Each year you can hear “this is a year of Linux desktop” phrase. After few days with AArch64 desktop I know one thing: it is not a year of ARMv8 Linux desktop.
Web browsing
OK, I can be spoiled by speed of my i7-2600k desktop but situation when Firefox with less than 20 tabs open is unable to display characters I type into textarea fast enough shows that something is wrong (16GB ram machine). And tell me that this is not typical desktop use of web browser…
YouTube. Main source of any kind of videos. Sometimes it works, but most of time I lack patience to wait until it will start (VP9 and h264 codecs support present). And no way to watch “live hangouts”.
And say bye to music streaming services like Deezer or Spotify.
Gaming
I am not a game player. Installed Quake3 (which I never played before) and it worked, SuperTuxKart worked as well. But that does not prove anything as both those games have low requirements.
It probably never will be gaming platform on Linux desktop.
Development
For my style of development it is fine. But all I need is terminal and gVim ;D
Other hardware?
I think that results may be affected by a fact that all I have here is Applied Micro Mustang based on X-Gene 1 cpu. It is one of first ARMv8 processors in Linux world and it is optimized for server use rather than desktop.
One thing is sure: in next year I will try this experiment with other AArch64 hardware. Just hope it will be sooner than in a year from now (which is my feeling after lack of new aarch64 hardware announcements from Linaro members during this week Linaro Connect).