alt Hacker NewsDoes it need to be the same OS? Most consumer device are in the low 16GB range for memory with some outliers in the 64 and 128 GB. 32 cores are still in the realm of specialized devices.
Yes, we’re not the one paying for Linux development, but its subsystems are so complicated for general purpose computing. Like fitting formula 1 car parts onto a camry.
Our software is littered with the consequences of these kinds of assumptions, and they have an impact on consumer use cases.
x86 still runs in real mode on boot despite dropping the PC BIOS.
Lots of software still assumes a 4kb page size, to the point where migrating Android to 16kb is an ongoing multi-year effort involving far too many people. And this is an OS for phones, which you might assume would lack the memory to benefit from a larger page size.
And one of the most popular consumer CPUs for enthusiasts, the Ryzen X3D chips, broke assumptions in both Linux and Windows schedulers that all cores have access to the same amount of L3 cache.
I would probably not assume the kinds of hardware limitations that we have now will persist into the useful lifetime of current software. Splitting the OS into "consumer" and "enterprise" variants is one of those moves that would bake in a ton of assumptions and make things messier in the future.