UEFI is not enough if you don't have all the drivers in the OS image, especially the GPU drivers. Last year I bought a cheap Windows Qualcomm 8xx ARM tablet on sale and it was very nice for the money but I returned it when none of the ARM Linux ISOs I found online could boot on it despite the tablet having UEFI support, because Qualcomm.
Booting Linux distros out of the box is such a non-issue on X86 that we take it for granted when on ARM it's just a pipe dream.
If the ARM PC future is all proprietary custom firmware blobs that need to patched for each SoC/motherboard for Linux to boot, then you can keep them, I'll stick to X86 thank you very much.
Right, you need reasonable firmware (boot path and device enumeration) and to actually have the drivers upstreamed. Both necessary, neither sufficient alone. (Although, either one alone still a massive improvement over the usual)
Part of the point of UEFI is to support a graphical framebuffer and HID devices (keyboard and mouse) out of the box, that's what powers the fancy BIOS setup screens on newer PC's. Hardware-specific drivers are supposed to be optional.
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UEFI is not enough if you don't have all the drivers in the OS image, especially the GPU drivers. Last year I bought a cheap Windows Qualcomm 8xx ARM tablet on sale and it was very nice for the money but I returned it when none of the ARM Linux ISOs I found online could boot on it despite the tablet having UEFI support, because Qualcomm.
Booting Linux distros out of the box is such a non-issue on X86 that we take it for granted when on ARM it's just a pipe dream.
If the ARM PC future is all proprietary custom firmware blobs that need to patched for each SoC/motherboard for Linux to boot, then you can keep them, I'll stick to X86 thank you very much.
Right, you need reasonable firmware (boot path and device enumeration) and to actually have the drivers upstreamed. Both necessary, neither sufficient alone. (Although, either one alone still a massive improvement over the usual)
Part of the point of UEFI is to support a graphical framebuffer and HID devices (keyboard and mouse) out of the box, that's what powers the fancy BIOS setup screens on newer PC's. Hardware-specific drivers are supposed to be optional.
Can I run X or Wayland with the UEFI framebuffer?
It should - linux's simpledrm driver should work with uefi framebuffers using the "standard" user interfaces.