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

[89c51]

Jolla tablet might be a nice example to follow but what the people suggesting this laptop forget is that jolla has already delivered a product (the phone).


Plus the specs they suggest are not something appealing (to me at least).

[Adarion]

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

Make it an IPS screen (non glossy of course), an AMD APU and some battery runtime and you'll see me running and screaming "Shut up and take my money!". Oh, and maybe a decent keyboard (layout).
I'd even use a smaller screen (but please 16:10 and good res) with a tiny APU but high battery runtime. I don't need huge CPU power or gaming GPUs, just something mobile that is good to read outsides and nice to type on.
I already considered thinking about an used OLPC XO-1 but probably the ones still offered do not have good battery cells anymore. (Ruggedized, free software and nice screen feature with the B/W mode. A bit low res, though.)

[CrystalGamma]

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

What happens if AMD beat ARM at their own ISA?
I mean AMD have been developing their own ARMv8 cores for the last few months.

[dashcloud]

This is the state-of-the-art for FOSS laptops

I'm sure at least some of the folks here have seen Bunny's Novena Open Laptop/computer. This is the closest you can get, and provides you with capabilities just not available on anything else. I'd say the prices are high, but that would imply they have a competitor or even a product relatively close that you could buy.

If you put down the money for this, you'll get an awesome machine. Just be sure you carefully read all the specs and understand what you are getting- this is not like any other laptop or machine out there.

[Apopas]

The X60 is an outdated piece of crap by today's standards.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.

Yup, I agree. But what has it to do with what I said?

[IsacDaavid]

Dual core 1.66 with 512 mb ram? You fucking joking? My smartphone is more powerful than that... Fanbois....

Dual core x86_64 and up to 3 GiB of RAM. Seems about as powerful as the latest and most expensive smartphones but for half the price; and comes fully packed with freedom.

Meanwhile, every 2 years you buy a new overpowered mobile computer designed to track you and deceive you in every possible way to play angry birds and post your status on a facebook app.

[IsacDaavid]

What a bunch of bitches...
I looked the specs up for that piece of crap and you are right, it is a great laptop... for 2006.

512mb of ram? Are you insaine? If you are going to quit posting because comments like that make you mad... Please, never post again. My life is too precious to read your crap. I can only justify typing this as community service.

When will you retards learn that Free Software and the Free Software Foundation are not devoted to shill the newest or most impressive gimmicks, but to work on what gives you the most rights as a user. It is the FSF's responsibility to advertise the few pieces of hardware that meet these requirements, like the deblobbed X60. I would loose confidence in the FSF as an activist organisation if for example they dismissed the Libreboot X60 just because it's a 7 year old model.

[Irma Suarez]

Surely you must be joking, even if you gave it an SSD it would still be outdated crap by today's hardware standards.
I mean we're talking these processor options:

• Intel Core Duo (Yonah) 1.66 or 1.83 GHz
• Intel Core Solo (Yonah) 1.66 GHz
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) 1.66/1.83 GHz (2MB Cache) or 2.0 GHz (4MB Cache)

Whereas the average laptop is running an i3 at a minimum of ~1.7GHz usually more like 2.3GHz or so with a much much faster architecture (what's it... 3x the speed at this point?) and is clocked higher.

Also 512MB or 1GB of DDR2 RAM, don't make me laugh, the standard right now is between 4-8GB of DDR3, and DDR4 is starting to hit the market, and a minimum of 4GB of RAM is basically required for modern web browsing even if we're discounting things like running Gnome or KDE, and pretty much any serious productivity software (Eclipse is ~500MB in and of itself (granted it's pretty much the heaviest IDE I'm aware of although lets also be fair in that compiling tends to consume a ton of memory too)), more is preferred.

The GPU performance isn't even worth comparing the difference is so significant, and if you want to go higher in price than baseline i3s any comparison will utterly dwarf the x60

Plus if you want 5+Hours of battery life you can find it reasonably easily as long as you're not being a cheapskate.

It may have been nice in it's time and if appropriate upgrades are done, potentially still usable today, but don't delude yourself into thinking it's any kind of performance monster.

I think you can purchase it with up to 3 GiB of RAM, but that's irrelevant.

I really don't understand why you get so upset because some people out there don't share your consumerist modern hardware standards. Do we burn them at stake or rather stone them to death because they are using old laptops to browse the web and even probably are programming great stuff with them?

And 4 GB for web browsing? IDEs as the paramount of productive software? Please stop, my ribs are dying

---

Posted from my single-core 2008 laptop with 2 GiB of RAM and happily running GNOME 3 and Firefox

[startzz]

Yeah, nothing good, very bad price/performance laptop, made only for hardcore apple-like fanboys, only for ubuntu-boys.

[curaga]

/hijack

Would anybody be interested in a similarly free ARM laptop?

13" 1366x768
2GB RAM
dual core Cortex A9
Mali 400 3d / accelerated 2d
8GB flash + SDHC slot
4+h battery life
priced around 200-250 eur incl shipping to EU/US
aluminium case (think MBA look-alike)

It's one I've been thinking about hacking on for a while. Everything would be free software, but there would have to be some firmware blobs for networking and possibly other parts. The soc doesn't support SATA so no SSD/big HD, it does support hw video encoding and decoding but there's no guarantee that block could be exposed in free sw.

Could probably get a SKU of it RYF certified, if that one was shipped without the firmware blobs and using a FSF-approved distro.

Ya, it's slow and with a 16:9 screen, but those are available from China right now, and just need some drivers written. With Mali 3d it'd be one of the best free options.