2013, the year of ARM Linux on the desktop?

Welcome back, Morgaine.

I don't think it will be the desktop, but rather the laptop.  With a desktop, you have enough cheap electricity available so that Intel's superior performance wins over ARM's superior power consumption.  OTOH, on a laptop lower power translates directly into longer battery life, which is why it's an ARM-only mobile phone and tablet market.

I think the most promising news along these lines is Samsung's Series 3 XE303C12 Chromebook, which has a Dual-core Cortex-A15 Exynos 5 SoC, 2GB RAM, and 11.6" 1366x768 display for US$250.  It's cheap enough to provide a portable near-instant-on way to do Internet stuff, so you only need to turn the desktop beast on when it's time for serious work.  While it normally runs Chrome OS, you can run various GNU/Linux distros without much trouble.

RasPi is a nice little toy, and makes a nice cheap GNU/Linux brain for experimental gadgets especially when you can actually get a Model A for US$25.  It's also dandy as a media center, given that it has exactly the same processing power as a Roku 2.  But I think people are finding that RasPi is pretty limited as a desktop, laptop, or tablet computer, and it won't cost much more for an i.MX6 Wandboard or Exynos 4412 Cortex-A9 Quad ODROID-U.

I'm not sure about TI.  Didn't they decide to give up on competing at the OMAP level with Samsung and Qualcomm, instead opting for industrial application processors like the AM3359 used in BeagleBone?

Hello all and best wishes for the year ahead.

2013 mght be a bit optimistic imo, but as a rule tech-types have always made woeful futurologists...

What does ARM bring "to the party" (horrible phrase, but there you go...)?

1) High energy effeciency

2) low cost

As John says the energy part still isn't that much of an issue with desktops yet. It should be, obviously and it's just plain nice to not have one's ears assaulted by whirring fans. But laptops do seem a reasonable future pitch for ARM - a device that lasts all day on a charge, but doesn't weigh a ton / toast your knees, yet has a generously sized screen / kb and enough processing power to do grown up stuff.

But how many laptop consumers require their laptops to be truly standalone? Most of the "ordinary people" I know with laptops have them tethered to *something* much of the time. They're a desktop replacement, not a mobile solution. ARM is appealing on a purely cost basis, but if low cost is the only motivator for your customer, then that isn't overly appealing for manufacturers. Market share does not necessarily equal profit - consider the netbook fiasco. Which kind of brings me to the point of my ramblings:

Trying to fit new technology to an old paradigm might just be completely missing the point. We're also completely disregarding the software interface in all of this too. Low cost implies an operating system that isn't spendy either and with the possible exception of Ubuntu, it would appear that G**gle have things pretty much sewn up in that department, which is a depressing thought. Of course they want everyone to participate in a remote "cloud", because it gives them so much more personal data for their bots to sniff through. [/tinfoil hat mode]

Manufacturers of *whatever* next generation hardware would do well to start bashng out a few standards to make it possible for devices to become part of a modular whole imo. Your generic smartphone could become a low powered desktop by placing it next to a screen / kb combo, so you could reply to those emails on a "proper" keyboard, or edit those photos you just took, but without having to physically "dock" it. Perhaps if you needed a bit more cpu or external storage then you could (seamlessly) call on the beige box that pipes the interwebs into your house, because it has dualcore whatnot and SSD. Oh, and it's your media server too. It all just works together and doesn't mind if your tablet is manufactured by a different company. And it doesn't require hours of sawing away at the terminal to make it all work.

There is no "one device to do it all" (although the x86 desktop has served pretty well in the past. so long as you didn't have to carry one too far). ARM is ideal for multiple devices with tightly focussed  functionality, so lets hope that hardware and software manufacturers start playing to these strengths, because it's all in danger of becoming a fragmented race to the bottom right now.

Edit: Oh, and the whole desktop paradigm (sat in a chair whilst glaring at a keyboard and monitor) just perpetuates the existence of badly designed operating systems and software that demands user intervention at every junction. This might seem acceptable to old timers like me who grew up with this kind of chaff, but modern customers may disagree. Poking about in the guts of something is an essential option for the inquisitive, but it should be optional. It's about time that stuff just worked, even if it means paying a reasonable premium for that privelige. I guess that brings me back to the whole "race to the bottom vs quality" thing.

