I’m planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
In the first place, consider why you even want to switch to RISC-V. If it’s because of an enthusiasm for open-source and hearing the ISA described as open, know that any performant hardware you’ll get likely won’t be as open as you expect. The SoC won’t be open-source, the CPU cores in it won’t be open-source, the firmware and bootloader might be an open-source u-boot fork but there’s a good chance it’s proprietary. Even the actual implemented ISA won’t be open since major core designers add custom instructions that aren’t part of the RISC-V spec.
Distros like Ubuntu and Fedora seem slated to treat RISC-V as a main architecture that has close to the same number of packages and the same update schedule as x86/ARM by the end of next year, if not sooner. Just like is also the case for ARM, proprietary software like games can run with a nontrivial performance overhead, and other binary software distributed through other channels outside the distro repos (like docker containers, third-party apt/yum repos, or appimage) is often only distributed for x86 even for things that are open-source and can be compiled for other arches without issue.
The software situation can be either a major annoyance or completely seamless depending on how closely you stick to just the distro repos.
Hardware vendors will probably have stuff comparable enough to recent Intel/AMD for desktop in about a year from now. Likely not better, but within the same realm at least. Within another couple years after that you’ll almost definitely see more than one of the established major SoC vendors (like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung) release something RISC-V in the desktop, server, or mobile space, which is sure to be competitive with x86 and ARM hardware in that space.
Laptops might not see anything good. An alternate ISA can be viable on servers and mobile (both being Linux-first ecosystems), and desktop can easily inherit from stuff made for server, but laptop has unique hardware needs and the market isn’t there for vendors to bother investing too much R&D on laptop chips that can’t run Windows nor Mac. RISC-V laptops do exist but they’re basically taking chips designed for SBC/edge and throwing them in a laptop shell, with the result naturally being awful at power draw since it was never meant to be a good laptop chip, and the iGPU situation is a mess too. That’s unlikely to change in the next few years.