I agree that the search feature is awful for new users. If you spell the first few letters of whatever you want accurately, it pops up a list of matching results very quickly and with a nice animation. But if you put a keyword into the search, nothing comes up - an unbelievable oversight.
The plain truth is that a development community of volunteers with a few corporate backers spending a total across the industry of maybe a few billion dollars per year on all aspects of free software are not going to match companies like Apple and Microsoft that each spend many billions of dollars per year on user interface alone.
I wish I could tell people that free software is engineered better, less buggy, easier to install, and more aesthetically appealing in all respects than proprietary software. But often it's not.
Things keep incrementally improving, and a good Linux distribution in 2011 is arguably better in all respects than any Microsoft or Apple operating system from 2006. I fully expect that a good Linux distribution in 2016 will be better than any Microsoft or Apple operating system you can get today. But the free software community will always be playing catch-up against proprietary software companies that have literally ten or even fifty times the resources to devote to their products. The best reason to use free software is because it's free. I would certainly be happier if it was also universally better in technical terms, but it isn't.
Please keep that in mind if you want to try Linux again in the future - or when you phrase future criticisms.
Have you run Ubuntu 11.10? Unity was too buggy to be usable in Ubuntu 11.04, at least for me. But I'm a long time Ubuntu users so I gave 11.10 a try, and Unity runs fine.
And if you install regular Ubuntu with Unity and don't like it (and most people don't, I think)
I think people accustomed to GNOME 2.32 or KDE or XFCE, or power users, will dislike Unity. But for someone trying Linux for the first time, who is not especially technical I think they'll take five minutes to adapt and then use it without a second thought. The biggest problem I had with Unity when it first came out in Ubuntu 11.04 was not anything in its design, it was the fact that it kept crashing. But when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 it worked flawlessly for me, and I don't mind using it at all.
I'm annoyed that Unity does not have a high degree of customization. You can move the move the dock to other parts of the screen, which I have not done, and you can shut off auto-hide, which I have done. But you can't have nested menus, you can't move the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the right side of the window, and you can't set it so that some applications on the dock are intentionally not grouped. As a power user, all that drives me crazy.
Mark Shuttleworth is the CEO of Canonical, the company that funds most Ubuntu development. He has the (ridiculous) goal of getting 200 million Ubuntu users, and if targeting Linux desktop user interface settings and options to power users who like lots of customization options and prize variety of choices far more than a unified user interface would get a distribution to 200 million users... then it would have happened already, because that's the way Linux desktops have been for over a decade. Clearly if you want to target the largest potential user base, you have to tailor your interface for non-technical users. Unity does that, and while we the technical people may dislike the lack of options I think it's hard to argue that the default settings are bad.
Unity sucks for techies because Ubuntu has gone out of their way to avoid making it highly configurable. But is it truly bad for end users? As a default user interface for non-technical people, I think it's pretty good.
The problem I had with Unity was that in Ubuntu 11.04 it was so unstable for me that I couldn't use it and had to revert to GNOME 2.32. That's clearly no way to win fans for your new desktop environment. But for Ubuntu 11.10 it's never crashed and works very nicely. My non-technical wife and kids had no problems with it, they made the switch from the GNOME 2.32 environment I was using previously to Unity with two minutes of instruction and no complaints.
I think the Ubuntu developers are clearly aimed at making Unity and everything you run inside Unity as unified and consistent as the iOS or Mac OS X user experience. That's a major annoyance for us, the type of people that post to Slashdot and prefer a highly configurable user interface experience. But if they can keep improving Unity, it may start to attract the same huge base of rabid fans that iOS has. Clearly a lot of people love the way Apple restricts their user interface customization options. There's some kind of market there.
Since Canonical (which funds most Ubuntu development) is trying to be profitable, I imagine they're hoping to make money off that somehow - Ubuntu tablets? Ubuntu kiosks? Yet Another Attempt at OEM Linux PCs? I have no idea, but they wouldn't go through the trouble to build their own desktop environment unless they had a specific goal in mind, otherwise they would have stuck with default GNOME 3 or KDE or XFCE.
