SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

It seems ARM Chips are the future, and not just for mobile phones. I remember buying my first ARM Chip based computer in 1987 - the Acorn Achimedes.

The Apple M3 Max and now the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite look very impressive from a processing point of view as well as a low energy point of view (so important for laptops). Intel and AMD must be very concerned.

I agree. I think that Apple are actually concerned that people are producing less software, thinking there isn't the market. 

They're embracing gaming in a much bigger way now, and making their new technology very capable of running current peak performance requiring games even under emulation with the silicon machines.

This gameporting toolkit they've released is making it very easy for devs to cross build their games for Mac as well as just Windows and that's going to make the developers think why not? If it's not much work to do it, then it's an additional revenue stream, even if they don't consider it much of one yet. And that naturally leads to better results as more of them take the same path.

I've noticed that there's a lot less of the crap spouted in forums about how Mac's aren't gaming machines, and should be just for business or graphics. You can't argue with how superior the chip technology is now, and their other strongest argument was price. That's kind of a weak point when you consider that an entry level M1 Mac mini - and I think M2 as well now, are like £699. Just stick on a monitor and you're good to go.

Just for Internet use, I bought a higher end Chromebook, mainly because I wanted something with amazing battery life and quiet and I wanted to get away from AMD/Intel and Windows for my Internet machine.  It has a MediaTek Kompanio 1380 Octa-Core CPU.  Extremely fast and does not get warm, no matter what.  It also runs much of my Linux software just fine. When I could stream from YT (I am banned now) and have the screen off, I have gotten just shy of 21 hours on the battery, with the screen on, 16-18 hours.

@Swampie, that's a good choice, nice one. I saw someone had installed ChromeOS on an old Macbook, which I didn't know you can do. ChromeOS sounds fast. I'm interested in doing something like that with some old Macbooks, maybe a Linux instead. Anyone have advice for me? Thanks.

Arm chips will not be the future. They may dominate the mobile market and have made their way into single board computers, but they will only dominate the PC market if a number of players push ARM chips, which will not happen when the biggest market for PC's are businesses. And businesses have a habit of not jumping onto the latest shiny new thing unless they are really forced to.

I have some 9+ year old code I was able to dig out of a WIP sprite engine.  Purely GDI based but, instead of using BitBlit, I have written the blitting routines in ASM.  I am getting 100,000 sprites on the screen and still pulling 25 FPS even on lower end laptops.  A friend on another forum tested it on his M1 Mac, using UTM and the ARM version of Windows 11.  Even under the throttle of emulation, he was getting 30 FPS on the same demo running under emulation.  Apple Silicon is pretty darn powerful!  Irony is when using 500,000 sprites he only pulled about 8 FPS, but on my quad core 8 thread lappy, I could get 12 FPS.

@markcwm  I really like my Kompanio 1380.  It holds its own against 10th gen i5's in many tests.  Against the M1, I only ever saw it beat the M1 in one category (which was rather superfluous category from what I remember).  This is the Chromebook I bought.  Very happy with it.  If I was making a system for somebody not skilled (like a parent), I would not think twice about putting Chrome OS Flex on it for them.

If it is an Intel based Macbook, Linux Lite may be of interest.  Elementary OS is also nice as is Zorion OS.  The last two are very beginner friendly.  However MX Linux is very lightweight and beginner friendly, too.

The Cinnamon edition of Mint was always my favorite, but I bought an expensive HP lappy with Pop_Os! on it which ended up getting sent back due to the shoddy screen on that model, but Pop_Os! was wonderful and impressed me.  I am not a Linux guru, so I consider myself a good test subject on what is beginner-friendly.  That said, from growing up on DOS and being very familiar with it, I do not find the command line stuff daunting on Linux -- more of a not used it since the 90's kinda thing.

@Swampie, thanks. Are Chromebooks Netbooks? I don't like Netbooks, they have no hard drives. 

And what is the benefit of cloud computing? I just found it to slow down my computers so I always disable it. LOL.

I'm not a Linux newbie but thanks for the suggestions, Elementary OS looks nice, I know about that one but you mention some I've never heard about before. I've never tried Mint but everyone says good things about it. I tried Fedora recently and didn't like it, I was disappointed, it's supposed to be great but I didn't like how it worked or looked. I am only familiar with Ubuntu, which I've always been fairly happy with.

Most Chromebooks have hard drives, just smaller ones since the OS isn't as bloated,   The average user would only use Google's products, but there are offline versions of those and you can install things.

Personally, I utilize my hard drive and keep things installed on it.  On the Linux side, I keep FreeTube installed (since I am banned from YT), and I keep several games installed on the hard drive that I play regularly.  Also a few Linux utilities.

Keep in mind, for me the Chromebook is my Internet system (which is all it was bought for) and I do a lot of writing on it, as well.  Easily syncs to Google Drive.

As to Linux.  Again, no guru here:

Elementary OS, Zorion OS, Mint and Pop! OS are all based on Ubuntu. 

MX Linux and Linux Lite are based on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based on).

Chrome OS Flex is great for really old systems that need a more modern OS but can't run anything else.  Also great for elderly and none tech savvy as it will keep them much safer online.

Nowadays, any OS is Internet based to a large extent and there are online versions of most software.  Even on my Windows development machines, for many simple things like image editing, audio editing, video editing, I do it online.  It is usually simpler and faster than doing it on my own machine and I can pick up where I left off, no matter what system I am using.  More complex things, I stick with offline software.

I really do NOT like the recent announcements about Windows and what is planned for 2024.  I may look at moving to Linux and just running Windows stuff under Wine.

ps.  Even Windows netbooks have hard drives and you can easily install normal Windows software on the hard drive as long as you are using a normal version of Windows.

Thanks Swampie, that was very interesting. Sorry for going off-topic guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KF9W49Gjxw&ab_channel=AlexZiskind