> On the other hand in mobile and embedded there is basically no customer demand to be able to run preexisting distro releases
This is not a difference in customer demand. The customers are by and large the exact same people and the inability to do this has been a major longstanding complaint of phone customers, both from the nerds who want a real third party OS and the ordinary users who are frustrated that the OS on the phone they only bought two years ago is already out of support and the device can't have any currently supported OS from any source installed on it even though there is no good reason it couldn't at least run the current version of vanilla Android.
The difference is a difference in competition. There are a thousand PC OEMs and you can start one in your garage by assembling PCs from parts. The parts are made by a variety of companies (Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI, SuperMicro, etc.) If PC OEMs started locking the OS to the device so you had to buy a new PC every three years, they would lose customers to ones that don't, because customers would actually have a choice. Even Apple doesn't prevent Asahi Linux from running on Apple Silicon Macs.
The phone market is much more consolidated. Suppose you want a normal ~$300 phone with similar specs to other Android phones at a similar price point, but with an unlocked boot loader and in-tree kernel drivers. It doesn't exist. Customers can't express a preference for it because it isn't available, and the market is sufficiently consolidated that the incumbents benefit more from lock-in and planned obsolescence than they would from gaining market share by providing customers with what they want. Because the companies who do that first would be the small ones or startups who use it to gain market share, but the barriers to entry are kept high through vertical integration because of the lack of antitrust enforcement.
> On the contrary they may see their custom deviations as important parts of what makes their product better or more feature rich than the competition.
This is, to begin with, questionable. Phone customers are not buying phones over "custom deviations". They care about cameras and storage and battery life and price. Nobody wants custom buggy bloatware from the hardware company.
But regardless of that, it's orthogonal to the issue. There is nothing about Vendor Cloud AI Thing which is incompatible with having the drivers in the kernel tree.
> I don't think they're ever going to "see the light" and suddenly decide they've been doing it wrong all these years
Do some trust busting and see what having actual competition does to their behavior.
This is not a difference in customer demand. The customers are by and large the exact same people and the inability to do this has been a major longstanding complaint of phone customers, both from the nerds who want a real third party OS and the ordinary users who are frustrated that the OS on the phone they only bought two years ago is already out of support and the device can't have any currently supported OS from any source installed on it even though there is no good reason it couldn't at least run the current version of vanilla Android.
The difference is a difference in competition. There are a thousand PC OEMs and you can start one in your garage by assembling PCs from parts. The parts are made by a variety of companies (Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI, SuperMicro, etc.) If PC OEMs started locking the OS to the device so you had to buy a new PC every three years, they would lose customers to ones that don't, because customers would actually have a choice. Even Apple doesn't prevent Asahi Linux from running on Apple Silicon Macs.
The phone market is much more consolidated. Suppose you want a normal ~$300 phone with similar specs to other Android phones at a similar price point, but with an unlocked boot loader and in-tree kernel drivers. It doesn't exist. Customers can't express a preference for it because it isn't available, and the market is sufficiently consolidated that the incumbents benefit more from lock-in and planned obsolescence than they would from gaining market share by providing customers with what they want. Because the companies who do that first would be the small ones or startups who use it to gain market share, but the barriers to entry are kept high through vertical integration because of the lack of antitrust enforcement.
> On the contrary they may see their custom deviations as important parts of what makes their product better or more feature rich than the competition.
This is, to begin with, questionable. Phone customers are not buying phones over "custom deviations". They care about cameras and storage and battery life and price. Nobody wants custom buggy bloatware from the hardware company.
But regardless of that, it's orthogonal to the issue. There is nothing about Vendor Cloud AI Thing which is incompatible with having the drivers in the kernel tree.
> I don't think they're ever going to "see the light" and suddenly decide they've been doing it wrong all these years
Do some trust busting and see what having actual competition does to their behavior.