Qualcomm hopes to attract devs to Windows 10 on Arm with new testbed, spins up 2nd-gen 7c cheapbook chips

For nearly a decade, Microsoft has fought to turn Windows on Arm into a viable platform for day-to-day computing. Success (not to mention anything resembling meaningful market share) has proven elusive. Users (not to mention developers) are few and far between. In an attempt to close the app chasm, Qualcomm today introduced …

[karlkarl]

Would be really useful to get BSD or Linux running on one of these. The Raspberry Pi is *just* a little too underpowered still to use for a viable day-to-day platform but this hardware could be adequate.

... of course if it isn't artificially locked down and crippled to running consumer Windows. These days I don't jailbreak, I just move on to non-broken hardware.

[EvaQ]

... but why not use an existing Chromebook with ARM for Linux?

[Neil Barnes]

Last time I looked, at cheaper chromebooks, insufficient RAM, insufficient 'disk' space, and of course it wasn't always easy to rip the chrome out and put Linux on instead... things have probably changed and I should probably look again.

I have been vaguely considering a new laptop, and something without the hidden system engines that Intel and AMD are so fond of appeals to me... but I have some critical applications I do need and at present I don't know if there are ARM builds for them: immediate requirements include

- the full C developer suite

- Kicad

- Logisim Evolution

- Firefox

- STM Cube IDE

- Gimp

- LibreCad

- XSane

- ABBYY v7 OCR

- LyX

- the usual LibreOffice stuff

- Salaea Logic

- 16GB ram

- 0.5Tb 'disk'

And no doubt others which will occur to me only when I try and run them... I don't know whether any or all of these applications are available; I haven't looked at any in detail. But they're what I'm regularly using now.

[chasil]

4G

I don't know if many Chromebooks have LTE in addition to WiFi, but the 4G cellular modem (Snapdragon X15) is not often seen in PI-class machines.

It would be interesting to swap my simcard into one of these for occasional remote support. It would also be nice to have a SODIMM socket, with no RAM included, so I can decide what I want and when.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats just running Linux in a chroot / container within ChromeOS isn't it?

No difference from running Linux chroot in a crippled Android tablet.

Hopefully I am wrong or you have severely missed the point of "non-artificially crippled / locked down platforms".

[martinusher]

There's probably no point

My experience as an embedded developer with Windows is that you get to use it because the company executives mandate it. They mandate it because their business software life is built around it, their world is dominated by Outlook, Teams and the rest of the Office suite. You can run other software on the Windows platform but its always subservient to the demands of the main Windows applications and there's always the problem that Windows updates tend to break things.

What's called "IoT" has been my stock-in-trade for literally decades. We've been integrating sensors, actuators and controllers, anything needed to solve a particular problem. I'd guess that much of what's called industrial networking is unknown to the majority of programmers which is why they'd tend to what to re-implement existing functionality in their own home made, and all to often proprietary, protocols. Their chosen platform is Web based so it requires a fairly heft infrastructure to support it so its natural for them to turn to the platforms they're already familiar with. The problem with these hefty platforms is that they're bulky and because they include numerous services they' also tend to be insecure. So we end up taking an everyday problem that needs an everyday solution, reinventing the wheel and then wondering why the world + dog isn't rushing to buy their product.

[Old Used Programmer]

Maybe...

If it's cheap enough, I can run the browser I choose and can run PuTTY and LibreOffice, I'd have a use for it. I'm considering building a system around a NUC, but I could be persuaded otherwise.

[Potemkine!]

Don't get it

Isn't the goal of an OS to put a abstraction layer between the hardware and the app?

As to develop 64-bits apps... do so many apps require to address over 4 GB of RAM?

I'm probably missing something... explanations needed, TIA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't get it

"Isn't the goal of an OS to put a abstraction layer between the hardware and the app?"

Welcome to the wonderful world of Windows, where the goal of the OS is to push services and apps that make Microsoft more money. Whether Windows works for you or not, or whether you find it usable or not, are completely not issues that Microsoft truly gives a damn about.