There's Talk Again About An "Open To The Core" Ubuntu Laptop

[Luke_Wolf]

I'm not going to convince a consumer of real standards. Just accept that mine are different than yours.

Nice handwaving ad hominem, what that actually says is that you don't know what you're talking about and have latched onto a device and don't want to give it up, and in fact feel threatened by anyone who tells you that it is old, outdated and a joke by modern hardware standards, which you have delusions of grandeur surrounding given your claims about how if you could put an SSD in it that it would run faster than modern hardware, which is objectively wrong.

[Michael_S]

I'm a Linux fanboy, but I'm a Linux fanboy that's a software developer. So 4GB of RAM won't cut it. Otherwise I would be satisfied with the specs.

[Michael_S]

there is also a campaign about a laptop you build yourself on indiegogo.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/p...-yourself#home

it ends on 30th November. It is nice they reached the 150k$ stretch goal, so they will try to support boards like BeagleBone Black and Udoo, which makes it a bit more interesting for me.

Yeah, I don't understand how anyone supported the project with just the Raspberri Pi itself as the foundation. It's a nice little board, no disrespect intended, and I understand the value of learning how the innards of a laptop fit together. But it seems to me that for your $250 (if you already have a Raspberri Pi Model B+) you get something you can assemble once, and then will never, ever use because a 700 MHz single core ARM processor and 512MB of RAM is good for... what, maybe if you used a half decent USB 2.0 sound card it could be a cute portable music player. What else can you do with it? Web surfing will be painfully slow. Watching movies could work, but I think the specs are a 1366x768 display, not like the 1990s but most things you see these days are 1080p or better.

Instead, I'd pay $50 for a software project that lets me take a $200 Nexus 7 2.0 and run vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Mint, OpenSUSE, pick your favorite) on it with a decent GUI or good bluetooth keyboard and mouse support. Then you've got quad-core 1.7GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 1080p for the same $250 investment.

[Gusar]

I will fully agree that using wording such as "piece of crap" in an article is inappropriate, I cringed when I read that sentence.

However, objectively, that machine really isn't capable of handling today's bloated web. The CPU is too weak to handle the amount of JavaScript in today's webpages, not to mention doing colorspace conversion and scaling required for web video. If there was at least assistance from the GPU, but there isn't any (the thing can't really be called a "GPU", there's no vertex shaders and it can handle only very simple pixel shaders; the thing was slow when it was new 8 years ago, let alone today), and there's no hardware video decoder. Browsing the web is pretty much unbearable, watching web video impossible. Hell, even offline video is a chore. When the common offline video format was 624x352 Xvid, the CPU was enough. Nowadays more and more video is 720p h264, the CPU will run full steam trying to decode that (and only barely succeed, it'll choke on bitrate spikes), which will drain the battery very fast (so forget watching video when on the go).

In a way, it's nice that there's a truly free machine out there. But it's undeniable that it is not really capable of handling the computing loads required today. To be usable, a machine has to be at least first gen Core i3 (Clarkdale/Arrandale) or AMD equivalent, equipped with a hardware video decoder.

[riklaunim]

Intel is quite good at open source GPU drivers, AMD on the open ones may or may not work as well as with the binary blob, plus IMHO they can't do much price/performance at the moment. At the moment basic laptops start at $300 - 15" with quad core Baytrail and 1366 x 768 screen. Full HD screen would be nice, but it would add to the price. Dual core i3/i5 Haswell would have better GPU than Baytrail, but more expensive. Maybe Braswell (BayTrail successor) would be better? Especially those that allow up 16 and not 8 GB of RAM (if you want to attract developers and alike).

[Michael_S]

Intel is quite good at open source GPU drivers, AMD on the open ones may or may not work as well as with the binary blob, plus IMHO they can't do much price/performance at the moment.

AMD can do price/performance as long as you buy relatively cheap stuff. Once you buy expensive processors, AMD loses. And AMD is way behind on price per watt. But I still prefer AMD due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel

[jimbohale]

The author of the article should use more professional manners at first place. Calling other people's ways as a crap is at least an insult..

