I have a small Chromebook built by Acer running a full Linux distribution for about 10 years. I like the small size and long battery life. I exchanged the built-in 16GB SSD for a larger one and the battery twice. Unfortunately 2GB RAM is getting small for modern web browsing.Microsoft killed them.I would really love a netbook kind of machine. Never understood why they disappeared Small, low power, minimal ram, good enough for regular use.
There is an interesting article
https://kyrylo.org/software/2025/08/21/ ... exity.html
about software complexity. Arguably, providing a practical bound on complexity was an advantage of the original single-core 512MB Raspberry Pi. Unlike the bounds enjoyed by the retro-computing enthusiasts, the bound provided by the original Pi was not ridiculously strict. Even so Scratchy has just applied to attend the next catzilla CatConf.
Now that AI can write thousands of lines in the blink of an eye, there may be a market for small understandable computing--not just a netbook, but a netbook powered by the RP2350 MCU.
In my opinion the difficulty with such a product would be to create an artisanal operating system that is easy to understand and fully self hosting so the complexity of cross compilers, Windows and Linux do not spoil the simplicity.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Sat Aug 30, 2025 3:56 pm