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.

Stellaris

Not at all with RPMFusion.

Hannah Montana Linux

Also Minecraft and Stardew Valley.

Waste time configuring things and troubleshooting things when your ultra custom system breaks.

I use normal KDE because I don’t know how much of a hassle it would be to put everything in containers and use flatpaks for everything.

Not to derail the discussion but this makes me wonder if anyone here in the US actually uses .us or .co.us instead of .com, .net, .org, or .gov.

The distro is designed to be a bulletproof, highly user-friendly operating system that showcases the best of KDE technology—a system that KDE can confidently recommend to casual users and hardware manufacturers.

So it looks like there will finally be a distribution that Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS users can jump to and just start using without having to learn much and with a much better and more familiar GUI than GNOME.

Why? What’s the issue with Snap? Is Flatpak any better?

I use Fedora KDE but this one sounds like exactly what I need. I primarily use Linux for software dev and web browsing and Windows for gaming and Office.

I keep it default but with dark mode. And that’s perfect for me. I wouldn’t want it to look or function any other way.

KDE Plasma and I refuse to use anything else on Linux unless there’s no choice.

Fedora

Why does it only use one core?

Meanwhile the Broadcom VideoCore is completely undocumented and only works with their kernels.

Secureboot and DMA are two different and AFAIK unrelated things. Secureboot primarily exists to ensure that only trusted OS kernels are run on a particular device. Otherwise someone could just boot their own OS installation from wherever and then have it access your storage and other devices and thus compromise your machine. I am not entirely sure how it works but I think it uses cryptographic signatures for kernels and drivers that aren’t built into a kernel. I know that on Linux with Secureboot on if you want to use certain dynamically loaded drivers then they have to be signed. I prefer not to deal with all that so I just disable it in the firmware because no cyber criminal has physical access to my PC anyway.

DMA is just a way to get data from peripherals without CPU intervention. Without DMA every time a peripheral wanted to send your machine data it would have to trigger an interrupt (or be polled continuously) which the OS would catch and then read the data from the device. This isn’t really super practical with modern hardware hence DMA allows peripheral devices to write directly to the system’s main memory without the CPU (or the OS that runs on it) being involved at all. Then the kernel can read that data from memory whenever it sees fit to do so.

By contrast, Windows is a microkernel. It only creates an API layer for the hardware vendor to write a driver that interfaces with Windows.

NT is a hybrid kernel that is nearly monolithic.

Also you don’t seem to understand what the difference between a microkernel and a monolithic kernel is. The defining difference is what mode and address space drivers and non-core kernel subsystems run in. If they run in the higher half in a privileged CPU mode like the base kernel then you have a monolithic kernel. If they run in userspace as one or more programs then you have a microkernel. If some run in kernel space and others run in userspace you have a hybrid kernel. And if your kernel exposes hardware interfaces directly to application programs providing only protection and multiplexing of them between programs and shared libraries are used to interact with those interfaces then you have an exokernel. If the kernel mimics the underlying hardware to each program running on top of it and let’s them think they’re running on the hardware directly then you don’t have a kernel at all you have a type II hypervisor.