In contrast to Chipzilla, of course.
It seems to have dawned on the Loons that YearOfLinuxDesktop™ isn’t working because the “product” is, well, shoddy and uncompetitive.
Not much they can do about that, really.
But what they can do is to pray fervently for what economists call an “externality,” which in this case is the sudden and total collapse of the hardware on which Windows apparently depends. This is slightly crazed reasoning (surprise!), but it goes somewhat as follows:
(1) People want small smart thingies that consume less electricity. (No they don’t.)
(2) Linux runs on any hardware whatsoever. (No it doesn’t.)
(3) Windows doesn’t run on ARM. (Yes it does…)
(4) ???
(5) Prophet!
Or, as Adam would have it, “profit.”
If you step back from this argument for a minute and ask yourself “what has the demise of Intel got to do with Microsoft?” it swiftly becomes obvious that it’s a teleological nonsense. But this is what happens when you start with a mandatory conclusion and then reason backwards in the vague direction of reality.
Comments
do they even have a working arm distro. when I mean distro I mean a full desktop with working graphics and not-buggy firmware support; not a text only hobby project?
debian has an arm version, but i don’t know which features it misses.
on the side note, I hate how MS has PC maker’s shlong in their mouth. I remember when balmer was saying that his toshiba ultra-portable is WAY better than the macbook air.
MS is a software company, not an apologist for shoddy turdballs that oem’s crap every two weeks.
A tiny correction, if I may, the statement:
“(1) People want small smart thingies that consume less electricity.”
Is actually not wrong (well, technically it is, but…) you see, people do like silence and neat shapes – silence requires low power and neat shapes require as much construction flexibility as you can get; low power is the key to it.
Not that loons understand any of this, they’ll be sadly disappointed when intel blasts ARM out of gadget market with their own x86 based SOC designs.
And according to Peter Bright on Arstechnica, they are already on their way…
Oh, but it is wrong.
“People want small smart thingies” is correct, for the most part.
“People want devices that consume less electricity” is also correct.
The error lies in assuming the two sets are congruent. Consumers are quite happy to choose a small thingie that consumes lots of power (iPhones). Conversely, consumers are quite happy to choose a large thingie that consumes very little power (the latest generation of household boilers, for example).
It’s typical Loon laziness to imply that only the intersection is important.
but consumers are often confused and don’t know better. I don’t see why people buy full powers when they can get slim towers where the only difference is that the power supply has a different shape. not to mention “mac mini” types like the inspiron mini, but that’s another story.
Oh, I don’t disagree. The amount of FUD involved when buying hardware is truly astonishing.
The only thing I am trying to say is that the argument is inside-out.
People buy a product because it performs a certain function or fulfils a certain need. Let’s say that function or need is, for example, a word processor or something tedious like that.
Does it matter whether the thingie is small? Well, actually it does, because word processing on a 3×5 screen is insanely painful.
Does it matter whether the thingie consumes 50W rather than 100W? In almost all cases, no.
If an ARM device could magically overcome these problems, it would sell like hot-cakes. But, of course, the problems are built into the requirement in the first place.
And that’s without even considering whether you would want Linux on your ARM device or Windows.
Ahh, I see what you mean; well we can’t be too demanding of the loons.
@RC:
Ummm … that would negate the point of this site, no?
I may have spoken in jest…
on the side note, it is ironic that “architecture-centric” distros have better hardware support because the focus is limited. x86 distros are a acpi, apic, video driver nightmare. i use finnix for ppc and that thing works perfect 100% of the time.
Interesting.
A few years ago, I was begging all my friends to link me to something like “finnix.”
Sadly, it transpired that none of them had ever heard of it.
Does it do anything other than trip over its own dick?
Have we just found the perfect Linux?!
Has the promised future finally arrived?
Shall we hear the angelic chorus anytime now?
Is this it – unity, singularity – the ascendance?
Are we even ready for the glory that awaits us upon our arrival to our place at the golden throne where god himself watches over all-creation?
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I trust the answers are: yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
I doubt it, really.
The question to your answers would be:
“duckpondix?”
the ppc version is the only maintained linux live cd for that architecture. I use it mainly for either badblocks, checking smart stats on the hdd or ddrescue. it does it’s job fine. the x86 version lacks ms-sys, testdisk and chnps/regedit, despite future requests the maker hasn’t included them.
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