I suppose Ubuntu Linux is just chopped liver.

C'mon people. Wake up! There are tons of operating systems out there. Some are even better than Windows! *gasp*

I know, there's nothing like a lack of attention to hinder the pace of driver development. Therefore we should never adopt the alternative platform, as the drivers will obviously not improve.

On the other hand, I would like to see someone give Intel a run for their money since it seems AMD is being kneecapped. If ARM does it from the low/embedded end and moves up (leveraging their huge number of licensees) then all the more power to them.

It's dead, Jim (Schon). When the lights, go down in the city, does anyone really care? There are ZERO APPS for ARM Windows (if there ever were such a thing, and Windows CE is not Windows) so ARM is better off trying to get people to compiler Linux ARM apps (good luck with that !!).

netbooks are a great place to quietly slip in non-windows OS's that meet customer needs. the mobile phone/smart phone market has shown that customers aren't slavishly devoted to Windows. they will buy what works.

The current standard of eight hours on a XP-based netbook

Having owned an XP netbook (aspire one) I must say that an eight-hour standard is optimistic beyond belief, and likely only possible if you leave it sitting there. The Atom processor is power hungry and once you start actually using it the battery life plummets considerably.

ARM already has an advantage on power consumption, if they can match the Atom on performance I suspect they'll win on battery life by default.

They still do, the problem is it's shit and it won't run any off-the-shelf applications. It's used in a number of industrial PDAs, particularly ruggedized, intrinsically-safe ones.
The way I see it, using CE on a laptop is far worse than Ubuntu because it looks like windows (95), behaves (mostly) like Windows, but won't run any Windows apps. In some ways it's the perfect combination - you get all the 'It-won't-run-Outlook/Oblivion/Photoshop' problems of Linux, all the 'It-won't-work-with-my-USB-doodad' problems of OpenBSD and all of the bugginess of Windows.

And unless it's CE6 (WM and most devices are still CE5), it will have that abysmal 32MB-per-application limit, so good luck porting any substantial win32 apps to it.

Much as I'd like a linux ARM netbook, I am a little worried that they don't seem to have 64-bit addressing in that architecture yet. It won't be so many years before it becomes a needed feature for a netbook too.

You are not all that bright. Some might even call you an idiot.

The ARM instruction set is not x86 compatible. End of story.

Second, even cutting the CPU power consumption to zero wouldn't give you anywhere near 40 hours of battery life in a netbook. The CPU is just one piece of it.

Oh yeah it clearly is Microsofts fault that ARM didn't bother to deliver a platform up until now.

That'll be news to the folk that have been using computers with ARM processors since the very early 1990s.

No x86 support is kind of a dealbreaker.

Well, you wouldn't necessarily expect x86 support on a non x86 architecture, would you.

It need not, and should not, be a deal breaker though. Windows has run on other architectures in the past - Windows NT and its successors have variously run on PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS and Itanium.

There are already Arm based netbooks out there, using the current low-perofmance chips, so presumably Arm has a reasonable reference on how fast their new chip will run a Linux netbook.

Fuck Windows. Seriously.

I've been unwillingly paying the Microsoft tax for TEN YEARS. All I ever do is wipe Windows and install Linux. If my new computer can't run Windows then... great!! Maybe I won't have to pay the tax.

I'd love a low-power, high-performance ARM notebook. I'd be happy with MIPS or Loongson (Chinese MIPS clone) as well. Debian already has a full-blown ARM port and I'll bet they could get it working on an ARM netbook in a day. Ubuntu would undoubtedly be soon-to-follow.

As a side benefit, having multiple widely-used architectures for desktop systems (x86 and ARM) would be a support nightmare for hardware companies that still keep their drivers proprietary and undocumented. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Broadcom and NVidia. This would just be another nail in the coffin for their obstructionist attitudes towards free/open-source operating systems.

If the ARM had equal processing power, but five times the battery life, they'd have a compelling product.

Well, it sort of does. Battery life and CPU power are actually somewhat convertible.

When the CPU isn't doing work, its power consumption drops considerably -- if you have two CPUs with the same designed maximum consumption, but one has twice the computing power available, then for the same workload that processor will use (a little bit more than) half the energy.

