Fedora 34 Looking To Add An AArch64 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 34 Looking To Add An AArch64 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin

Given the AArch64 laptops coming to market and continuing popularity around ARM64 SBCs for Linux desktop use-cases, Fedora's KDE special interest group is proposing Fedora KDE Plasma edition also be spun for the 64-bit ARM architecture...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-34-KDE-AArch64-Spin

[darkbasic]

What happened to the workstation spin for ppc64le? It was supposed to happen long time ago but never materialized...

[Vistaus]

No, no, no, fake news. Fellow Phoronix commenters always tell us very well that Fedora doesn't care about KDE...

[MadeUpName]

No, no, no, fake news. Fellow Phoronix commenters always tell us very well that Fedora doesn't care about KDE...

Fedora as in Redhat the company doesn't. It is outside parties that build the spin.

Here is where I admit my complete lack of knowledge about the Arm architecture. My understanding is that it is strictly an embedded system where you have to flash a ROM in order to boot and run. Is there such a thing as an Arm laptop or desktop that you can throw a USB drive in and do a normal install like I can do with x86? Then I also have to ask about graphics drivers. While I know there is basic VGA capability, the last time I looked there were no open source graphics drivers that could access any of the advanced features on graphics cards like hardware decode etc. Am I just a decade behind the curve or that still the way it is?

[polarathene]

My understanding is that it is strictly an embedded system where you have to flash a ROM in order to boot and run. Is there such a thing as an Arm laptop or desktop that you can throw a USB drive in and do a normal install like I can do with x86?

You'll usually encounter ARM Linux with SBCs, but there are some laptops now I think with supported SoCs. I'm not super experienced in this area myself, but support is generally more brittle than x86, so you may only see certain products with official support. Graphics wise, there's multiple SoC vendors with open-source GPU drivers now, video HW accel for encode/decode is separate to my knowledge and usually lags behind the GPU support.

Not sure about USB install, but I think a bootloader (U-Boot or Petitboot) can support booting from USB instead of say microSD/eMMC flash storage. Quite a few have distros that have modified kernel and such (binary blobs) to work with the board from release, while upstreaming and open-sourcing parts slowly progresses. For graphics output, it's usually HDMI IIRC, but other outputs might be available depending on device. If it's a laptop/tablet with integrated screen, probably eDP.