A World Beyond X86: Surviving without access to physical x86 system

Introduction

When we are talking about computers, we think about the most widely used computer architecture: x86. Intel and AMD, those two are the most widespread processors for computers.

Is there architecture beyond x86? Well, there are many architectures out there. The most popular after x86 is ARM. It's found on many devices, from handheld gadget, smartphones, tablets, tv-boxes, single board computers, and servers.

Well, I've been away from x86 physical computers for some time. Can you do it? Doing computers without x86? It depends on what you do.

The setup

For me, an Android device is the main desktop now. I can access everything shell related inside termux. Well, even termux can do multimedia. mpd plus ncmpcpp is a perfect combination to turn termux into full featured audio player.

Accessing remote servers such as blinkenshell can be done via termux. Most command line utilities are available via apt-get. A great salutation for termux developers to make this so damn easy to do development on Android device.

For accompanying media storage, I've turned a second-hand Android tv box into a full-fledged linux server. The cpu inside the tv box is a quad core Amlogic S905X. Well, it performs so well for the task: serving files via sftp and samba. Well done, Armbian developers for building kernels for many different ARM boards out there - including those random tv boxes.

I even pair Armbian kernel with Void rootfs so I can have lightweight musl powered distro.

root@voidlinux
--------------
OS: Void Linux aarch64
Host: Amlogic Meson GXL (S905X) P212 Development Board
Kernel: 5.15.18-meson64
Uptime: 4 hours, 41 mins
Packages: 179 (xbps-query)
Shell: sh
Resolution: 720x576i
CPU: ARMv8 rev 4 (v8l) (4) @ 1.512GHz
Memory: 129MiB / 1931MiB

Closing thought

My development needs have been covered inside termux so I can go without accessing physical x86 system.

Would it work for you? That depends on what you are doing. If what you are doing is mostly text related stuff, such as typing markdown text or creating bash scripts, it can be done without x86 system. But if you are doing many compilation tasks such as creating custom kernel or building Android custom rom, well, you need access to x86 system or powerful arm64 servers out there.