It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.
Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?
That's great information. I had no idea Chromebook prototypes started as early as N455, but since you're skilled with Arch, I'll recommend two distros(one isn't really a distro, but a toolkit) for your cr-48 : Tiny Core Linux, and NanoLinux. The latter is built on TCL and a distro was released on Sourcefourge around 2015- no releases since..
One could really optimize an N450 using a very light package manager over TCL, although it's possible you already have something like that on Arch. With TCL, more assembly is required.
I also used SliTaz on an EeePc 701 back in the day, and I used it more because it had out of the box wifi support. https://slitaz.org/en/ At just 30MB, quite unbeatable. The OS gets some updates still, but it's a smaller project and probably less known. I suppose you could also try Damn Small Linux 2024: https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/2024-download.html
What makes the N450 tolerable over the Celeron 630 and even N270 is that it has hyperthreading, so it's like a dual core computer in some cases, but technically single core. It's not as fast as the AMD C-50 (with better GPU and out of order instructions, but fast enough for very light weight applications.)
Admittedly, I don't use it as a daily driver and only test it when there's a lightweight distro I want to check. Knowing i915 supports Wayland makes me want to test it again
(The AMD FX series did something like this, saying their FX 8350 was 8 cores, but it was really 2-4 physical cores and 8 logical cores): https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ngnwp7/did_the_amd_fx_...
(I have an FX-8320E, and it's not super slow though-quite fast in fact)
Wow, what a delightful surprise! I'm a huge NetHack fan and have been waiting a long time for the official 3.7 release before switching over to it. I've been a 3.6 holdout, haha.
AFAIK, the backend has moved a lot of map generation logic (and exposure of other data) to a Lua API, which is quite exciting as something for people to play with in tooling, forks, mods, etc.
Minor spoilers below:
I heard about some great balance adjustments that help to mitigate over-reliance on a single kit, such as making certain extrinsic resistances (e.g. wearing rings) stronger than their intrinsic counterparts, which adds to the decision-making in choosing what to equip. Another change I'm really excited for is the unicorn horn no longer being usable for "restore ability", so ability-draining effects (of which there are many) are a more significant threat (they were effectively zero threat until now).
Also very cool to hear the quest is now possible to do early (despite being a Bad Idea) as that has great implications for speedrunning or "fewest turns" runs.
I wrote that L-cancel training code! Funny to see it come up out of nowhere. I too have always adored the Wii and its moddability. It'd be my go-to choice if I someday ever get the itch to write console homebrew software of my own.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
It’s not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million phones a year, that’s 400 million ARM devices a year from a single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM devices sold each year is in the billions.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
I can't believe these "smooth scrolling" scripts are still a thing. I was wondering why I was having a hard time scrolling the page on my phone, when I got to my PC and felt the reason.
It's incredible to think how many employees of this world-leading Web technology company must have visited this site before launch, yet felt nothing wrong with its basic behavior.
The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Mario 64 had undercurrents of a dreamy, abstract, dare-I-say vaporwave-y quality that I attribute to the undersung influence of SGI specifically and early American 3D animation in general on its development that I think is a big part of its enduring appeal; the Galaxies and Odyssey are technically superior and more polished and certainly classics in their own right, but even among younger generations it seems like Mario 64 remains the definitive 3D Mario.
My favourite demonstration of this is a comparison between The Secret Aquarium bonus stage [0] with one of the animations in The Mind's Eye [1] (technically this is from Symbolics rather than SGI, but 3D animators of the time were in metaphorical conversation with each other), but this is maybe the most explicit example of just how direct that connection was.
This article inspired me to check if Google has something similar for Google Workspace, which also just increased its price due to a bunch of Gemini integration I have absolutely no need for.
As it turns out, they do—but it's hidden from the "Plans and Upgrade" page, which only shows the Standard plan and above. After some digging, I finally found an inconspicuous dropdown on my plan's billing page that had an option to downgrade my plan. Upon clicking it, I was taken back to the earlier "Plans and Upgrade" page, but this time, the Starter plan was made visible on the page.
It's exactly half the price of the Standard plan, just with less storage, no Gemini, and some restrictions on other enterprise features I've never even heard of. Pretty bizarre and upsetting that they completely hide the existence of the Starter plan like that.
I'm hoping I can eventually bring my reliance on Google services down to zero, whenever I can afford the effort it takes to migrate to something better.
The CRT effect is immediately what stood out to me as well. It's the first time I've ever looked at a "CRT filter" that really gave my eyes the sensation of looking at a real CRT, specifically Amiga. It's so good that I would compel the author to share it with Amiga emulator developers to see if there's any chance of it being implemented. Maybe except for the line that occasionally travels from bottom to top, that's more reminiscent to me of a camera artifact and not something I experience with my eyes on Amiga monitors.
Agreed about the moving line, also the effect is a bit overblown IMO. And, the scan lines should bend along at the top and bottom. They shouldn't be straight as they are now. Very good approximation though.
Let's be real, Commodore has no one to blame but themselves for squandering their 5-year lead in hardware and OS. They were carried hard by the passion of their engineers, but irredeemably greedy and soulless at the top. At Microsoft and Apple, engineers were the lifeblood from the very beginning. At Commodore, they were a spreadsheet column.
Kind of wild to imagine an alternate universe where Commodore and Atari were still big names in computing. Would have loved to see the Amiga continue to grow, it seemed so ahead of its time.
Commodore probably got more pleasant after Jack Tramiel left to go run Atari. Unfortunately it got left in the hands of Irving Gould, who treated the company as his personal piggy bank and looted it til there was nothing left.
Imagine if Commodore had built ARM, or something like it it. A 16 register RISC in the 80s was basically an instant win. They would have been in the CPU lead for a couple of years.
And they had the resources. I mean hell, Acron was a tiny company and they pulled of building an absolutely incredibly machine in the Archimedes.
Its just what you dare to do. If they were as bold as the original Amiga team, with VSLI Technology 2nm CMOS in the late 80s they could have built an incredible machine. I think they held on to long trying to do their own semiconductors.
Acron didn't have the bandwidth to really innovate on the graphics side of things, and because of their problems with OS, they never managed to get enough software on the platform. And they just didn't have the market either.
Commodore on the other hand, actually had a pretty high quality OS with lots of software and users already.
Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?
Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...
Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.