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Linus: '2016 Will Be the Year of the ARM Laptop' (softpedia.com)
jones_supa writes: Linus Torvalds took the stage at LinuxCon Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and talked about a number of things, including security and the future for Linux on ARM hardware. There is nothing that will blow your mind, but there are a couple of interesting statements nonetheless. Chromebooks are slowly taking over the world, and a large number of those Chromebooks are powered by ARM processors. "I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop," said Linus excitedly. He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux. It's not a glorious job, and it usually entails answering emails seven days a week. Finding someone with the proper set of skills and the time to do this job is difficult.
You misread that.
It's the year of ARM on laptop!
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Yes, that could be a major reason why. I have been creating and supporting board support packages for Linux on ARM for 7 years. The number of public posts I have made to open forums can be counted on one hand for exactly this reason.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
What maintainers have quit? If you're thinking of that girl who quit, she wasn't a kernel maintainer, she just maintained some USB3 chipset driver thing. The other story about that guy who left in a huff was because he was trying to jam in unnecessary BSD features into the kernel after earlier trying to dump userland features into the kernel and Linus told him to talk a flying leap after he persisted.
Neither were maintainers. The just had kernel patches they wanted landed. If they were maintainers, they wouldn't need to submit patches.
Depends on the bootloader. Some just ship with coreboot and that's it - you can't boot Windows that way. Windows requires either BIOS or EFI to boot, and most Chromebooks ship with neither.
Plus, chomebooks are a pain if you want to use them as anything other than chromeos - the security means you get prompted every boot (including reboots) that your chromebook is compromised. You have to hit a key combination (Ctrl-D?) to tell it you intentionally want to boot developer mode. Miss the opportunity and it goes into the recovery screen asking for you to insert a USB recovery key.
Yes, this is intentional. Chromebooks are supposed ot be super secure devices immune to malware. So the bootloader checks the kernel and filesystem it's about to run to make sure they're original.
Thank you for the link to that article... from 2008. Of course, nothing has changed in the SEVEN YEARS since that article was written. Well, except for:
1. Those were netbooks, which were Atom-based and crappy, regardless of the installed OS
2. ChromeOS didn't even exist
3. Android was in its infancy
4. We're now talking about ARM machines with VERY capable GPUs
5. The competition is no longer WinXP or 7, but Win8/10.
sig: sauer
You salty bitch. Let's look at the full quote shall we?
On maintainer teams:
We’re getting lots of contributors, but we have more trouble finding maintainers. Probably because the maintainer’s job is to read emails seven days a week. Forever. That’s why we’re pushing for maintainer teams as much as possible. It lessens the steps to becoming a maintainer if you’re not the only one.
The reason its hard to find maintainers isn't because of imaginary abuse to your fee fees, but because maintaining code is pretty much the most boring and least glamorous part of being a developer. You usually have to take over code that someone else wrote, trying to fix bugs while not introducing regressions and still supporting hardware that's ancient, but still in use in Peruvian ISP's. It's often thankless and burnout can be quite common especially if the developer has opportunities to work on something newer that challenges him creatively. It has nothing to do with the current SJW bullshit propaganda that's being spread around.