I think the reason is that most real numbers are gonna be the result of measurement equipment (for example camera/brightness sensor, or analog audio input). As such , these values are naturally real (analog) values, but they aren’t fractions. Think of the vast amount of data in video, image and audio files. They typically make up a largest part of the broadband internet usage. As such, their efficient handling is especially important, or you’re gonna mess up a lot of processing power.

Since these (and other) values are typically real values, they are represented by IEEE-754 floats, instead of fractions.

Actually, you can consider RGB values to be (triplets of) floats, too.

Typically, one pixel takes up up to 32 bits of space, encoding Red, Green, Blue, and sometimes Alpha (opacity) values. That makes approximately 8 bits per color channel.

Since each color can be a value between 0.0 (color is off) and 1.0 (color is on), that means every color channel is effectively a 8-bit float.

The problem is that they’re not really made for this task, both in hardware and available software. They typically specialize in routing and switching, but have insufficient internal hardware (memory especially) to run a full-blown OS.

So whatever you install on these devices, will probably not give you all the features that you would like to have. (For example, a full linux command line with all the typical programs installed.) Also, it doesn’t allow you to use HDMI to connect to a monitor, so there’s that. But basic linux things can be done on it, if you figure out how to get to the command line. But it’s very limited.

Yeah, good to know. today I learned …

GIMP feels non-intuitive sometimes.

For example, layers.

I expect that GIMP internally has a list of all objects that I added to the file. Like, text, brush drawings, pasted images. Instead, I cannot find that list anywhere.