In 2012 I wrote “What interest me in ARM world” post. Listed hardware I played with and some words about what I was looking for.
Decided that it is time to write 2025 one. About AArch64.
Hardware I used
When it comes to AArch64 world I skipped most of Seriously Bad Computers and concentrated on servers.
Servers
During all those years I have used several servers. From X-Gene to NVidia Grace. Some for longer, some for shorter tasks. Most of those systems were in Linaro or Red Hat labs and I used them remotely.
At home I had AppliedMicro Mustang. It served me as a desktop in 2014 (for a few days) and as main development system for a few years.
Seriously Bad Computers
Of course there were SBCs too. Pine64, RockPro64, Espressobin, Honeycomb, NanoPC-T6. Even Raspberry/Pi 3 — which I bought on announcement day to check how bad it was.
I do not use any of them to run some service at home.
Used Espressobin as my router for a month or two. Honeycomb was my main development box (until Macbook replaced it). Rest of them I bought to check how SBC market looks like.
Macbook
I use Apple Macbook Pro (14”, M1 Pro, 2021) as my work laptop (Red Hat provided). It runs Fedora 41 Asahi Remix and serves me for almost 3 years. During that time I ran MacOS maybe four times. Most of time I use it as headless machine over SSH+Wayland connection. Nice, fast machine for my Linux/AArch64 work.
Still has several not supported things. No Thunderbolt, no microphone etc. I do not blame Asahi team for it — they have done great work. I learnt to live with those because system performance pays for it.
Early adopter? Not anymore
After 20+ years of working with Arm hardware I decided to stop being early adopter. Sure, it is fun to be one of the first users of any platform but I learnt to value my time.
When I pay, I want hardware that works. Let it boot Debian ‘testing’ or Fedora ‘rawhide’ from generic install image. Being able to run *BSD would be a nice bonus showing that platform was well tested.
Hardware which boots after pressing power button. And shut downs completely on poweroff command — including all peripherals and expansion cards.
I do not care much will it use ACPI or DeviceTree to describe hardware to the operating system. As long as it is done in sane way. Source code for firmware is optional when it works properly.
On a new Arm system I would run BSA ACS (or ask someone with hardware). To check did vendor even looked at BSA specification before doing hardware.
Future?
Who knows, maybe one day I will use Arm system for home services.
Instead of yet another x86-64 thin terminal. Which works. Out of the box.