Good point. Plus Java is not as processor or memory efficient as Objective-C. The efficiency difference between them is irrelevant in modern desktop hardware, but it's noticeable on a little ARM device with 1GB of RAM.
I think the grandparent post defines "Apple's star is waning" to mean that their percentage ownership of the entire smart phone and entire tablet market is going to drop. You're defining "Apple's star is waning" to mean that the company is no longer unbelievably profitable, and of course you are correct that Apple is definitely still unbelievably profitable and will probably sell tens or hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads every year for the foreseeable future.
The battle between Android tablets and phones against iPad and iPhone has many rough parallels with the battle between Apple computers and Microsoft Windows in the 1990s. Of course the big difference is that Android is open source and has no license fees from the software vendor (although it's starting to carry a lot of patent licensing fees from other companies) where Windows is proprietary and carries licensing fees. But in both cases Apple picks the exact hardware and pretty rigidly enforces the rules for how the software will perform and how the user interface will work. Windows and Android are both sold on a wide range of hardware, including a fair bit of hardware that has abysmal performance or awful reliability or both, and the user interface is a lot clunkier and the quality of third party applications varies widely.
Configurability is not a bad thing. The sane approach to Ubuntu's Unity or GNOME 3 would be to make the user default experience exactly what it is now, but allow people who wanted to change it back to something more like GNOME 2.32 or XFCE or any other window manager the option to do so.
Selecting a single coherent user interface experience as the default makes a lot of sense. Blocking users from changing the settings makes no sense, especially for an open source project.
The competition from GNOME is probably one of the reasons that Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL in 2000. Even if nothing else good came out of GNOME (and plenty of good did come out of it and continues to come out of it), that alone justifies the existence of the project.
But the real problem with GNOME is as you said, the political atmosphere. I don't care how they want to configure their default user experience. It's their project, they can do what they want with it. But GNOME has just not been friendly to user or distribution packager customization of the user experience. That more than anything hurts the popularity of the GNOME desktop.
I welcome the forks of the project. I hope the most customization-friendly fork wins the broadest user and developer base.
Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. - Robert Heinlein
I disagree with your implicit assertion that happiness is all about fun and leisure. Every life needs lots of fun and leisure, because all work and no play makes Jack a deranged alcoholic. But ideally all of us would find at least one pet project that we devote some of our free time to - soup kitchens, political lobbying (for a worthy cause), volunteer work at a school, volunteer work at a library, mentoring kids, contributing to Wikipedia and similar projects, maintaining a historical monument, improving energy efficiency, or writing free software. Then you can look back at your life with a sense of accomplishment above and beyond 2000 fun hours of Team Fortress 2.
If you can't get the salary you feel you deserve, whose problem is it?
Well naturally everyone would like to be paid millions of dollars for a few hours of work per week, and it won't happen. But your idea there is absurd. It's tautological that the best 10% of all job-seekers out there will only be 10% of the job-seekers out there. "Develop better skills so you can demand higher pay" only works if you can reasonably expect the great majority of other job-seekers in the same industry are content to let their skills stagnate - and of course that never happens.
I'm not affiliated with Mozilla in any way, but I'll take a stab at your "why" question. First, Boot2Gecko is aimed at any mobile device but specifically includes phones. That drops ChromeOS and Windows 8 from the list of competitors since as yet they do not plan to support mobile phones. Second, the Mozilla Foundation was founded for the purpose of public benefit through promoting the use of open source software. Out of of Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Rim, and WebOS, only Android is open source. So that narrows the field of competition down to one other project, Android. Maybe RIM or WebOS will become open source, but you can't bank on that.
On top of that Android is under attack for patent violations and lawsuits for improper use of code that is owned by Oracle. Because of lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, Android handset and device manufacturers are paying no licensing fees per unit to Google but undisclosed amounts to Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle. A mobile operating system that is fully open source and uses only open web standards is free as in free speech (just like Android) but also, as far as I can tell, more likely to be totally free for companies to use (no license fees, so free as in free beer too). And even if the Android lawsuits all get handled in Google's favor and the licensing fees go away, competition is good for everyone.
