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.

They get paid on commission which is why they always put their stickers on anything you buy so the store knows who sold it to you.

Me with Microcenter employees.

I strongly disagree.

I hate that schools basically teach students to over use classes for everything especially by using Java as a teaching language and then they get into the real world or grad school and we have to unteach them those terrible habits.

I’m so glad a lot of the newer languages (Rust, Go, Zig, C3, V) don’t have classes in them at all.

Obfuscation Oriented Programming as I call it

Not at all.

He’s a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.

OS and embedded dev here. I use assembly all the time. I’ve even worked on firmware that was entirely in assembly of strict requirements that couldn’t be met in C.

Also even machine code hides a lot about how the underlying machine works so if you really want to do computing from scratch you really do hate to invent the universe because there’s abstractions all the way up the hardware stack just like there is in software.