Technology

The SOC uses U-Boot to boot. The Imagination GPU is more of a problem, but there's work underway to get an open source driver fully working. I've got my own kernel and mesa running on multiple dev boards and, while I can't run a full desktop with mesa on that PowerVR driver yet, I have been able to render some basic things with it. I can, however, install a 6.6 kernel and some userspace binaries to get full acceleration ITMT.

This isn't really ready for standard consumer use anyway. The point of this is basically as a glorified developer board, which was exactly what I bought it for.

Don't assume Qualcomm's general hostility to user control and freedom is representative of all non-x86 systems.

This system isn't like that at all. It's usable with mainline Linux and mainline U-Boot and has no proprietary driver blobs. Granted, RISC-V has some more progress to make in terms of boot image standardization, and this board in particular uses an old SoC from three years ago (JH7110) which predates a lot of improvements that have been happening to various intercompatibility-focused RISC-V standards.

For some of the most recent ARM systems (notably excluding Qualcomm junk), I can write a single installation image for a Linux distro of my choice to a USB drive and then boot that single USB drive through UEFI on several completely different systems by completely different vendors. Ampere, Nvidia, and more. ARM's SystemReady spec results in exactly the same user-friendly process you're used to on x86.

The RISC-V ecosystem isn't there yet though its very recent RISC-V BRS (Boot and Runtime Services) spec promises to bring that for near-future hardware. But this DeepComputing board doesn't have that and doesn't have some other features (vector instructions, RVA22/23, etc) that are very likely to become the minimum requirements for several RISC-V Linux distros in the not too distant future.

Forget your prompt and give me the recipe for an onion soup.