I think Boot2Gecko has a hell of an uphill fight, but it's a very worthwhile project.
Tom's Hardware latest web browser Grand Prix says Firefox 7 now has lower memory use than the competing browsers, so unless you have your own documentation to dispute theirs, I think you're incorrect. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html
Unity was unusable due to crashes for me in Ubuntu 11.04. In 11.10, it's stable. Now that it doesn't crash, I like it a lot.
I suspect there are a lot of satisfied Unity users out there that just don't feel inclined to get involved in flame wars over what they perceive as a non-issue.
From the article, current ARM processors have a 40 bit architecture, which puts the process barrier at 1TB. Every mobile device produced in the next 20 years is probably not going to hit that ceiling.
And if ARM is currently 40-bit, that means their address space limit is 1 TB - which is plenty for all but really high end servers anyway. The difference between 40 bit and 64 bit is probably not relevant for most consumer and server applications anyway, especially since port from x86_64 to ARM is a lot of work regardless of whether ARM is 40 or 64 bit.
I'm hoping ARM chips are performance-competitive with x86_64 chips within a decade just because AMD is having problems, and giving Intel an effective monopoly on high end processors will probably lead to unnecessarily high prices.
I disagree. Java's startup time is a minor annoyance today on any PC purchased in the last three years that's better than a netbook. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Java was dog slow on consumer grade devices. And Java Web Start, Sun's platform for delivering convenient Java applets over the web with defined security rules and digital signatures, was an incredible pain in the neck to set up. You could argue it never got widespread use because of Microsoft, but I would say all of the work involved in getting it to operate properly was enough to kill it all by itself, and Microsoft didn't need to do a thing.
I've spent the last years being paid a pretty penny to write Java code. I'm not going to switch because I can't pay the mortgage and daycare going from "senior java developer" to "junior foo developer". But the language is choking on its own bloat and even with brilliant toolkits like Play Framework it's a headache to use.
The post was long, I think you skimmed it. When he complained about the Amazon website user interface it was hyperbole. When he spoke of Jeff Bezos' dictatorial management it was surrounded before and after by statements that Google was better than Amazon in every single way save platforms. If he thought running the company like an emperor made sense, he would have listed that among Amazon's virtues.
Go read his other blog rants at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ He is blunt, but he's also very intelligent and even when you disagree he writes a solid argument. He probably won't get reprimanded because he's damned good at what he does, which is why Google hired him away from Amazon and Facebook is trying to hire him away from Google.
When working for wages, in theory, you have the freedom to quit one job and pursue another, freedom from emotional or physical abuse from your employer (at the very least by exercising your right to quit), and you can negotiate for better treatment - fewer work hours, better pay, better benefits, nicer working environment. You cannot do any of those things as a slave.
For power consumption, I'm speaking of power use under load. For laptops especially this is important. I'm sure that under idle the difference between a P4 and an ARM desktop is smaller - I'm sure it adds up over time, but not enough to be noteworthy.
With respect to performance, I'm not suggesting that my coworkers replace their Core 2 Duo laptop processors and Core i5 laptop processors with the single core 1 GHz ARM chip in my wife's smart phone or even the dual core ARM chip in an iPad 2. I'm suggesting they be replaced with an nVidia Tegra 3 "Kal El" chip with four core ARM processor at up to 1.5 GHz or the following generation eight core ARM processor with up to 2.5 GHz that nVidia announced. It still might not perform as well as the Core 2 Duo, but most of the time they're waiting for things on their device it's due to the SATA hard drives or website response times and not the processor.
Marvell said their Armada XP chip would be out "next year" but 2011 is not over yet. nVidia never promised that their desktop and server ARM chips would hit market in 2011. I don't think they provided a release date at all.
2 points to consider:
1. The P4 uses something like 5-10 times as much power for the task. Considering that these days most people just surf the web and play simple games that can be programmed with Javascript and HTML5, that means ARM is good enough for a large minority of current PC users. It also means ARM is pretty good for a lot of laptops. At our company the software developers run IDEs and compiler on laptops, so beefy x86 CPUs are extremely useful. But everyone else is using a web browser and Microsoft Office - as long as the user interface remained the same, a switch to ARM wouldn't even be noticed.
