They wanted to drop support because they didn't have the hardware. Now that they have access to the hardware and not dropping support, I am not sure if it matters much.

The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.

The problem to be solved seems availability of the hardware, not support from a small Linux distribution. It's not like we can go to Hetzner and rent a RISC-V server or go to AWS and provision a RISC-V VM.

And the availability will only improve if there is enough demand from the market to build such hardware. The EU and China wanting to be less dependant on US tech might help here.

Of course, RISC-V hardware should be on par on perf/price with x86 and ARM to tempt someone to switch.

Whilst not exactly easy to come across quite yet, there are some signs of growing public availability for RISC-V:

https://frame.work/fr/en/products/deep-computing-risc-v-main...

https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-riscv-laptop...

In the original post about dropping RISC-V support chimera Linux mentions that this existing hardware is too slow realistically use for build machines. They specifically mention the JH7110 which powers the framework board and the spacemit k1/m1 that powers the DC Roma laptop.

So yeah there is hardware available but expect raspberry pi 3 or lower levels of performance.

> The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.

The fuck are you talking about?

I barely pay attention to this stuff and know this is available and have already seen one in person on a colleague's desk:

https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-jupiter-spacemit-m1-k1-oc...

Good news for their huge userbase (3 people around the globe)

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