this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Getting there—the last time I checked, Gentoo had enough stuff with ~riscv keywords to produce a KDE desktop with Firefox, a media player, email, and some other useful software. If Firefox is completely functional, that alone would be enough for some people. Still not user-friendly to install, though, because Gentoo. Debian's better at that part. Anyway, if you can get the hardware, the software is edging up on "possible".
It's not long ago Pine64 announced their Pinetab-V with RISC-V infrastructure and absolutely no software support, now people are already running KDE Plasma and watching YouTube videos with it. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I'm amazed how fast it's developing.
I really don't think we're that far away from being able to run RISK-V as a daily driver for basic computing.
And I gotta say, my partner recently got a M1 MacBook Air, and while I have many reservations about the device I'm jealous about the fanlessnes and battery life. So I'd absolutely be interested in being an early adopter.
The processor is a JH7100 - from this statement it seems to be open, but I honestly don't know how to verify it.
The purpose is primarily to get a RISC-V device out there so that people can start hacking away - if you're more interested in using it than tinkering with it, it's probably better to wait a bit longer. :)
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab-V is the place to start looking for info.
FreeBSD has had kde on riscV for a bit now, if they can do it I can’t imagine Debian et all will have much issue once they get the ball rolling.
People are running KDE desktop on the VisionFive 2.
Arch Linux has had a RISC-V port for quite a while now - FYI, just in case you don't know, Felix (the guy running the website I linked) is one of the Arch Linux package maintainers.