2. ARM processors are going to improve. The nVidia Tegra 3 "Kal El" processor is made with a 40nm semiconductor technology, 4 cores plus one low power core, a cap of 1.5 GHz, and a 12 core GPU. nVidia has announced future generations of its ARM processors with 28 nm semiconductor technology, 8 cores and a 64 core CPU, and no details on max GHz. It's likely in as little as three years there will be ARM chips that are comparable to a mid range Intel Core i5 today with much lower power draw. Then ARM will be sufficient for 75-90% of desktop machines.
I don't do video editing, Folding@Home, or Bitcoin mining. I'm sure if I did that would change my position on this, and for people that do I'm sure having a beefy CPU and top tier dedicated GPU is essential. In my experience, the AMD 6-core CPU I have at home and the Core i5 I have at work never top 100% use of one core plus 50% use of a second core. The rest are always idle.
Read up on rootkits. Some rootkits inject themselves into the boot process and get loaded before the operating system starts, and thus make it effectively impossible for the operating system to detect their presence. This UEFI secure boot process is an attempt to prevent that kind of rootkit from working. They describe it right there in the page, look at the Figure 2 diagram for current boot processes and the Figure 3 diagram for what UEFI secure boot does.
Google's Chromebook devices use the exact same feature, for the same reason. A rootkit that hijacks the boot process can run undetected in Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD just as well as it can in Windows, we're just fortunate that current rootkits mostly target Windows because there are more potential victims out there.
Admittedly Microsoft is not shy about working in its own best interests. I fully expect that some significant portion of the machines that ship with UEFI configured to make it effectively impossible to install any operating system other than the Microsoft operating system it received from the original equipment manufacturer. But the technology itself is not primarily aimed at blocking adoption of Linux, it's a true security feature. The next time you purchase a PC or motherboard, just make sure it can boot additional operating systems before you buy.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the search feature is awful for new users. If you spell the first few letters of whatever you want accurately, it pops up a list of matching results very quickly and with a nice animation. But if you put a keyword into the search, nothing comes up - an unbelievable oversight.
The plain truth is that a development community of volunteers with a few corporate backers spending a total across the industry of maybe a few billion dollars per year on all aspects of free software are not going to match companies like Apple and Microsoft that each spend many billions of dollars per year on user interface alone.
I wish I could tell people that free software is engineered better, less buggy, easier to install, and more aesthetically appealing in all respects than proprietary software. But often it's not.
Things keep incrementally improving, and a good Linux distribution in 2011 is arguably better in all respects than any Microsoft or Apple operating system from 2006. I fully expect that a good Linux distribution in 2016 will be better than any Microsoft or Apple operating system you can get today. But the free software community will always be playing catch-up against proprietary software companies that have literally ten or even fifty times the resources to devote to their products. The best reason to use free software is because it's free. I would certainly be happier if it was also universally better in technical terms, but it isn't.
Please keep that in mind if you want to try Linux again in the future - or when you phrase future criticisms.
Have you run Ubuntu 11.10? Unity was too buggy to be usable in Ubuntu 11.04, at least for me. But I'm a long time Ubuntu users so I gave 11.10 a try, and Unity runs fine.
And if you install regular Ubuntu with Unity and don't like it (and most people don't, I think)
I think people accustomed to GNOME 2.32 or KDE or XFCE, or power users, will dislike Unity. But for someone trying Linux for the first time, who is not especially technical I think they'll take five minutes to adapt and then use it without a second thought. The biggest problem I had with Unity when it first came out in Ubuntu 11.04 was not anything in its design, it was the fact that it kept crashing. But when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 it worked flawlessly for me, and I don't mind using it at all.
I'm annoyed that Unity does not have a high degree of customization. You can move the move the dock to other parts of the screen, which I have not done, and you can shut off auto-hide, which I have done. But you can't have nested menus, you can't move the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the right side of the window, and you can't set it so that some applications on the dock are intentionally not grouped. As a power user, all that drives me crazy.
