A lot of what makes x86 machines so interchangeable is ACPI, which automates things like device enumeration - having drivers is one thing, not knowing how to even find what hardware is installed is a much bigger hurdle.

It's why ARM support is such a vendor-sensitive roller coaster. MacOS on Apple is easy, since they know their hardware, the RasPi foundation puts serious effort into making Linux etc. work on RasPis, but just look at how much Linux struggles on Macbooks, or how hard it is to run a current kernel on a 3 year old mystery Raspi clone that had no documentation and shipped with a custom Linux kernel binary.

The situation is slooowly improving, but we're far from there yet.

situation will only improve when arm is made acessible to the masses..

i think this will go a bit like secure boot.. it existed for ages, it only became a real available in every computer when MS got behind it and made it happen..

now you can install even most linux distros without a problem and it just work..

arm will be a pain in the beginning but having microsoft backing it might the best way to make it happen..

i am curious to see how microsoft, that historically aim to keep backward compatibility as much as possible, will handle such a braking change like this move to arm..

but one could argue that this breaking change might be what they need to just get rid of some legacy stuff..

> The Raspberry Pi and company run on ARM just fine?

Not in my experience. Maybe things are better now, but as of a year or two ago you still couldn't use a generic kernel on there. You had to have special patches. There's also a fair amount of packages that won't build on ARM. Raspbian is a pretty good experience and it shows they have put serious effort into it, but venture away from that and you're rolling some dice.