• @TCB13@lemmy.world
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    11 year ago

    How come nobody wants them? Particularly the tablets how come the Linux community isn’t all over those things, low power, cheaper than Intel, uses ARM? I’ve never seen those devices for sale anywhere not even ads.

    • Users don’t want to buy into a platform with no apps. Devs don’t want to make apps for a platform with no users. It’s a catch 22.

      Everything windows does Android would do better, and android has apps. But Android tablets don’t even sell that well.

      • @tal@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        I mean, Linux definitely does have ARM apps in that for the open-source stuff, you can just use an ARM build of the distro. So the transition for Linux is definitely easier from the standpoint of obtaining native binaries than it is for MacOS or Windows; a huge chunk of the software has the source publicly-available.

        But if you want to play closed-source games on Linux – like, off Steam or GOG or whatever, some of which is Windows binaries – most if not all of that doesn’t have ARM available, and a lot of it will definitely never have ARM builds, because the stuff was written ages ago and the source was lost, even if the rightsholders were able and interested in getting an ARM build out. And ARM can’t really efficiently emulate x86.

        CPUs aren’t that expensive. Maybe it’s possible to create some kind of ARM-based laptop with an x86 coprocessor that is only used when running x86 code, or something like that.

      • @TCB13@lemmy.world
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        11 year ago

        The Linux community is known for blindly buying into a platform without apps :P Android is great from an App POV however it is a privacy nightmare… and sometimes a upgrade nightmare in the future.