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Linus: '2016 Will Be the Year of the ARM Laptop' (softpedia.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the year-of-ARMtops-on-the-penguin dept.

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.

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I don't think so. by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

    At least of you have an x86 Chromebook, you can always load Windows 10 on it if ChromeOS doesn't work out for you.

    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.

  2. Re:Finally! by ichthus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Except this is retarded either way. Linux on netbooks? It has been done and saw a 400% higher return rate than Windows on the same device

    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