That's the main reason I haven't jumped on the tablet bandwagon yet. I want a system whose platform is standardized enough that there's more than one OS for it.
Well technically speaking 'It shouldn't be that way' IE it should just work, however we all know people get lost if they don't have direction and that's what has been going on with linux for ARM. When I started looking at it for a project it was a giant 'this is confusing and useless'. If you used a vendors specific 'interface then you were stuck with that specific vendor. Now it wasn't a tablet and it wasn't a PC still you can't have something that doesn't follow sane methods.
X alone is a pain in the but on such platforms. I'm still trying to work with the beagle board in that regards. Angstrom is much better than other arm embedded distros but it's still a PITA. Android isn't even an OS, I don't know how Google gets off calling it that. It's more like the way in the earlier days of PC's things were done, "you have one language BASIC it must ALL be BASIC and you have to use OUR BASIC", when the IBM PC came along it was still that for a short while. Android just demands "you must use Javascript it must be ALL Javascript".
Erstwhile, the core of Linux shouldn't have proprietary hardware information in it. It should just compile with platform specifics as loadable modules. The exception is memory management, most big ARM systems have that but there is very little incentive to implement SWAP (so memory management may not be needed to the degree x86 platforms have). Modules should handle specialized hardware (loading a module for the recognized hardware should be pretty much brainless). Most ARM platforms have methods to indicate who the manufacturer is (including hardware revision and CPU version etc.) Most people noted that it is wholly unnecessary to support every hardware aspect IN the kernel. It's impossible to maintain as it is because it's all mixed together right now.
