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Windows and Wintel (x86) Are Too Fat, and Not Evolving Fast Enough, to Actually Survive

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Summary: GNU/Linux and BSD platforms with a small memory (RAM) footprint and low CPU/clocking requirements are the way to go; Microsoft and x86 duopolies are in trouble

THE emergence of small and power-efficient devices has been highly beneficial to GNU/Linux. Now that the price of energy is soaring the advantages associated with a pivot to "small" computing will certainly be further accentuated. Samsung tried this years ago, but stopped for unspecified reasons [1, 2]. Raspberry Pi nowadays targets the desktop market (I installed Debian 11 on a Raspberry Pi 400 device less than 24 hours ago), which might explain why Microsoft is so desperate to infiltrate (it did so last year and also half a decade earlier).



"Now that the price of energy is soaring the advantages associated with a pivot to "small" computing will certainly be further accentuated."The Linux Foundation intentionally ignores all that and instead promotes highly polluting Microsoft by greenwashing it (it's paid to promote lies), but we all know that the future is not x86; Intel's pivot to RISC-V shows the embattled Intel recognising that electricity-hungry motherboard aren't they way to go; that's why "Atom" failed.

There's even much greater a barrier to Intel's long-term survival; putting aside UEFI 'secure boot' and ME back doors, the architecture is far too complex and eternally broken. These issues aren't fixable. "Don't forget about the unfixable security hole in Intel hardware," an associate reminds us. ""Spectre" and "Meltdown" are whole categories of vulnerabilities and there are several other categories on top of them. Not all are repairable with either kernel changes or even microcode replacement." [1, 2, 3] (the second link has a good chart of two categories)

"Fat operating systems spend most of their energy supporting their own fat."

--Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, rediff.com, Apr 2006



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