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Comment by freekh | Hacker News Reader

I am hoping it’s gonna be ARM based and that it will be easyish to install Linux on it. ARMs, at least apples cores, finally seem to have gotten fast enough to be powering my main/Dev machine and if I could get the screen, look n feel, ram and disk that’s high-end enough I am jumping at it. I am really hoping for something to be replacing the x86 with something more open, more secure and more battery friendly.

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I don't know why you'D want to pick the worse evil. Most ARM systems are more closed. There are less opensource drivers available unless you want to limit yourself to very specific SoCs and apple SoCs are not part of that subset. Even if you buy the latest SoC and reverse engineer the drivers by the time you're done the SoC is already outdated and there is a better one available. I'm not sure how ARM is supposed to be battery friendly because as soon as I do something CPU intensive the battery on my phone drains in less than two hours. There are more effective strategies that are completely irrelevant from the instruction set of a CPU. You can significantly increase the lifetime of the battery by limiting depth of discharge and usable capacity via software. Phones and laptops use batteries in the most unfriendly way possible because space is a premium and getting 30% more charge in the same space for the first one or two years is more important than the capacity dropping to 50% or less after four years.

ARMs are mostly horrible in case of drivers. I have an Acer Chromebook 13 with nVidia Tegra K1. Around the beginning of this year videos can get pixelated [1]. Generally there are few graphical glitches - boot splash screen can have many short black lines overlaid, mouse cursor can have some random garbage in it.

I had to once wait over an update, because it broke the system. It had symptoms of GPU driver issue.

Generally I'm quite pleased with the machine, but I wouldn't buy another ARM Chromebook. Rockchip SoCs have drivers mostly open source from what I understand, but GPU driver is not OS. Intel is safer bet. I really like the idea of AMD Chromebook, but you can't have everything.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chromebook-cent...

Thanks I am gonna check this one out! I don't care about graphics to be honest.

I can't think of a single reason to pay $1800 for an ARM-based device. If I'm going to spend so much money on it it's better be able to run Windows/Linux and all my x86 architecture apps.

That is hinted in the article, i.e. the specs are too beefed up just to run Chrome OS (half a terabyte of storage) and a full dev environment awaits via virtualization.

Maybe it will be chrome OS + k8s with some glue for trivial to run local containers vs cloud for linux/windows.

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