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So what's the point of this?So what's the point of this?Posted Sep 17, 2012 0:10 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)In reply to: So what's the point of this? by drag Parent article: Intel declares Clover Trail Atom processor a "no Linux" zone (ars technica)
The problem is that in many cases the hardware with good Linux support is more expensive than hardware with poor Linux support. People who try to save money by getting cheap hardware wind up paying in their time trying to get it to work properly. If the alternative is something very expensive or if Linux is a hobby and working through problems is part of the enjoyment, that may be a worthwhile approach. But a lot of us wind up going down that path either because the up-front cost of the cheaper hardware is obvious but the time spent getting it to work is not, or because we tend to overrate the value of money relative to the value of our time. To slightly modify a well known saying, you could say we're dollar wise and hour foolish.
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So what's the point of this? Posted Sep 17, 2012 15:17 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite so. A good few friends of mine have bought new machines on a frequent basis but economized on each one to such a degree that the things are barely capable of running Windows and lock up frequently even then (Linux is almost unthinkable, lockups at boot are not rare on such hardware). That sort of cheap and nasty hardware is going to cause more problems than it solves no matter *what* OS you're running -- yet reliable machines aren't all that much more expensive. I'm not sure who these machines are targetted at -- surely not gamers, they want their games to work at least sometimes. Probably people who want to do a bit of light web browsing and little else.
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