Re:How Fat Does a Fat Binary Need to Be?
by LordDragonfang on Thursday February 11, 2021 @02:51PM
(#26106241)
Many chromebooks are on ARM, and chromebooks all have the native ability to run a true linux shell at this point, and have for several years now.
Re:How Fat Does a Fat Binary Need to Be?
by greyandgreen on Thursday February 11, 2021 @03:33PM
(#26106732)
I know a guy who long ago gave up MacBooks for Chromebooks for development. He programs the systems that keep HVAC/large refrigeration systems running. He buys a new machine every year and his company pays for it. Cheap. His last Chromebook had 8 GB RAM and his current one 16. For all intents and purposes, it's faster than any Mac or PC that you would use for programming and the horsepower needed is on a remote server. He can never lose any code or other project notes, photos, since they, too, live in the cloud. Not for everyone, obviously.
Re:How Fat Does a Fat Binary Need to Be?
by LordDragonfang on Sunday February 14, 2021 @03:19AM
(#26130559)
Oh, yeah, I have a chromebook with 8 GB of ram. It's a good dev machine.
By "everything that mattered" I guess I should have said "everything that mattered that you have a shell on".
For some of those non-desktop-operating-system devices, getting a shell is impossible without bypassing lockdown measures. For others, it's possible, but not particularly common as far as I know, for a variety of reasons. They tend to run stripped-down OSes; they don't have great keyboards; they were pretty slow compared to desktops until recently.
Yes, this is a huge overgeneralization. Plenty of people do run shells on their phones or routers. But I do believe that a major desktop platform switching to ARM is qualitatively different from what we'd seen before.