There's Now A KDE-Branded Laptop Running Neon With Plasma 5

[wizard69]

Seems to me screen resolution is more important for you than screen size, which is understandable. If not, to each their own I guess.


So are laptop sales. Both are falling for a few plausible reasons.

The markets and industry are certainly changing fast.

One issue is that we have a whole generation of kids these days that are completely focused on their cell phones. Nobody is buying PC's or tablets to simply communicate with friends.

Second; Intel has really screwed up in not offering the types of performance increases that would drive the power user segment of the market. We have gone more than 3 years with basically flat CPU performance numbers, so there is little incentive for people that need performance to upgrade.

Third; the SoC world sees a lot of systems with ARM hardware built in. A lot of these systems are being sold but aren't classified as PC's. Raspberry PI for example has really taken off and if you judge by magazine space dedicated to the platform seems to have completely replaced PC's for people that lie to tinker, so that is another lost market segment.

So it will be interesting to see what happens to the PC industry in the next year or two. I expect some consolidation and company failures to be honest. The interesting thing here is that Linux is the OS on many of these platforms.

[bug77]

Seems to me screen resolution is more important for you than screen size, which is understandable. If not, to each their own I guess.

I'm not a "retina display" junkie, but I do appreciate opening and IDE and having some space left to see the code.
Tablets I can live with because all I do is casual browsing and playing some games that were designed for tablets anyway.

I don't know, there's something about small laptop displays that makes me look for an external monitor. The same way I look for a keyboard and a mouse. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a (sizable) market for sub-15" laptops, but with such a slim KDE powered laptop selection, I'd loke the option of a bigger screen. Maybe it's in the pipeline?

[ldo17]

To those complaining about the cost of laptops that don’t come with Windows, note that vendors get paid to include the “crapware” that you invariably get on the Windows ones. Think of that as a subsidy on the price, which you don’t get with Linux.

Hardware margins are razor-thin these days. Intel and Microsoft continue to rake in huge profits for their components, while the actual PC vendors end up with peanuts. If you’re wondering why the products end up looking so mediocre, that’s why—it simply isn’t worth taking the risk of offering something radically new, because the likely payoff is so little.

[schmidtbag]

wizard69
Agreed, but there's actually more to it than that. For laptops, there's also the issue that AMD hasn't made anything too competitive. Carrizo is actually a very modestly efficient architecture but most people have given up on it. So, most people who currently own a x86 based laptop made in the past 4 years don't really have a reason to upgrade. It seems most laptop manufacturers are still using resolutions like 1366x768 too.

As for ARM, the problem is a bit more complicated. You could get a crappy quad-core tablet with 1GB of RAM and a decent display for around $200 a couple years ago. With the way Android and iOS are designed, that's all you really need to comfortably use your device. Apps are designed to target the widest audience possible, which would be people with these cheap devices. Even when you have a gaming tablet (like Nvidia Shield), it's mostly only good for streaming instead of playing games locally. So, nobody has a reason to upgrade. Even when it comes to storage, there are so many cloud services out there that people just don't have a reason to worry about internal storage.

Personally, I find it irritating. I really want to get an ARM-based device to run Linux on but the laptops are either junk or not readily Linux compatible, and the tablets are either overpriced or underwhelming.

[Vistaus]

To those complaining about the cost of laptops that don’t come with Windows, note that vendors get paid to include the “crapware” that you invariably get on the Windows ones. Think of that as a subsidy on the price, which you don’t get with Linux.

Hardware margins are razor-thin these days. Intel and Microsoft continue to rake in huge profits for their components, while the actual PC vendors end up with peanuts. If you’re wondering why the products end up looking so mediocre, that’s why—it simply isn’t worth taking the risk of offering something radically new, because the likely payoff is so little.

Actually, the price of this Slimbook isn't too bad. And it's still cheaper with Linux (you have the option of Windows as well when you click Buy, but it'll cost you an extra 120).

[bug77]

... So, most people who currently own a x86 based laptop made in the past 4 years don't really have a reason to upgrade...

Actually, intel introduced SpeedShift with Skylake and improved it with Kaby Lake. That's pretty big, some may consider it reason enough to upgrade.

[carewolf]

Nice, but too much of an ultrabook for me. I need more ports and more.. POWER!! especially for a KDE laptop, it should have 4 cores and be able to compile KDE at Akademy

[anda_skoa]

and be able to compile KDE at Akademy

Isn't that what Icecream is for?

Cheers,
_

[Filiprino]

Build systems also improve error rates.