Update Supported Platforms article #1267
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philrz
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Up until now, our Supported Platforms statement has been primarily expressed in terms of where we run CI as well as the support statements from Go/Electron. However, the work on Suricata reminded us how there can be additional sensitivities in terms of shared libraries that may not be present in some platforms and hence will determine whether Brim can install and operate out-of-the-box on them.
I recently ran through a fairly extensive smoke testing exercise documented in #1263 that confirms where we stand on many platforms at this point-in-time as we're preparing to release Suricata. Therefore this PR attempts to make our support statement more current in line with the findings from #1263.
In terms of target audience and approach, I've tried to lead with a simple summary (e.g. a typical user just wanting to confirm that they're a-ok when running on a current release of a common platform) and build up to an audience of advanced users (e.g. a developer that uses a niche Linux distro that may be willing to invest their own cycles into determining what it takes to make Brim run on it).
In keeping with the theme of the prior article, I've stopped short of saying many things are out-n-out "unsupported", barring the ones we know that are an absolute certainty (e.g. M1-based Mac hardware). I figure this is a reasonable line to walk since the recent smoke testing exercise indicated that the reasons it didn't work on certain platforms seemed to come down primarily to, 1. existence of libraries, or, 2. packaging, both of which could potentially be overcome with some elbow grease. I pointed toward the "cookbook" format as a potential delivery vehicle for that, since those are presented as experimental/advanced. If such a user did submit a PR for such a cookbook, we could reference it from this article and set expectations that the variation is effectively "community supported". I have my doubts this will happen in practice, but I figure it doesn't hurt to leave the door open to motivated users.
Once this is merged, I plan to link to it from the word "platforms" on https://www.brimsecurity.com/download/ page.
Closes #1263.