ARM-Powered Laptops To Increase Linux Market Share

Charbax writes "Last April, Microsoft argued that it controlled the netbook OS market for devices sold in certain Microsoft-friendly US retail stores, while ABI Research claims that Linux actually has 32% of the worldwide netbook market, and that its market-share is growing. At the recent Netbook World Summit in Paris France, Aaron J. Seigo, Community leader at the KDE Foundation, and Arnaud Laprévote, CTO at Mandriva Linux, give us their estimation for next year's Linux market share (video) in the consumer laptop market. Their estimation is that Linux will dominate in ARM-powered laptops and that those may take over a significant share of the overall laptop market by their significantly cheaper prices (as low as $80), longer battery life (as long as 20-40 hours on a small battery using the Pixel Qi screens), as well as lower size and weight. Running some of the Chromium OS builds for ARM available shortly and having a full browser experience on those cheaper and better ARM-powered Linux laptops could make it a significant mass market success to shake up the Intel and Microsoft consumer PC/laptop monopoly in its boots."

Re:Christ, AGAIN!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Archos 5 Internet Tablet.

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes
http://www.google.com/products?q=ARM+Netbook+-atom&hl=en&aq=f

Re:Christ, AGAIN!?

[Cyclops]

Here's one (and I have the SmartQ7 model): http://www.smartdevices.com.cn/ [smartdevices.com.cn]

Nice and cheap.

Re:Chrome OS

[Randle_Revar]

Doesn't change the fact that it is a non-standard distro that doesn't even have X11.
I'll stick with Debian, thanks.

Re:Except Chrome OS is shit.

[mhall119]

I think you're missing a very, very big point here, and that is that even if there is a Windows 7 port to ARM, those people would still not be able to play their existing games, or use their existing apps, because those games and apps were written for x86 architectures. So the when the ARM netbooks come out, you will have your choice between Linux and the vast majority of Linux's apps, or Windows and the vast minority of Windows apps.

Re:Frecon Netbooks

[slinches]

I'm posting this from a Nokia N900, which does nearly everything you describe. It does have phone functionality built in, but it works just fine without a sim card. Even though it's only been available a few weeks ssh, vim and several other useful apps have been ported with the promise of many more in the near future (debian based Maemo OS). Devices like this and it's predecessors (N800, N810) do exist.

Re:ARM slow

[sznupi]

Since it was able to play 1080p video, I'm guessing it was Tegra? Nvidia somehow managed to convince people to talk mostly about its HD playback acceleration (which is pointless on such device), which is handled by DSP/GPU of course.

What they don't talk about is that Tegra is based around ARM11 CPU core. Which is...a bit ancient. There are other solutions based around Cortex-A8, which is almost two times faster per clock. Even faster Cortex-A9, which can be also multicore, is upcoming.

Re:OS is nothing. Apps are everything.

[TheRaven64]

Porting can be a problem for open source software, but porting from x86 to ARM is not. If you are using C, the only thing that will work on x86 and not on ARM is a few somewhat obscure pointer casts (which might work and generate slow code on ARM, if the compiler notices that they might be unaligned, and will always generate slow code on x86). It's not like going from x86 to SPARC64, where the word size, alignment restrictions, and endian all change.