Red Hat ARM Team engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz spent nearly a year using an Ampere Altra 80-core AArch64 system as his primary Linux desktop, built around an ASRockRack board with AMD Radeon graphics. After eleven months, he abandoned the experiment and returned to his AMD Ryzen x86_64 desktop. Key pain points included weak single-threaded performance, recurring PCIe controller issues requiring weekly custom kernel patches, AMDGPU driver bugs on Linux 7.0+ causing video and gaming regressions on ARM64, and missing NVIDIA Flatpak support for AArch64 after switching to Nouveau. He concluded that the problems were platform-specific quirks rather than fundamental architectural flaws, and that a future AArch64 desktop attempt would require entirely new hardware. The Ampere Altra system now runs headlessly for RISC-V package builds where its multi-core throughput shines.