Mark Shuttleworth is the CEO of Canonical, the company that funds most Ubuntu development. He has the (ridiculous) goal of getting 200 million Ubuntu users, and if targeting Linux desktop user interface settings and options to power users who like lots of customization options and prize variety of choices far more than a unified user interface would get a distribution to 200 million users... then it would have happened already, because that's the way Linux desktops have been for over a decade. Clearly if you want to target the largest potential user base, you have to tailor your interface for non-technical users. Unity does that, and while we the technical people may dislike the lack of options I think it's hard to argue that the default settings are bad.
Unity sucks for techies because Ubuntu has gone out of their way to avoid making it highly configurable. But is it truly bad for end users? As a default user interface for non-technical people, I think it's pretty good.
The problem I had with Unity was that in Ubuntu 11.04 it was so unstable for me that I couldn't use it and had to revert to GNOME 2.32. That's clearly no way to win fans for your new desktop environment. But for Ubuntu 11.10 it's never crashed and works very nicely. My non-technical wife and kids had no problems with it, they made the switch from the GNOME 2.32 environment I was using previously to Unity with two minutes of instruction and no complaints.
I think the Ubuntu developers are clearly aimed at making Unity and everything you run inside Unity as unified and consistent as the iOS or Mac OS X user experience. That's a major annoyance for us, the type of people that post to Slashdot and prefer a highly configurable user interface experience. But if they can keep improving Unity, it may start to attract the same huge base of rabid fans that iOS has. Clearly a lot of people love the way Apple restricts their user interface customization options. There's some kind of market there.
Since Canonical (which funds most Ubuntu development) is trying to be profitable, I imagine they're hoping to make money off that somehow - Ubuntu tablets? Ubuntu kiosks? Yet Another Attempt at OEM Linux PCs? I have no idea, but they wouldn't go through the trouble to build their own desktop environment unless they had a specific goal in mind, otherwise they would have stuck with default GNOME 3 or KDE or XFCE.
Good point. Plus Java is not as processor or memory efficient as Objective-C. The efficiency difference between them is irrelevant in modern desktop hardware, but it's noticeable on a little ARM device with 1GB of RAM.
I think the grandparent post defines "Apple's star is waning" to mean that their percentage ownership of the entire smart phone and entire tablet market is going to drop. You're defining "Apple's star is waning" to mean that the company is no longer unbelievably profitable, and of course you are correct that Apple is definitely still unbelievably profitable and will probably sell tens or hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads every year for the foreseeable future.
The battle between Android tablets and phones against iPad and iPhone has many rough parallels with the battle between Apple computers and Microsoft Windows in the 1990s. Of course the big difference is that Android is open source and has no license fees from the software vendor (although it's starting to carry a lot of patent licensing fees from other companies) where Windows is proprietary and carries licensing fees. But in both cases Apple picks the exact hardware and pretty rigidly enforces the rules for how the software will perform and how the user interface will work. Windows and Android are both sold on a wide range of hardware, including a fair bit of hardware that has abysmal performance or awful reliability or both, and the user interface is a lot clunkier and the quality of third party applications varies widely.
Configurability is not a bad thing. The sane approach to Ubuntu's Unity or GNOME 3 would be to make the user default experience exactly what it is now, but allow people who wanted to change it back to something more like GNOME 2.32 or XFCE or any other window manager the option to do so.
Selecting a single coherent user interface experience as the default makes a lot of sense. Blocking users from changing the settings makes no sense, especially for an open source project.
The competition from GNOME is probably one of the reasons that Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL in 2000. Even if nothing else good came out of GNOME (and plenty of good did come out of it and continues to come out of it), that alone justifies the existence of the project.
But the real problem with GNOME is as you said, the political atmosphere. I don't care how they want to configure their default user experience. It's their project, they can do what they want with it. But GNOME has just not been friendly to user or distribution packager customization of the user experience. That more than anything hurts the popularity of the GNOME desktop.
I welcome the forks of the project. I hope the most customization-friendly fork wins the broadest user and developer base.
Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. - Robert Heinlein
I disagree with your implicit assertion that happiness is all about fun and leisure. Every life needs lots of fun and leisure, because all work and no play makes Jack a deranged alcoholic. But ideally all of us would find at least one pet project that we devote some of our free time to - soup kitchens, political lobbying (for a worthy cause), volunteer work at a school, volunteer work at a library, mentoring kids, contributing to Wikipedia and similar projects, maintaining a historical monument, improving energy efficiency, or writing free software. Then you can look back at your life with a sense of accomplishment above and beyond 2000 fun hours of Team Fortress 2.
If you can't get the salary you feel you deserve, whose problem is it?
Well naturally everyone would like to be paid millions of dollars for a few hours of work per week, and it won't happen. But your idea there is absurd. It's tautological that the best 10% of all job-seekers out there will only be 10% of the job-seekers out there. "Develop better skills so you can demand higher pay" only works if you can reasonably expect the great majority of other job-seekers in the same industry are content to let their skills stagnate - and of course that never happens.
I'm not affiliated with Mozilla in any way, but I'll take a stab at your "why" question. First, Boot2Gecko is aimed at any mobile device but specifically includes phones. That drops ChromeOS and Windows 8 from the list of competitors since as yet they do not plan to support mobile phones. Second, the Mozilla Foundation was founded for the purpose of public benefit through promoting the use of open source software. Out of of Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Rim, and WebOS, only Android is open source. So that narrows the field of competition down to one other project, Android. Maybe RIM or WebOS will become open source, but you can't bank on that.
On top of that Android is under attack for patent violations and lawsuits for improper use of code that is owned by Oracle. Because of lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, Android handset and device manufacturers are paying no licensing fees per unit to Google but undisclosed amounts to Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle. A mobile operating system that is fully open source and uses only open web standards is free as in free speech (just like Android) but also, as far as I can tell, more likely to be totally free for companies to use (no license fees, so free as in free beer too). And even if the Android lawsuits all get handled in Google's favor and the licensing fees go away, competition is good for everyone.
I think Boot2Gecko has a hell of an uphill fight, but it's a very worthwhile project.
Tom's Hardware latest web browser Grand Prix says Firefox 7 now has lower memory use than the competing browsers, so unless you have your own documentation to dispute theirs, I think you're incorrect. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html
If you sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager you can change the shortcut keys.
You think GUI development with Java is not a pain? What world do you live in? ;)
I think Swing is a sadistic joke foisted on the industry by some psychotic Sun employees.
Unity was unusable due to crashes for me in Ubuntu 11.04. In 11.10, it's stable. Now that it doesn't crash, I like it a lot.
I suspect there are a lot of satisfied Unity users out there that just don't feel inclined to get involved in flame wars over what they perceive as a non-issue.
From the article, current ARM processors have a 40 bit architecture, which puts the process barrier at 1TB. Every mobile device produced in the next 20 years is probably not going to hit that ceiling.
And if ARM is currently 40-bit, that means their address space limit is 1 TB - which is plenty for all but really high end servers anyway. The difference between 40 bit and 64 bit is probably not relevant for most consumer and server applications anyway, especially since port from x86_64 to ARM is a lot of work regardless of whether ARM is 40 or 64 bit.
I'm hoping ARM chips are performance-competitive with x86_64 chips within a decade just because AMD is having problems, and giving Intel an effective monopoly on high end processors will probably lead to unnecessarily high prices.
I disagree. Java's startup time is a minor annoyance today on any PC purchased in the last three years that's better than a netbook. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Java was dog slow on consumer grade devices. And Java Web Start, Sun's platform for delivering convenient Java applets over the web with defined security rules and digital signatures, was an incredible pain in the neck to set up. You could argue it never got widespread use because of Microsoft, but I would say all of the work involved in getting it to operate properly was enough to kill it all by itself, and Microsoft didn't need to do a thing.
I've spent the last years being paid a pretty penny to write Java code. I'm not going to switch because I can't pay the mortgage and daycare going from "senior java developer" to "junior foo developer". But the language is choking on its own bloat and even with brilliant toolkits like Play Framework it's a headache to use.
