I think part of the problem is how awful an experience it is to read articles on most websites. I get that they need advertising revenue, but the giant ads plastered all over the articles make the experience of reading them simply awful.

Good lord. That website is unusable.

You might want to think about running a “stable” or “LTS” OS and spin up things in Docker instead. That way you only have to do OS level updates very rarely.

Right now, not very. Basically only open source software can run on it, and only if it’s either exceptionally portable or has been tweaked to compile for it.

In the future, hopefully this is usable for general computing, but right now it’s basically only usable for R&D or niche applications.

The path forward for RISC-V is getting it into more developers’ hands though, so having it available for really nice hardware like the Framework is awesome.

Well, kind of 3 companies.

Intel and AMD both have rights to x86_64, since they both held patents used by it. In 2021, AMD’s patents expired.

Then there’s ARM, which is solely owned by Arm Holdings.

But yes, it’s still very much a big problem, and I really hope RISC-V succeeds to solve that problem. Licensing core designs is a much better motive and business model than licensing an entire ISA.

Edit: oh wait, you said two architectures, not two companies. Never mind, you’re right. :)