Yes, it runs Linux (you didn’t hink they were shipping it with Windows on it, did you?). Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo should all have support. I don’t know about Arch.
Not in the way you’re hoping for. Proton is a wine offshoot, which means it’s exclusive to x86 and x86_64 arches. You could perhaps get it to run by installing qemu and setting it up to run x86_64 binaries, but even if that worked you’d likely end up with single-digit FPS in most games.
Based on what Gentoo currently has keyworded, you should be able to get a solid useful desktop—KDE or Gnome (or sway, if that’s your preference), Firefox, Libreoffice, Gimp, VLC, and other popular basics—but I wouldn’t expect games or other proprietary software for a while yet, if ever.
There are translation layers to run x86/64 code on ARM, I don’t know how easy it will be to do the same work on RISCV, but I’m guessing if the will is there, the code will follow. But I’ve yet to see a RISC-V chip that gets close to the performance if a modern ARM or x86 laptop/desktop class device, so that translation might be useful to help close gaps, but I doubt anyone is going to be doing real gaming on RISC-V this year.
There are a few open-source games that appear to work already, yes, including supertuxcart and nethack. And someone will surely port Doom to it soon if they haven’t yet.
does it run Linux? I’m waiting for a good low power CPU laptop that I can install a standard distro on. preferably arch…
Yes, it runs Linux (you didn’t hink they were shipping it with Windows on it, did you?). Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo should all have support. I don’t know about Arch.
I didn’t think Debian had support for RISC-V until 13.0 Trixie comes out later this year.
Huh. Thought they did. Maybe I’m wrong—it isn’t my distro of choice, after all.
Once there is Debian support, would it just run all software that Debian runs ie steam proton?
Not in the way you’re hoping for. Proton is a wine offshoot, which means it’s exclusive to x86 and x86_64 arches. You could perhaps get it to run by installing qemu and setting it up to run x86_64 binaries, but even if that worked you’d likely end up with single-digit FPS in most games.
Based on what Gentoo currently has keyworded, you should be able to get a solid useful desktop—KDE or Gnome (or sway, if that’s your preference), Firefox, Libreoffice, Gimp, VLC, and other popular basics—but I wouldn’t expect games or other proprietary software for a while yet, if ever.
There are translation layers to run x86/64 code on ARM, I don’t know how easy it will be to do the same work on RISCV, but I’m guessing if the will is there, the code will follow. But I’ve yet to see a RISC-V chip that gets close to the performance if a modern ARM or x86 laptop/desktop class device, so that translation might be useful to help close gaps, but I doubt anyone is going to be doing real gaming on RISC-V this year.
FOSS games like Super Tux probably work though. But Steam won’t.
There are a few open-source games that appear to work already, yes, including supertuxcart and nethack. And someone will surely port Doom to it soon if they haven’t yet.
Check the destro of your choice to see if it’s supported.
Not just Linux, but also FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Not sure about NetBSD.
It does run Linux, but it would probably more precise to say it walks Linux.