Hello Morgaine Dinova and the group!

As being a pure, soon die-hard Linux geek in which everything in my world runs Linux, I couldn't pass by this thread. My Raspberry Pi doesn't compete with my Android Fleet... It just has close friendships! :-)

For those that don't already know, I'm living life on a shoestring. It's hard...

As for the ARM Linux on the Desktop... It's a monochrome screen; the way I started Linux 15+ years ago. When it comes to the Raspberry Pi, it is FAST. And no, I don't miss that Eye Candy that others claim to be a "desktop"...

Happy New Year, Everybody!

Marcos "Kuya Marc" Miranda

>  PS. The title is a play on one of Slashdot's common memes .... "the year of Linux on the desktop", which seems to never arrive.  But with "ARM" added in there, it just might!

One of the issue holding ARM linux back, including RPi, is mainline integration.

The Fedora ARM guys keep slipping their timeframe for making ARM a primary

architecture.  It always seems to be a year away, the latest estimate is for

Fedora 20, a year from now, and tentatively only ARMv7 and up.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2013-January/004933.html

Debian has ARM as a primary architecture, but RPi isn't integrated into

mainline, and there looks to be a lot of work to do on device tree support.

The work being done by Gordon to try to fix RPi USB using FIQ looks unlikely

to make it into mainline

X-Window performance is another roadbloack.

Simon, the volunteer working on X-Window GPU acceleration has reported that

X relies heavily on CPU (not GPU) speed, so he is not optimistic that good X

performance can be achieved on low-speed CPUs such as RPi, unless each

application is individually tuned. 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294

The RPF is reportedly trying to tune Scratch, but Simon also reports

serious performance issues with Python's default IDE, IDLE:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294&start=19

and with the Geany editor:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294&start=21

@ coder27: some relevant point there, 'spesh from the Pi point of view.

I think that one of the hurdles to the "ARM + Linux desktop" combo is convincing hardware manufacturers that Linux support is good for business.

Bear in mind that I'm thinking of the concept of a desktop in a "consumer" sense - a box (not a board) that one purchases, unpacks, plugs in and it's (mostly) ready to go (bar the usual of getting it to talk to your home network and whatnot). Buying a box with no OS preinstalled would be a bar for many consumers, so doubtless most manufacturers will choose to ship their boxes with Android (because it's so ubiquitous), Most of our consumers would doubtless plod along with this without even realising that there are alternatives so to get Linux out there our box really needs to ship with Linux as well - and not just any old "fits where it touches" distro that will send our customer scurrying back to the familiarity of Android after five minutes, but something that provides a transparent interface between the customer, the applications that (s)he wants to run and the hardware that (s)he wishes to utilise.

That's what an operating system is supposed to do, after all. For most people it's just a means to an end rather than an end in itself. I think it's easy for people like us who habitually poke about in the guts of computers to forget that. So the charitable manufacturer might choose to preinstall Ubuntu and will then brace itself for a wave of "why don't you support this or that distro?" questions.

@ coder27: Whither Fedora: I don't think that they ever intend their product to be consumer level. It's alpha all the way and the page upon page of mailing list diatribe micro-analysing each meeting-about-the-previous-meeting that they produce in lieu of any kind of roadmap seems to bear this out. That's fine, someone has to do the cutting edge stuff, but it just feels like Fedora exists for it's own sake rather than to achieve any kind of stated goal. I don't think that provision of customer support or human readable documentation would be playing to their strengths either. [/soapbox]

The Pi thing in general shows how essential proper manufacturer support is from the outset - aside from the odd wobbly driver and the failure to utilise existing hardware features (which is fair enough, considering what it was made for) I think it demonstrates that limited hardware needs a complementary OS. Perhaps when quadcore ARM missiles are commonplace it won't matter, but it would be a shame IMO if yet again we tossed processing power at sub-optimal software instead of taking the time to write it properly in the first place.

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

. Perhaps when quadcore ARM missiles are commonplace it won't matter, but it would be a shame IMO if yet again we tossed processing power at sub-optimal software instead of taking the time to write it properly in the first place.

I have one of those, in the shape of a Sabre-Lite, but it also suffers from the same old problem as the pi - gpu drivers.  It also suffers from being 5x the cost of a Pi, but is very nice none the less.