I will not use a system with snap and has nothing to do with being proprietary.
One of the reasons that I could not use Ubuntu is that I cannot control using snap or not. They even use it to install apps that you install via apt.
The fact that the only time I did use a system with snap left me with the impression that it is an absolute performance pig certainly does not help.
I do not think it is about the royalties in most cases. I mean, RISC-V royalties may be the reason you choose it over ARM for a custom chips ( say in the bajillion SSDs you are going to ship ). Perhaps you were going to choose a different ISA for a microcontroller and the lack of license fee makes RISC-V attractive.
For chip maker, it is the freedom that matters as that is what “convenience” means to them. And it means less risk. Look at the Qualcomm / ARM lawsuits right now. That would not happen if Qualcomm had chosen ARM.
And if you are a chip maker licensing core designs, do you want your ISA to force you into a monopoly? ARM is more mature today but the role that ARM the company plays is being filled by multiple RISC-V suppliers ( HiFive, Milk-V, etc ). More players means more completion means more choice and probably better prices. ARM’s core business is licensing chip designs and they are about to have a lot of competition from RISC-C.
And in the end, competition from and within the RISC-V space will drive down prices for consumers. That is what consumers are going to care about. The lower prices will not really be because of lower license fees ( though that will help of course ). And it all comes with a large and open software ecosystem. So the “convenience” will be there too.
Why is ARM better suited for the consumer market?
I am torn on this chip. One way of looking at it is negative as they are adding custom instructions that are not part of the RISC-V standard. Part of me hates the fragmentation.
On the other hand, the alternative is that they release another MIPS chip ( MIPS ISA, not RISC-V ). That obviously fragments the CPU space even more and does nothing to drive the RISC-V space forward.
If I take a step back, this is exactly the freedom that RISC-V represents. Not only did it make sense for MIPS to adopt RISC-V over their own ISA but this is the kind of thing that would not be possible if they went with ARM.
What makes RISC-V better than ARM is the freedom, not the lack of licensing fees. I think this is an example of how RISC-V wins in the end.
Equivalent instructions will make it into the RISC-V spec ( official extensions ) and future MIPS chips will no doubt use the standard at some point.
In the end, this just creates more demand for and more support for RISC-V on Linux and Open Source RISC-V toolchains ( such as compilers ).
Anything that moves RISC-V forward is positive.
Now they just need to let you run Distrobox in it.
Have an upvote. I use Edge on Linux every day for Outlook and Teams. I do not really use Office online to create my own docs but, if there is an attachment in an email, I use Office in the browser to view it. It all works well enough that I hardly think about it.
It used to be that Edge was the only browser that worked well for Teams. Ironically, with the latest update to Edge, my webcam stopped working. I loaded Teams in Firefox and it worked fine. There are other reports online of the same problem and Microsoft posted that they are working on a fix. So, Microsoft managed to break Teams compatibility in their own browser and it seems that Teams now works fine in Firefox. At least, it did for me.