[GTALUG] desktop thoughts on Black Friday

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2020-11-28 12:31 p.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> … 
> ==== NVMe SSD support ====

Sometimes need weird proprietary drivers to debug/get best performance 
out of. When my Intel NVMe thingy failed I needed a blob to see the 
diagnostics. I hope that's no longer the case.

> ==== fancy new features added to USB after USB 3.0 ====

Charging, expensive cables.

> DRM is mixed into this, often sidelining Linux desktops.

Netflix seems to work with the Firefox Widevine plugin. It even had a 
"Do you want to install this - you might not want to" popup.

> ==== support for video-calling and video-conferencing ====
> 
> We just use notebooks for this.

The advantage of recent notebooks and tablets for this is hardware 
acceleration of audio and video CODECs. All the video platforms are 
processor intensive, and older laptops struggle and get rather warm.

Happy shopping. I'm semi-underwhelmed with the Rock Pi X I bought: 
unless you really need an x86 SBC in Raspberry Pi form-factor, the 
current Raspberry Pis are faster and much cheaper than this board's 
rather insipid Cherry Trail Atom.

cheers,
  Stewart