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incidentally, i haven't bought an x86 machine of any kind as a daily driver since the obama administration

x86 is the architecture where they had to try 3 times to have proper hardware device isolation, and the last attempt (which is still somewhat broken) has more to do with virtualization than it does actually isolating badly behaved hardware/drivers from the host

x86 only remains as prevalent as it does because of the effective duopoly in non-embedded SoCs between intel and AMD.

and, ultimately, x86 only became dominant on big iron because AMD undercut enterprise chip manufacturers with Opteron. before that, it was only seen in microcomputers and minicomputers (now called servers).

anyway x86 does not win because of technical excellence, it wins because the market positions of intel and AMD make it impossible for anyone else to effectively compete (except for the hyperscalers).

incidentally, the last time i had a GPU-related kpanic was in... 2017, when i was still running linux on an x86 machine

because, you know, every other architecture out there has proper MMUs capable of full hardware device isolation

@lanodan ehh, most ARM boards anymore are using UEFI, so it shouldn’t be any worse than x86.

@ross @ariadne @lanodan but most of them seem to still not have runtime SetVariable() support, so half the features they claim to have are make believe.