Review of the Ampere Developer Platform by Jeff Geerling

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You have seen the questions and conversation going on about the Ampere Developer Platform in the community. Today Jeff released his review. Now we need get MS to work with us to make Windows easier to install. But the many flavors of Linux works out of the box.

Check out the video below. And @geerlingguy thanks for the detail review. And it was interesting to see a little bit into your research and process (from twitter, this community, mastodon, etc. Maybe we could have an interview/Q&A with you about how you create your videos, how much time it takes, etc.

His second channel, is just as fun and interesting, just more broad about Engineering. They explain how a TV tower works.

And for everyone else, maybe we can come up with a check list of what is needed to get Windows running on the Ampere Development Platform . And if you know how to do it, write it up and let us know, we will definitely promote it!

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You’re quite welcome! Usually for a video like this it’s at least a month or two in the making… though in the last two weeks leading up to the release it’s more of a flurry of activity as I start working on things beyond “does it boot” and “why does it exist”.

I generally start with an idea / concept that I think will be interesting to other people (in this particular case, it’s “a lot of us want an awesome Arm desktop for Linux… and you basically just have Apple right now, but Asahi is not a first-class experience. Could this machine give us that?”

But to make it more clickable I decided to focus the intro bit on ‘Could this be the next Mac Pro’? (needs to be slightly clickbaity to get people to actually click. All of us engineering types SAY that we don’t like clickbait, but for 99% of us, if you gave us the clickbait version and the non-clickbait version in your YouTube feed… we’d click the clickbait version 100% of the time :wink:

But the script gets started with a rough outline and notes about 2 weeks prior to filming. I generally have 5-6 videos in that state at any given time.

Then I choose to put a video on the schedule, and then it’s either top priority (and I work 6-8 hours daily on getting the testing I need done) or it’s 2nd priority (if I have blocking issues or open questions that need resolution to get further).

But about 1 week out, I start finishing up the script, usually cutting some of the juicy details we programming/engineering nerds love but parts that cause 90% of the other viewers to click off the video. Sadly, if I don’t do that, YouTube severely cuts down on the video’s reach (so a narrow but deep audience). I tend to give the depth in my GitHub issues, bug reports, Twitter, and my blog, and focus on highlights on YouTube, where it affects my bottom line!

Then 3-4 days before posting, I record my script, and start the editing process. Generally from here it takes 1-2 hours per minute of video, but some videos can take 3-4 hours per minute.

Someday I’ll maybe have an editor, who can help with this, because it eats into the time I can spend doing benchmarking, testing oddities, trying to break (and fix) things, etc.

Finally, on the day of posting a video, I generally take the morning to watch comments, hop on Twitter/Mastodon/elsewhere to see what’s happening, and then start ramping up in the afternoon on the next video. It’s a grind, but it’s similar to the grind you’d have shipping features for software, so it’s a familiar grind!

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Thanks for that video Jeff. I think you nailed it, Apple has dropped the ball consistently since the legendary Mac Pro’s. I can see this Ampere Dev desktop filling that spot, it doesn’t have the spit and polish just yet but it has the POWERRR. :rofl: If i can channel my inner Clarkson.

I also appreciate the amount of work it took to try and get Windows to boot. You followed every possible lead. I have to write up the process I took to create a Win10 ISO for my ARM Lenovo Laptop. You’d think I was handling national secrets. I had to download a huge folder full of these tmp files which then a Lenovo app combines via magic and sorcery into a bootable Win 10 ISO. Of course only after authenticating you, and making sure you’re worthy of the Win 10 ISO, are you allowed to wait the HOURS it takes to build.
And from there I was able to get the Win11 upgrade. It’s not optimal, of course I much rather get a clean Win11 install but …

Tiny11 ARM looks interesting but it’s so stripped down I think it’s missing the drivers I needed for keyboard/mouse. So close :expressionless:

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Wow, just saw part of your response quoted on Twitter, that was a little strange. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the detail response. I love why you chose the intro.

Are you a one man shop? do you farm out some of the work to others? It would seem to me (or maybe I am projecting here) that there would just be so much work to do around these videos and as you described above, there is a lot of work that goes into them.

Thanks for the information!

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One man shop right now, though for my Geerling Engineering channel I work on with my Dad, we have an editor who helps out most of the time! It’s a lot of work, for sure, but also a lot of fun!

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Thanks. One of the reasons that I asked is that it amazes me in my career how many strange things that I have had to learn for my job that is completely outside of engineering (this is also what makes the job fun). For example, I have had to learn how to edit videos, write scripts, and produce a commercial. Plus how to run a gas pump, how parking gates and electric vehicle charging stations work. What is the “best price” in a retail store, and many more. Maybe I should create a topic about this here and everyone can list all of things that Engineering school didn’t teach them. :slight_smile:

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