Comparing Windows and macOS to Linux is moot and we should stop doing it. Linux has always been and will continue to be an ecosystem driven by various communities, and expecting everyone to agree on the same standards is silly.
The sooner we all begin treating Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as separate Operating Systems the sooner we can all move on from the "single standard" and "Linux on Desktop" debates. As an application vendor I always find it amusing when customers ask if we support Linux. My response is no, we don't support Linux but we do support Ubuntu 18+ and RHEL 8. Linux distros are so wildly different these days, not just in software but in ideologies, that this distinction is important, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Not in 2022 they're considered different Operating Systems. People have been developing AppImage, Flatpak and snap for a reason. They're being used and it's a thing.
Yeah, the year of the Linux desktop isn't coming, but it's not 2001 either. We've standardised onto a few technologies pretty much everyone adopt except the ones that want to be different: systemd, Flatpak being the most used cross-distro system, pulseaudio (and pipewire offers a 100%-compatible shim for it), dbus, NetworkManager and now finally with GNOME 42/libadwaita we can have even standardised UI design.
And like many other things frontend, things move at a pretty rapid pace. Ubuntu 18 is ancient, might be good for a server, but it's not a good idea to use that as a metric for where the Linux desktop is.
Samsung support is atrocious. Had a similar issue with my S9 phone where the power button suddenly got jammed and couldn't be released. They sent it back with the exact same reasoning: "Caused by physical damage". Well yeah, I physically press the button to turn the phone on and off, what do you expect. I don't understand how they are still so popular when they never help you with anything.
Author has clearly not heard about NexGen! They implemented a RISC architecture that code morphed x86 i586 design. They were then bought out by AMD who shortly thereafter adopted the design for their own architecture. Then Intel had no choice but to adopt NexGen architecture as well lool. We all use NexGen Architecture now. The most famous microprocessor no one's heard of. I only know because NexGen was based in Milpitas and that's where I live, so Milpitas Architecture is like hometown pride.
As for patents, Xed is tiny (only ~4kb) and it allows us to distinguish the which instructions belong to which microarchitectures, e.g. k8, sse3, sse4, avx. That gives us a clear accurate picture of the intellectual property rolloff, thereby enabling a fabless chip or emulator to simply ignore the encumbered parts of the encoding space. The tradeoff is you can't patent troll Intel (due to Xed being licensed Apache 2.0) and I think that's fair.
Nexgen was great, the lack of a FPU at that moment in time however was fatal at launch.
Quake was just starting to ignite the world and pentium performance at 486 prices would have done more, but no fpu... it ran NT fine enough although my memory wants to say Microsoft detected it as a 386 so that would have cut NT 4 out of the picture.
I thought knowledge of them was more common but I guess not
The TL;DR seems to be that if you restrict yourself to implementing an ISA from 20 years ago, your chip can indeed be patent free, but that isn't going to run modern software - maybe not even modern x86 32-bit software!
Not directly, but anyone with a Hackintosh (modified PC running Mac OS) must have it disabled, and a fair number of pro users disable it for various purposes.
