[wronglebowski]

It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.

[ryandrake]

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.

[ozarkerD]

It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.

[makeitdouble]

Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support.

Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying.

And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.

[andyferris]

But - doesn’t open sourcing it kinda make it someone else’s chore?

Obviously it has to “work” at sale but ongoing maintenance could be shared with the community.

[opan]

I would recommend the Anbernic RG353M running ROCKNIX, or for a more powerful device, Retroid's Pocket 5 running ROCKNIX. Most other options have awful software support and are just e-waste, unfortunately.

[colechristensen]

They're stuck in the building model of making semi-custom SoCs for enormous corporations and releasing/developing drivers for them in extreme NDA environments.

It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.

Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.