this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I've seen people talking about it and experienced it myself with a server, but why does Linux run so well on ARM (especially compared to Windows)?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linux runs well on practically every CPU architecture.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Because it's open source and most of the applications for it are open source. That means you can compile it and the applications specifically for the hardware you have.

Windows does kind of support ARM on its specific hardware, but it can't be adjusted for other hardware and they have to translate most applications to work. Apple has done much of that work for their hardware to work well, as well as very good translation for x86, and because they leaned hard into the transition, developers were mostly forced to compile for ARM going forward. Microsoft hasn't done the same, and ARM is a tiny target, so it doesn't happen with any regularity there.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Because people have been doing so for a long time and have ironed out most of the quirks. The software is also generally quite simple, meaning there are just fewer quirks that need to be ironed out. And the ecosystem is largely open source, meaning everything can be recompiled to target the relevant architecture, so while translation layers are still useful, they're not the essential tool they are in proprietary ecosystems. The main headaches that plague windows on arm mostly just don't exist on the Linux side.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Because you can try compile it on arm, and if something doesn't work you can report it or fix it yourself. That said windows worked fine on arm years ago. Many gps, medical, and such devices used to use windows ce on arm, mips. (Windows phone too, arm)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

ARM the company as well as industry partners contribute code & resources to the linux kernel...so that would be one reason why linux on ARM runs well.

Unsure how we are tracking Microsoft ARM as worse than Linux arm, what benchmarks did we see?