[GTALUG] desktop thoughts on Black Friday

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| 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.

Ewww.  I did not know that.

We do have a couple of laptops with sockets that support NVMe SSDs.  I 
think that one actually has an NVMe SSD (one has a SATA drive in that 
socket).  I've not noticed anything about this disk, a great state of 
affairs.

| > ==== fancy new features added to USB after USB 3.0 ====
| 
| Charging, expensive cables.

Somehow charging now involves negotiation (of voltage? of current?) and 
this seems to require cables to have active circuitry.  That makes them 
expensive.  Mind you, sometimes USB C cables are neither expensive nor 
smart.

Or perhaps you are referring to cables that connect DisplayPort or other 
odd things to USB C / 3.x.  These are necessary because new laptops have 
fewer and fewer kinds of ports.  And fewer ports of any kind.

| > 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.

Interesting.

One complaint about cheap TV boxes from Shenzen companies is that they are 
not authorized to display things like Netflix and YouTube at better than 
Standard Definition (detailed rules are not in my head).  I wonder whether 
FireFox on them would solve that problem.

We use a Xaiomi Mi Box, which is running licensed Android TV.

There are a bunch of inexpensive AMLOGIC s905x3 boxes which could then be 
interesting. (s905x3-b is the same but with a Dolby Audio license; rare 
and expensive.)

Consider, for example, this colourful model
<https://www.banggood.com/HK1-Box-Amlogic-S905X3-4GB-RAM-32GB-ROM-5G-WIFI-bluetooth-4_0-1000M-LAN-Android-9_0-4K-8K-H_265-TV-Box-Support-Google-Assistant-p-1608874.html>

Comparing with Raspberry Pi 4:

- cheaper especially when including power supply and case and SD card.

- CPU is a bit weaker, but the hardware crypto is way faster.

- Armbian (derived from Raspbian, derived from debian) should be trivial 
  to put on it.

- only some have gigabit ethernet

- eMMC should be faster than SD

- no ability to hook up random signals

Some Shenzen boxes are considerably more expensive for reasons I don't 
understand.  Those with s922x or Rockchip rk3399 SoCs, for example.

| > ==== 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.

Yeah.  I'm not clear which chips have which codecs.  But usually newer is 
better and more expensive is better.

| 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.

Thanks for the report.

Linux support for x86 is superb, especially mainstream distros.

Cherry Trail is very old.  Intel has 90% thrown in the towel on mainstream 
adoption of Atoms.  But they are still milking the old designs.

Where Apple has pushed ARM is pretty interesting.  Luckily for AMD and 
Intel, they aren't a chip vendor.