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.

Comments

Finally!

[tripleevenfall]

Finally! The year of Linux on the laptop!

Re:Finally!

[Flavianoep]

You misread that.
It's the year of ARM on laptop!

Re:Finally!

[ichthus]

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.

Re:Finally!

[hairyfeet]

1.- Its a laptop as far as users are concerned, in fact I never sold a single one at the shop where anybody called them anything but laptops. If you think users will "cut you a break" because its ARM? News Flash they don't know a CPU from a HDD, they WILL expect it to do every.single.thing. your average laptop in Walmart does? When it don't? Hello return desk.

2.- Go look on your local CL under Chromebooks, News Flash they are already being dumped en masse because to steal a line from a former POTUS "Its the programs stupid!". People see a Chromebook, and again I cannot stress this enough users have no fucking clue what an OS is and all they know is "I use Google at home, it says it is from Google, so I can do everything I can do at home" and after a couple of weeks of finding out that is NOT the case? Hello Craigslist. I just looked on mine, they have a pile of 'em in the $70 range and most have been there awhile, know what that tells me? The users are treating them just as they treated those cheap tablets, they use it a few weeks, find it wanting, and get rid of it.

3.-...Sigh, how hard is it to understand? YOU know what an OS is, know who don't? THE VAST MAJORITY OF CONSUMERS that is who! They aren't gonna know WTF an "Android" is because, and I bet my last fucking dollar damned near everyone of them will say "that is for cellphones" and is that a cellphone? Nope its a laptop and therefor should do what laptops should do which according to Joe and Jane is RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS, when it don't? Hi return desk, I'd like to return this?

4.-GPUs...Will these GPUs run all those Winhdows programs that Joe and Jane WILL expect it to run, because that IS what runs on the laptops at Walmart? No? Then nobody will have a single fuck to give, next!

5.-Windows 10? Yeah that is why you are extra fucked as again Joe and Jane have not a single fuck to give about rumors of spying, data collection, all that shit means nothing, for fucks sake they blab their sex lives on FB! What they DO care about very much is Windows 10 LOOKS like Windows 7, and all their programs run on it just fine. Ya know what I do to Windows 8 PCs brought into the shop with users demanding I "fix it"? I slap in classic shell, voila! That'll be $50 and they hand it over with a big happy smile on their face because all they care about is the GUI and form factor and if its a laptop that LOOKS like Windows 7? Well they are just happy campers and Win 10? Looks like Windows 7.

All of these points you are bringing up? Yeah its pretty damned obvious that you have NEVER worked retail or you would know that Joe user? He don't even know WTF those words even mean! An Operating System? CPU? GPU? What are those? If its a cellphone it should act like a cellphone, a laptop should act like a laptop, which means it should look and act like Windows. Mark my words, feel free to bookmark this post, when these flop I'll sure as hell be dropping links to this as a big giant TOLD YA SO because I have been working retail since the Shat sold Vic 20s with TJ Hooker hair and I KNOW how consumers think, and this? Ain't gonna work.

I don't think so.

[gizmo2199]

I had a Chromebook with an Exynos 5 and wasn't that great, in addition to the hoops I had to jump through to install Ubuntu on it.
I traded it in for a Celeron Cromebook, which is faster. Much better experience, plus the i915 graphics driver is much more mature and has video acceleration support.

Re:I don't think so.

[tlhIngan]

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.

Re:I don't think so.

[Zero__Kelvin]

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

That's like buying a recliner and saying: "At least if it turns out not to be very comfortable, I can take a shit in it!

having trouble finding maintainers

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the stream of abuse probably doesn't help...

Re:No. It won't be

[alvinrod]

There is some speculation that Apple will eventually ditch Intel and start using their own ARM chips at some point in the future. I don't think they'll do it next year, but I'm willing to bet that they'll have a non iOS product using an ARM SoC by 2020. Remember that before they went to Intel, Mac OS used IBM's POWER architecture and that they had an internal build of Mac OS that ran on x86 in development for years before it was ever released. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see that they were doing the same thing with ARM.

Re:"finding people to maintain Linux"

[cide1]

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.

Re:"finding people to maintain Linux"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There's no technical reason this couldn't happen

[roc97007]

It's the netbook argument all over again -- most people's use case for laptops is web and email, and it doesn't really matter what processor or OS the laptop is running as long as it works with most websites and email sends and receives ok. There are assumptions there -- that video and other resources used by websites work correctly -- and there's room for some specialized apps like Netflix, but that's pretty much it.

So Linux on ARM as a laptop? Sure. And it'll almost certainly be more reliable, run faster on equivalent hardware, and meet most people's needs who own laptops. There's no technical reason this couldn't happen.

The reason it won't happen is that there's this ninety billion dollar company and this other one hundred eighty billion dollar company that both have a vested interest in this not happening. And they're really good (at least so far) at making sure it doesn't happen.