Sweet, are there any resources on transitioning/migrating or differences between x86_64 and riscv; or the ISAs are drastically different that it's just better to dive in head-first?
I played with Linux (Debian) for RV64 in Qemu and the experience was pretty painless, albeit slow but I think that was more to do with emulation overhead. My personal programs I wrote myself compiled and ran without a single issue. Obviously if you need closed source software or software with build tools targeting an OS that doesn't run on RISC-V, then yeah you would have a hard time. Most open source software should be a breeze to port. A lot of the weirdness of the platform will likely be from bootloaders and drivers.
Absolutely. If you can go with OSS only, than it's easy as a breeze. Yet if you depend on proprietary stuff like I do (CADs, Wine, etc), than it's a pain. I'm currently trying to switch office to ARM (RPi 4 and Baikal-M) and that is not easy.