Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

I’m guessing it’s because the developers either have a different speciality that they focus on, are employed to support specific hardware, or both.

Yeah, but this is (according to OP) faster, which saves money. And, because it’s open, if there are features that could add serious value, they could be added in-house.

But yeah, perhaps a bit of a pyrrhic victory.

One of the real downsides of ARM is, it seems, the relative lack of standardization. An x64 kernel? It’ll run on most anything from the last ten years at least. And as for boot process, it’s probably one of two options (and in many cases one computer can boot either legacy or EFI).

ARM, on the other hand…my raspberry pi collection does one thing, my Orange Pi does something else, and God help you if you want to try swapping the Orange kernel for the Raspberry (or vice versa)!