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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Well, benchmarks are nice. But a processor is not an end user product. How do you think this is going to be as a product once you put it in a PC running Windows - especially as Microsoft struggles trying to get third party apps on ARM and MS’s own substandard x86 emulator

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I can not fathom the level of incompetence by vendors to want to install Windows on ARM devices.

1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility.

2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox.

Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less.

Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.

Have you tried x86 emulation on Windows for ARM? It works just fine for me.

It's slower and one of the main things people want Windows to run is games. Also, games are one of the things emulation systems are most likely to break, because games use all kinds of weird performance hacks and come with heinous anti-cheat systems.

Have you tried it though? I use it primarily for games and I've never had an issue with it

I had a Thinkpad X13s for a while that worked quite well except for a video issue (used pawn shop purchases are a risk like that). Firefox, Edge, and MS Office worked great natively on ARM. LibreOffice worked just fine via the MS x86 emulator. And the X13s had the old Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with less than half the performance. Granted, I wasn't doing any heavy lifting with it the month I had it.

I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.

The entire value proposition of Windows is wide array of application support for every little niche app you could possibly want.

You just named a few apps that are on Macs.

I got it to handle 3 things: a laptop I can use as a laptop for basic stuff and to use to remote in to my development desktop at home, a Windows ARM machine I can test my Windows x86/x64/ARM64 software on, and a Mac to test out my software running under macOS via Wineskin. It's a little clunky but it works for all 3.

My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now.

I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.

Intel and AMD should get ahead of the curve and put some real support behind desktop linux, which has an actual path to ARM adoption for a much larger portion of its software.

But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.

I don't use Windows. The Raspberry Pi has great Linux support, and the Linux Geekbench scores were even higher than in Windows. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Linux Geekbench scores in the 23W configuration.

To a first approximation - no one cares about how well a Qualcomm desktop chip runs Linux. The consumer market is Windows and Macs

Linux is 10% of desktop/laptop share and even higher of laptop share, given that very few people use ChromeOS on desktops.

Just a quick Google search shows 3%.

My previous comment explains why you interpreted your Google search incorrectly. ChromeOS is Linux. https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/03/07/windows-losing-market-...

This also shows the power of marketing. ChromeOS is a subset of Linux -- it doesn't do anything you couldn't always have done with Ubuntu. But for years people said that normal people don't want Linux, it doesn't run their apps, they can't use it.

One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that.

We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.

The consumer market is Windows ecosystem.

Without the ecosystem who wants Windows? And what will it do for reputation of the vendor or Microsoft when people can't run their apps.

People are already buying non Apple ARM laptops. They are called Chromebooks. They can run Linux apps and Android apps. And thats more than most consumers would expect.

Chromebooks are basically the hardware equivalent of a SaaS product where the user is not the buyer. Schools are buying Chromebooks for students.

Most people I know have some kind of chromebook (next to MacBook for work). They bought them in stores.

Is this a US thing where your school buys you a laptop?

> Is this a US thing where your school buys you a laptop?

It is a thing that is essentially an equivalent of an employer-provided work laptop, but for students and provided by their school.

Many schools in the US provide their students with laptops and Chromebook is the overwhelming favorite. The student has to return the laptop at the end of the year. As an anecdote, I know of no one who bought a Chromebook for personal use. My friends, colleagues and acquaintances are buying Macs or Windows machines if they want a laptop, iPads or Android tablets if they just want a tablet.

In a way, Google's strategy of getting Chromebooks into schools may have backfired as they're largely seen as kids' computers.

I’ve never even seen a Chromebook in real life here in Australia. I’m sure they must exist but I’ve never heard of anyone using one.

They are in use by the millions in schools. I have one and I really like, can run android apps, chrome web browser, and in the crostini linux system I can run any apps, dev tools, web browsers, emacs, and it is native. I like it better than raw linux because of the built in android support.

I gave chromeos laptops to my family because they aren't trustworthy. Now they have reliable laptops and don't get virus infections or os problems.

Yeah ok interesting! Makes sense for the Linux parts - not sure I’d trust Google with my family’s data but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

That's a complicated story. No one really wants surveillance capitalism. I don't think google copies what I'm doing on my chromebook, but almost every website has google tracking. Chrome has google tracking. You can use non-chrome browsers on chrome os, they are all there via the linux subsystem. You can also run the android ones.

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