Of course the real picture is not so rosy, because a CPU that uses that little power to start with is probably accounting for less than half of the total power consumption of the system, and of course the workload is likely to increase if you have more CPU available (people watch video fullscreen instead of windowed, games will generally render as fast as they can and use all available CPU, etc.).

I don't know where you've been seeing the growth, but linux has held pretty steadily at sub-1% desktop market share for years. Netbooks gave it a slight boost when first released, but MS quickly squashed that and now dominates the netbook market. It's true that Windows has been losing ground, but it's OSX that has been gaining, they are up to almost 10% share last time I looked, just a few years ago they were at less than 5%, so that's pretty darn good.

Linux? Not so much. As for the popularity, ARM is pretty popular as is on small devices, one could say they dominate, and MS already has some software that runs on ARM processors, so if this new breed of ARM is popular then we could see MS make the jump. But it will have to work in that order, the ARM will need to be popular and THEN MS will jump on it, it won't magically happen the other way around (unless MS has a major stake in ARM, which I don't think they do).

I like you you casually throw "hdtv" into the list as though it were as simple as a keyboard or mouse, instead of the massive driver clusterfuck that it historically is.

On a serious note, why not get your computer built for you (or DIY if you can). I had mine built by a small local company (Intel core2 quad, 4Gig RAM and 250Gig hard drive so a decent spec) and it cost well under £300. It came 'empty' - no OS - so I could install Ubuntu with NO Windoze contamination. It works geat. It's never given me any trouble at all and it does everything I want, quickly and very well.

That's not a bug, its a feature.

But it's also proven they'll buy what doesn't. The practice of selling crippled and sabotaged phones in the US hasn't slowed down one bit in spite of the iPhone. Put a shitty ARM port of windows in front of these people and they'll mindlessly slurp it up.

While that may be true for...say a geek with IT experience, you really have to think like Joe and Sally average. You know what my customers call Netbooks? They call them "baby laptops" which is VERY important. You see they expect their "baby laptops" to be able to do most of the things a big laptop would, only slower...well because they are babies and babies are little. Intel was VERY smart in that respect, by pairing the Atom with WinXP it runs the apps folks are used to, and because of the "baby laptop" aspect they even expect it to be kinda sucky, because babies are little and aren't strong like the "big" laptops.

So while I have no doubt these things will find a niche, if for no other reason battery life, the real question to me is how big of a niche, and whether that niche will be big enough to sustain it. Because never underestimate how much folks love their little Windows apps. In my 15 years I have seen everything from cheesy photo software that came with a camera to some 10 year old graphic arts program (Xres) labeled a "must have-no matter what" and there is nothing Joe and Sally hate more than change. Hell even now I am building two brand new XP boxes because the customers were willing to shell out the dough just to NOT have Vista/Win7.

Trying to switch folks over to X86 Linux is one thing, where you can at least give them Crossover Office which will help cover the "must haves" but with ARM you are expecting the user to not only throw away everything they know, but every program that they like. And whether Joe and Sally will go for that is a BIG if my friend.

With serious improvements within ffmpeg stack, w32codecs as mandatory package is already gone for some time. Most of newest netbook oriented distros (Moblin, Maemo, Ubuntu Netbook Remix) uses Gstreamer as multimedia engine, which has serious developers working for speeding up things for ARM platform. Also I bet ffmpeg guys already have been working on this.

Except they suck as "baby laptops".

On what grounds do you base this claim?

Trying to run a netbook the same way you run your desktop (let's be fair, laptops are already "baby desktops"), is doomed to frustration.

Works fine for me.

Just as using a netbook as a primary computer is misguided (sometimes circumstances require it, but a netbook is, at best, a temporary hold-me-over until you can replace it with a real computer).

I have two real computers. I also have a netbook. I use the netbook as my primary computer because it's the most convenient.

It's great having a machine so light it can be safely picked up with two fingers, so small it fits in any bag, and with such long battery life I don't need to spend half my time hunting for power sockets. The keyboard is fine for typing, the screen is large enough for working, and the processor is fast enough for anything short of games or HD video. What's the problem supposed to be?

For a netbook as a "baby PC", Intel and Windows is pretty much a requirement.

Damn, I never realised I required Windows! Thank you for telling me. I should have realised something was wrong when I managed to install a driver for my wireless card and connect to my router immediately without even needing to reboot.