This is also why I don't get why people are so enthusiastic about ARM. While there is nothing technically preventing manufacturers from using extensible standards and technologies like ACPI, UEFI, etc. with ARM, pretty much no one does. Meaning these devices are closed and pretty unusable with Linux.

Linux had the chance to fight against what GNU called "TiVoisation" but Linus said TiVo did nothing wrong.

So now we have a world full of devices running open software but which are locked down. And a Linux foundation run by corporates.

To me it is clear this was indeed a huge problem. Linux might not have become as big as it is now if it had taken GPL3 on board but it would have made it a lot harder for manufacturers to do what they're doing.

I strongly agree with you. My little experience tinkering with ARM-based systems has been frustrating, I don't want to touch ARM ever again until it has some kind of standard boot process. Same for RISC-V.

ARM does not have a 'ibm pc clone' moment. There is no one, that anyone wants to rally behind. The market is fragmented in an interesting way but a way that is hard for people to target. This fragmentation has existed since the start of microprocessor was started. There were hundreds of different x86, 6502, SH, MIPS, ARM style computers as well. Even the 'ibm pc' was even one of them, but everyone just kinda said 'that one'. All of those standards you said exist in some ARM boards. It is a really mixed bag. Out of all of the ARM systems RasberryPI came closest to a standard.

QCOM in this case probably could make a standard ARM PC. The problem will be QCOM corporate structure will probably strangle it. They will want to create a patent license stream. The interesting bits would be behind NDAs. It is their bread and butter.

The reality is no one wants to be IBM in the IBM/PC clone market. Basically the ones who did the expensive work to make the board but everyone just copies it.

ARM support is still mediocre, but it's improving with the new Snapdragons. Every generation seems to make running normal Linux on those things a little bit less of a pain.

Funnily enough, the device with probably the best "normal" desktop protocol support is the old Windows RT tablet, which features an ARM SoC that runs UEFI and ACPI and everything. It's locked down to Microsoft's secure boot keys, unfortunately, but thanks to Microsoft abandoning the device, there are exploits you can use to bypass that.