Intel says Clover Trail will not work with Linux

Why does the idea that Linux is incompatible with profit still persevere? It's especially ridiculous considering the rise of Android.

I actually have some sympathy with a hardware company in this position; if all your competitive advantage is in actually in software, open source is a tricky proposition. Nobody cares about the driver interface to the rendering pipeline any more - I imagine it's heavily dictated by the need to make open standards fast (eg. OpenGL). Power saving? That's a whole different ballgame.

It's a real pain that there are no useful standards for power saving - I've had to disable almost all of the cool processor features on my DAW (C-states, core parking, EIST) because they completely wreck real-time audio latencies, and cause clicks and glitches in DAW software (using external FireWire audio hardware). I notice that Cubase on Windows 7 dynamically installs a different power saving profile on startup, but presumably that means running it as Administrator, and we're back to the bad old days of running as root everywhere.

This is a non-story, Atom versions following this one will be able to run Linux fine.

One reason it's common for GPU makers to be secretive is that there is a very big risk that GPUs and their drivers violate patents, and the makers of these products want to make it as difficult as possible to ascertain whether patents are being violated. They won't even broach the topic because that would draw them in to willful infringement.

So a proprietary OS maker like Microsoft can conclude a deal with IMGTek and give them all the secrecy they want, and Linux is left out.

Apparently even Intel can't get IMGTek to open up. Intel probably doesn't want to complicate their negotiating position with IMGTek by saying anything about whether Intel's GPUs might be sufficiently power-efficient to go into mobile parts. There is a lot of money, and a lot of product viability at stake. Intel GPUs have open source drivers.

I see them usually releasing good quality drivers for graphics (http://intellinuxgraphics.org/) and wireless (http://intellinuxwireless.org/ until they got into main kernel). This is the least problematic hardware I had to deal with.

You can run linux and other operating systems on many phones and tablets as well. But the fraction of those that consider that is waay smaller than for a laptop (and I doubt anyone would expect it from a typical phone/tablet). As well as the result being barely usable and more of a proof of concept in the very most of the cases.