Will Linux on phones become as easy as PC?

[nathanielwheeler]

Well I hate to say it but, hopefully not.  I hope to not see ARM devices get as generic as Wintel boxes.

Why not?  It seems to me that would make ARM easier to support as well as increasing accessibility.  Are there drawbacks I’m not thinking of?

Yeah, I would think more generic would be better with wider and easier support and maybe cheaper parts?

Maybe.  I was just discussing this with someone earlier: how we've lived through so many different stages of what is considered acceptable hardware that all PC's being PC's must have.  Cheaper possibly.  Better?  No, because the better parts are always the ones ahead of standardisation.  There are so many times in Wintel history that a good path was rejected for the cheaper "more standard" one.

Okay, so non-standardized hardware can have better performance.  Is that really worth losing better support, reliability, and cost?  I just feel that, for the majority of developers and users, the advantages of universal standards are too great to sacrifice for a slightly faster processor.  Multicore threading and orchestration software has advanced to where it's cheaper and easier to just buy more processors than it is to buy some sort of expensive custom processor that you have to support yourself.