The X60 is an outdated piece of crap by today's standards. The architecture for the processor is slow (relative to anything REMOTELY modern), and even 4GB of RAM isn't that much, although that's fine I guess it's still slow because of the architecture. Did I mention it's slow? Oh yeah I did, it is slow. Sure, it can run your old programs but we have something called modern programs and they tend to take up more resources, which are available on modern computers. I have no desire to write any software that targets non-modern computers just because you can't be fucked to upgrade.

AMD can do price/performance as long as you buy relatively cheap stuff.

There is a reason it's cheap, and it's not because it's good. ARM is the best competition right now in the sense of being the most feasible as it actually does something interesting instead of calling a quad-core kind-of-hyperthreadded an octo-core because of shady business practices. AMD needs to seriously rethink their processor strategy.

[xeekei]

There is a reason it's cheap, and it's not because it's good. ARM is the best competition right now in the sense of being the most feasible as it actually does something interesting instead of calling a quad-core kind-of-hyperthreadded an octo-core because of shady business practices. AMD needs to seriously rethink their processor strategy.

Just because the FX CPUs don't really have full 8 cores, doesn't mean they are suddenly quad-core CPUs. They are closer to octa-cores. Besides, the guy who designed the awesome Athlon 64 is back to make a new architecture to replace the Bulldozer-based one. Stay tuned for 2016!

[veleiro]

My reaction was a result of what I viewed as a direct attack on a respectable foundation. Shouldn't have reacted so.

However, I think we all have different standards on products, and mine disregards specs in favor of what I believe to be right and wrong. I believe things like Intel Management Engine, AMT, CPU microcode, or binary blobs that are required for any normal computing experience for me and for all users are ethically wrong. Therefore, I wont tolerate them on my machines. I dont care how outdated it is. If you ask me, having a bunch of high specs and features on top of something that undermines your software freedom makes the machine meaningless.

To the rest of the comments regarding minimum requirements for today's computing: I am a minimalist in computing, so I dont need the latest and greatest stuff because I require/consume less bulky data than the average user, and I want to keep it that way.

Does the FSF always make the most strategic decisions for free software? Maybe not. Does the first true fully free software laptop that they certify deserve to be called an "outdated piece of crap"? Not unless you're completely missing the point of it.

[Michael_S]

There is a reason it's cheap, and it's not because it's good. ARM is the best competition right now in the sense of being the most feasible as it actually does something interesting instead of calling a quad-core kind-of-hyperthreadded an octo-core because of shady business practices. AMD needs to seriously rethink their processor strategy.

I wrote the piece you quoted, not riklaunim. ARM may soon offer processors that compete with Intel for performance, but for right now they only compete in price per watt.

Look at, for example, Geekbench 3 results for ARM and x86 chips single core / multi - core
LG G3 961 / 2348
Nexus 6 1049 / 3288
iPad AIR 1464 / 2653
Nexus 9 1712 / 2867
AMD A10-7850k 2364 / 7489
Core i5 4570 3423 / 10678

AMD may be far behind Intel, but they're still comfortably ahead of the latest and greatest ARM. But again, I don't choose AMD for technical reasons, but for ethical ones - the largest single reason they fell behind Intel was the unethical and illegal business practices Intel used to beat them when AMD was making a superior product. Today Intel can put more money into R&D (11 billion per year) than AMD makes in a year (6 billion), so obviously it's difficult for AMD to catch up.

Nevertheless, if ARM surpasses AMD in a few years, I'll switch to ARM.

My reaction was a result of what I viewed as a direct attack on a respectable foundation. Shouldn't have reacted so.

However, I think we all have different standards on products, and mine disregards specs in favor of what I believe to be right and wrong. I believe things like Intel Management Engine, AMT, CPU microcode, or binary blobs that are required for any normal computing experience for me and for all users are ethically wrong. Therefore, I wont tolerate them on my machines. I dont care how outdated it is. If you ask me, having a bunch of high specs and features on top of something that undermines your software freedom makes the machine meaningless.

To the rest of the comments regarding minimum requirements for today's computing: I am a minimalist in computing, so I dont need the latest and greatest stuff because I require/consume less bulky data than the average user, and I want to keep it that way.

Does the FSF always make the most strategic decisions for free software? Maybe not. Does the first true fully free software laptop that they certify deserve to be called an "outdated piece of crap"? Not unless you're completely missing the point of it.

I respect your ethical stance. I'm too practical, even if that makes me unethical, to do the same.