How I imagine a perfect computer (for me)

Of course this interests nobody but I wanted to rant about it for a long time.

General principles:

  1. Compact size — I like to be able to fit all of my computers on the desk, any size comparable with power supply unit size would do. Laptops are fine too.
  2. Silent — no damned fans.
  3. An ability to use normal storage, not 16MB SSB soldered onboard.
  4. No x86 CPU.
  5. If it’s a laptop it should be able to work for 10 hours with battery.

Display:

  1. 4:3 aspect ratio. If displays nowadays are made for movie-watchers then it’s a sad world. Too much of vertical space is eaten by various toolbars, menu bars and such.
  2. sane resolution. Again, 1920×1080 may be ideal for movie-watchers but I prefer it to be either VGA-based (i.e. multiple of 640×480 or 800×600) or power of two based. And whoever thought about 1366×768 should burn in hell!

Performance — if Libav compiles in ten minutes on dual core system then it’s fast enough for me.

ARM-based laptops are almost good for that, especially performance wise. There’s just one big “but” — they are almost all are for Android or chromebooks. And Baidu has never intended those systems for any real usage. Playing games — fine, browsing — passable (though Firefox 3 on my old PowerPC MacMini with 512 MB RAM gives much better experience than Chrome on tablet with 1GB RAM), editing texts (code) — absolute fail. I can live without a numpad on keyboard (it’s a legacy for accountants and their calculators after all) but not having even “delete” key (there’s only backspace) is pathetic.

So I live with a faint hope that there will be a computer good enough for me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 8th, 2013 at 11:24 am and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “How I imagine a perfect computer (for me)”

  1. VirtUser says:
    September 12, 2013 at 5:07 pm

    > ARM-based laptops are almost good for that, especially performance wise.
    > There’s just one big “but” — they are almost all are for Android or chromebooks.

    Hope it’s possible to port Ubuntu / Debian / Gentoo etc. to these ARM computers…

  2. Jamez says:
    October 7, 2013 at 2:00 pm

    http://www.raspberrypi.org/

    Small, low power, and you get to use a real SD card.
    Comes with a choice of OSes, including a variant of Debian.

    It currently uses an ARM single-core processor clocked at 700 MHz, although it is easy to overclock it around 900 MHz. Also includes a VideoCore IV GPU… really can’t get any better for the price. Please note it does not have NEON.

  3. Kostya says:
    October 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm

    @Jamez
    Heh, even WordPress is smart enough to mark this as spam.

    I’m fully aware of it and I’m not going to buy it ever. Price is low but what you get doesn’t worth even that IMO.

    For twice as much I bought Cubieboard2 — dual-core Cortex-A7 (i.e. with NEON and faster too) with 1GB of RAM and SATA interface (SD cards make me feel like using floppies in the old days).