No, that’s a meow.

I’ve been using a cheap N200 laptop as a testbed for novel OS kernel development and it’s absolutely perfect.

The LattePanda Mu is configurable and can operate on as little as 6W up to 35W depending on your use case. The much more affordable Radxa X4 can operate on as little as 18W up to 25W if you need to power peripherals via USB.

Both use an Intel Processor N100 SoC which is surprisingly powerful and efficient given that the Processor N series is the new branding for what used to be called Celeron.

The prices are also competitive. The X4 for example sells for exactly the same price as the Raspberry Pi 5 with the same amount of memory at every memory capacity tier while having a CPU that’s twice as powerful and compatible with way more software and OSes and a GPU that is absurdly more powerful and fully publicly documented such that there are open source drivers for every OS under the sun.

As an OS developer both professionally and outside of work I have to say I really despise non-x86 platforms and ARM in particular for how fragmented they are and their vendors’ utter disregard for any form of standardization at the platform, firmware, or peripheral levels. That’s why I’m really thankful that devices like these exist and are affordable.

Lower power draw is about it. But there are now x86 SBCs that can also run on as little as 6W so there’s no reason to compromise and use ARM’s non-standard fragmented BS.

Stellaris

I meow therefore I am.

I gotchu

I accept our new Scandinavian overlords. But I would rather have it be Finland.

Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.

Also Minecraft and Stardew Valley.

Got that little tabby tiger face.

Aww cute babies

Visual Studio for Mac was never the real Visual Studio it was a reskin of Xamarin Studio.

I don’t actually use VS either mostly because I prefer to use a lighter editor and the commandline. But it does set a high bar for what an IDE should be.

There’s also Zed. It’s still pretty new and barebones but I like it a lot more than Code or anything else.

It looks like they deprecated that one so they can sell the Rust plug-in for CLion. Granted RustRover is free for non-commercial use.

Stuff like this is why I don’t mess with paid IDEs and editors.

They’re really not. As much as I hate commercial licensing for any dev tools, if you want to talk about superior there’s nothing quite as good as Visual Studio (not code) on Windows.

This is the result of so called tribal knowledge in software development. It’s even worse when the senior citizen who understands everything retires, goes senile, or dies.