To replace the current big tech business, I have a few suggestions:
Use FOSS (Free and open source software)
If this is not possible, try to find software that does not invade your privacy and made by a smaller company
Try to avoid paying privacy invading companies. I’m not saying never pay for proprietary software, but try to only spend the money on ones that respect you.
Spread the word about good FOSS apps
Donate to FOSS
Vote for politicians who are serious about antitrust
If you have the skills, contribute to FOSS or make your own software!
Use adblockers on websites that don’t respect you and/or your privacy
Yup. Just how cable TV started as “you pay extra for it, but you don’t get any ads!” and then when they realized they had everybody hooked, they started showing ads.
Same thing with streaming services. Pay money for a service with no Ads. Oh what’s that? Now that they realize they are your primary source of content, they are going to turn ads on unless you pay extra? Boom, gottem.
Paying for a service is generally going to result in less of a push to monetize the data though, especially if it’s a smaller provider or a private company.
We can’t just give up and stick with ad supported services, but then not want to see ads… Ad-supported services are always going to have to try monetize you somehow, whereas paid services don’t always need to.
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm
I was about to say how Eclipse saved my ass once in final project in college, then I remembered it was Netbeans that saved me. It was a feature that create an ugly looking but fully functional system by connecting to a relational database - right now, I really wish I could remember the name of it, or the step by step. That was back in 2012.
Yes, I have a VisionFive 2 and I use it to host some websites. I have am Arch Linux image compiled by a user in a forum, but the userspace packages are from a RISC-V repository from a other people working in Arch in general.
I could run my websites but it wasn’t easy at first, because, yes I have Docker but there are almost no images for riscv64, so I had to do some compiling and build images in a local registry. Bu now it works pretty well.
It sounds like the answer to "can I run this application on RISC-V" is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What's the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don't even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.
Yes. My apps are not static: one is a Django app (Python) using Postgres. I had to compile both Postgres and Python but that’s because I wanted to use them in Docker but there were no images available (maybe there are now, things change fast in this world).
Other was a Rust app, also using Postgres. For this I had to wait until a cryptography library (ring) added support to RISC-V since they use some assembly to improve the performance. After that, it was fine.
I’ve been experimenting with more stuff, in general almost all important languages work, but beware that even if it works, they might not be as performant as in ARM or x86. Java for example, worked but the JVM didn’t have a JIT so it was very slow (this is fixed now, but some distros still ship it without JIT AFAIK).
Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.
Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best
is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
Unfortunately, sounds like "no" currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I'm not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.
Consent-o-matic is also an option it will specifically opt out of those data vacuum popups. It is run by a Danish Uni so if it doesn’t work with a site you can submit the site and they will patch it in.
I have a Milk-V Mars but it really isn’t performant enough for any task I have for an SBC. Distro support seems to be a pain too, as the provided Debian image isn’t meant to run on repos aside from a Debian snapshot from 2022.
I really do hope things improve. I’m planning on moving over to an RK3588 ARM board for desktop daily drivering but one day I’m hoping a decently affordable RISC V alternative will turn up.
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