Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 13:45 UTC (Mon) by rbtree (guest, #129790)
In reply to: Distributors entering Flatpakland by farnz
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

> Intel's 10th Generation Core processors are still current

Oh god.

One of the of most significant advantages of Linux always was how efficient it is and how well it runs with limited computing resources. Personally I'm mostly using it on a desktop with i5-4460, and it runs as well as it did in 2014.

In my country, a lot of low-powered *new* laptops are beind sold to this day. Things with CPUs like Celeron N4020, 4 GBs of RAM, and HDDs, and people are buying them en masse because what else are you going to buy with a salary of $200-300 a month after taxes (which is what a cook or a construction worker typically makes)?

Teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats of all sorts are not doing much better.

Windows is pretty much unusable on those kinds of machines (although people are doing that and it's painful to watch). I'm sure there will be some distributions that will not go down the flatpak road and will still care about performance, but if all the popular ones do that, I'm afraid I will have nothing to recommend anymore (you're not going to recommend some student's side project that may be announced EOL a couple of days from now to a newbie).

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 14:41 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The comparison is even more stark if we move down from the high end CPUs to the low end; back in 2007, if you were in the market that today buys a Celeron N4020 (4 MiB LLC) with 4 GiB RAM, you'd have been buying a Celeron 365 or equivalent, with 512 KiB (0.5 MiB) LLC, and 512 MiB or 1 GiB of RAM.

Indeed, the gap between "as cheap as possible" and "low end for rich customers" machines has been shrinking over the last 15 years; you've gone from having 1/4 the RAM and 1/4 the LLC in an "as cheap as possible" machine as compared to "low end" to 1/2 to 1/3 the LLC and 1/2 the RAM of a low end machine for a rich person. The remaining gap is in mass storage - where a "low end" machine will have an SSD nowadays, a "cheap as possible" machine will still have a HDD because of the size differential between a $30 HDD and a $30 SSD.

That said, that gap may change, too - HDDs are limited in terms of how cheap they can be because they are precision mechanical systems, where an SSD scales down in cost; it was already true 8 years ago that if 30 GiB is sufficient space, an SSD was a cheaper option than a HDD, and the space on really cheap SSDs is likely to grow over time.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 21:01 UTC (Mon) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

Honestly windows isn't that bad on these sorts of machines if you disable windows defender (which is .... rather involved)