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."

See? We told you!

[Quiet_Desperation]

It's the Year Of The Linux Desktop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Netbook!

Re:Christ, AGAIN!?

[dgym]

But we were all told about the 10 ARM netbooks that would appear on the market by Q3 2009. It is now Q4 so they must exist, and you must be wrong.

I'm pretty sure this is a Microsoft stunt to make their market share look better. If you can't make geeks buy Windows, then make sure they don't buy anything at all because of all the sweet smelling vapourware on the perpetual horizon. Then again I'll blame them for most things, including a sock I lost.

Re:ARM slow

[Hurricane78]

Well, your choice. $150 and slow, or $600 and fast. Or anything in between.

And nobody will argue, that having the choice is a bad thing. :)

I, for one, will just buy a dozen of those for $150, and build a Beowulf cluster and a Password Swordfish style screen out of them! :D
They will *still* have a better price/performance ratio than your PC. ^^

Re:OS is nothing. Apps are everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is whether ARM-based netbooks will sell at all. It doesn't really matter what OS a netbook is running. Nobody buys any kind of computer to run an OS. They buy computers to run apps. You can argue all you want that Mac OS X is more elegant than Windows, or whatever -- but if you couldn't get a word processor for it, nobody would use it.

"This archive contains 27841 software packages." Yup, there's clearly no software available for ARM. (That's from the Ubuntu Karmic ARM port -- Debian also has a port and I'm sure some smaller distros do also have one).

Porting is not (typically) a problem for open source software.

Forget about ARM

[Yvan256]

I'm building a PIC-based micro-sub-netbook-mini that's going to last 40 weeks on a set of two AA batteries.

It won't have an OS or browser or whatnot, but it's going to run 40 weeks on a set of batteries, man!

Re:See? We told you!

[selven]

I believe you mean:

iIt's the Year Of the Linux DesktopESCc7hNetbook!

Heretic.

Re:ARM-Powered Laptops To Increase Linux Market Sh

[StuartHankins]

...run a TeX app, a dvi viewer, Matlab, eclipse, firefox, and MS Word simultaneously

"Which one of these things is not like the other; which one of these things does not be-long..."