Don’t insult Donald Duck by comparing him to that orange bufoon.

Until you fail to pay your subscription fee and Elmo autopilots you off a cliff.

I’ve been using a cheap N200 laptop as a testbed for novel OS kernel development and it’s absolutely perfect.

The LattePanda Mu is configurable and can operate on as little as 6W up to 35W depending on your use case. The much more affordable Radxa X4 can operate on as little as 18W up to 25W if you need to power peripherals via USB.

Both use an Intel Processor N100 SoC which is surprisingly powerful and efficient given that the Processor N series is the new branding for what used to be called Celeron.

The prices are also competitive. The X4 for example sells for exactly the same price as the Raspberry Pi 5 with the same amount of memory at every memory capacity tier while having a CPU that’s twice as powerful and compatible with way more software and OSes and a GPU that is absurdly more powerful and fully publicly documented such that there are open source drivers for every OS under the sun.

As an OS developer both professionally and outside of work I have to say I really despise non-x86 platforms and ARM in particular for how fragmented they are and their vendors’ utter disregard for any form of standardization at the platform, firmware, or peripheral levels. That’s why I’m really thankful that devices like these exist and are affordable.

Lower power draw is about it. But there are now x86 SBCs that can also run on as little as 6W so there’s no reason to compromise and use ARM’s non-standard fragmented BS.

Use GPG.

I gotchu

I accept our new Scandinavian overlords. But I would rather have it be Finland.

Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.

I have an RTX 4090 and use the proprietary driver. It works just fine on Fedora and Windows 11 alike. So IDK what to tell you. AMD and Intel are even easier since the drivers are baked into the Linux kernel. I have an AMD iGPU in my desktop and an Intel one in my laptop. Both work just fine and handle power management correctly.

One man’s Heaven is another man’s Hell.

Any halfways decent GPU driver and device firmware will put it into a low power state when it’s idle.

It’s more like going to a hotel, complaining that there are too many prostitutes, and then finding out it’s a brothel.

This is the result of so called tribal knowledge in software development. It’s even worse when the senior citizen who understands everything retires, goes senile, or dies.

Just buy Nvidia DGX machines and make your own AWS.

The good ending…

Most will just block themselves there like pornhub does in the states that require checking IDs in the US.