The post was long, I think you skimmed it. When he complained about the Amazon website user interface it was hyperbole. When he spoke of Jeff Bezos' dictatorial management it was surrounded before and after by statements that Google was better than Amazon in every single way save platforms. If he thought running the company like an emperor made sense, he would have listed that among Amazon's virtues.
Go read his other blog rants at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ He is blunt, but he's also very intelligent and even when you disagree he writes a solid argument. He probably won't get reprimanded because he's damned good at what he does, which is why Google hired him away from Amazon and Facebook is trying to hire him away from Google.
When working for wages, in theory, you have the freedom to quit one job and pursue another, freedom from emotional or physical abuse from your employer (at the very least by exercising your right to quit), and you can negotiate for better treatment - fewer work hours, better pay, better benefits, nicer working environment. You cannot do any of those things as a slave.
For power consumption, I'm speaking of power use under load. For laptops especially this is important. I'm sure that under idle the difference between a P4 and an ARM desktop is smaller - I'm sure it adds up over time, but not enough to be noteworthy.
With respect to performance, I'm not suggesting that my coworkers replace their Core 2 Duo laptop processors and Core i5 laptop processors with the single core 1 GHz ARM chip in my wife's smart phone or even the dual core ARM chip in an iPad 2. I'm suggesting they be replaced with an nVidia Tegra 3 "Kal El" chip with four core ARM processor at up to 1.5 GHz or the following generation eight core ARM processor with up to 2.5 GHz that nVidia announced. It still might not perform as well as the Core 2 Duo, but most of the time they're waiting for things on their device it's due to the SATA hard drives or website response times and not the processor.
Marvell said their Armada XP chip would be out "next year" but 2011 is not over yet. nVidia never promised that their desktop and server ARM chips would hit market in 2011. I don't think they provided a release date at all.
2 points to consider:
1. The P4 uses something like 5-10 times as much power for the task. Considering that these days most people just surf the web and play simple games that can be programmed with Javascript and HTML5, that means ARM is good enough for a large minority of current PC users. It also means ARM is pretty good for a lot of laptops. At our company the software developers run IDEs and compiler on laptops, so beefy x86 CPUs are extremely useful. But everyone else is using a web browser and Microsoft Office - as long as the user interface remained the same, a switch to ARM wouldn't even be noticed.
2. ARM processors are going to improve. The nVidia Tegra 3 "Kal El" processor is made with a 40nm semiconductor technology, 4 cores plus one low power core, a cap of 1.5 GHz, and a 12 core GPU. nVidia has announced future generations of its ARM processors with 28 nm semiconductor technology, 8 cores and a 64 core CPU, and no details on max GHz. It's likely in as little as three years there will be ARM chips that are comparable to a mid range Intel Core i5 today with much lower power draw. Then ARM will be sufficient for 75-90% of desktop machines.
I don't do video editing, Folding@Home, or Bitcoin mining. I'm sure if I did that would change my position on this, and for people that do I'm sure having a beefy CPU and top tier dedicated GPU is essential. In my experience, the AMD 6-core CPU I have at home and the Core i5 I have at work never top 100% use of one core plus 50% use of a second core. The rest are always idle.
Read up on rootkits. Some rootkits inject themselves into the boot process and get loaded before the operating system starts, and thus make it effectively impossible for the operating system to detect their presence. This UEFI secure boot process is an attempt to prevent that kind of rootkit from working. They describe it right there in the page, look at the Figure 2 diagram for current boot processes and the Figure 3 diagram for what UEFI secure boot does.
Google's Chromebook devices use the exact same feature, for the same reason. A rootkit that hijacks the boot process can run undetected in Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD just as well as it can in Windows, we're just fortunate that current rootkits mostly target Windows because there are more potential victims out there.
Admittedly Microsoft is not shy about working in its own best interests. I fully expect that some significant portion of the machines that ship with UEFI configured to make it effectively impossible to install any operating system other than the Microsoft operating system it received from the original equipment manufacturer. But the technology itself is not primarily aimed at blocking adoption of Linux, it's a true security feature. The next time you purchase a PC or motherboard, just make sure it can boot additional operating systems before you buy.