ARM as a primary architecture

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 14:55 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Mar 22, 2012, at 12:32 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > 
> > The mitigating factors are:
> > 
> > a) the desktop market could be considered unlikely to literally _die_.
> > What may happen instead is it could become much more of a niche - in
> > fact, very similar to what it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. There
> > could always be a small amount of people who actually need or want a
> > desktop computer, and these people could be rather close to the
> > self-same ones they were in the 1980s and 1990s: people whose use cases
> > intrinsically depend on large screens, keyboards, and significant whacks
> > of power.
> 
> I use Photoshop, Lightroom, work on multi-gigabyte image files, as do
> my customers. I intrinsically depend on a large screen, a keyboard,
> and occasional whacks of power. I haven't owned a desktop computer in
> 6 years.
> 
> The desktop form factor will die eventually, although the "desktop
> user" need will remain. Whether the need will be met with more
> powerful tablets and shared resources, or more efficient form factors
> that aren't so ugly, power hungry, and space inefficient - or a
> combination. We'll have to see. It depends on how much and how fast
> that market shrinks, but it will shrink.
> 
> I get along just fine without a literal desktop computer, have for 6
> years with just laptops/ I will eventually ditch the laptop also. Just
> a matter of time. I do own an old smart phone. I do not own a tablet
> or pad. 
> 
> And I'm not unique.

Anecdotal data is great, but it's just anecdotal. I tried using a laptop
and no desktop for a year and switched _back_ to a desktop, I found the
faff involved in switching between the two setups too much of a pain.
I'm sure I'm not unique either. =)

I think the form factor vs. arch point is of course important here. The
question of to what extent ARM has the future market for 'devices that
fulfill content creation with powerful systems and chunky peripherals'
sewn up, though, doesn't seem quite as settled as the future market for
tablets and smartphones.

> 
> > 
> > I'm just saying that broad sweeping generalizations about The Market are
> > well and good, but it's probably a good idea before deploying them to
> > stop and think about whether they're exactly applicable to the Fedora
> > project, or if maybe they could use a little modification first.
> 
> People's needs, expectations evolve. Even developers, content
> creators, and geeks. Surviving projects will survive because they
> adapt to people's needs. Neither the market, nor its ideas, will adapt
> to Fedora.

I don't believe anything I said above implies any such belief. In fact,
I'm having difficulty seeing how what you wrote is in any way a response
to what I wrote...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net