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I was already on the lookout for a small ARM-based mini PC, just for doing financial transactions and record-keeping. Now that seems more pressing but I don't

I was already on the lookout for a small ARM-based mini PC, just for doing financial transactions and record-keeping. Now that seems more pressing but I don't know of any such thing in existence. I tried doing that on RPi 3, but the IO seemed not up to the job -- the CPU appeared to be just about tolerable, but using micro SD as a disk was too slow and prone to failure (I'd have tried an external USB disk but I believe the problems were in part because of poor I/O bandwidth). Other single board machines seemed to have better provision for disks that are up to the task I had in mind, but lack software support, so that I had little confidence in security updates, for example. If somebody sold this I think they'd have my money tomorrow: * An ARM mini-PC * With a decent security update team behind it (probably the hard part?) * That will let me run some basics: for me, a Unixy OS with Chrome/Chromium, emacs, ledger and python, without a big effort to install those and keep them up to date * Ideally without too much anti-commodification BS (from my customer perspective) so that hardware can be swapped out if needed Does anything like that exist?

isr 9y ago
(coming late to this thread ...) arm-powered chromeboxes don't exist (yet?), so perhaps an arm-powered chromebook? (chromeboxes tend to be more upgradeable than their chromebook counterparts) Linux OS, kept up to date for you (with google backporting security fixes to their kernel, and of course - updating their browser), running on arm. Can be used as a simple browser-only machine, or if you are decently comfortable with linux, you can unlock its potential and use it as a fully-fledged linux machine. Your choice. If you want to avoid being part of the google foodchain, you could try dual-booting into another arm distro of your choice. Best I can think of, at the moment ...
21717117 9y ago
Android?
shasheene 9y ago
SD cards are optimized for sequential IO (reading/writing photos, video, music). For an OS root partition, random IO is much more important for general use. If the root partition is mounted from an external USB drive with higher random 4K IOPS benchmarks, IO performance should be greatly improved.

isr 9y ago

(coming late to this thread ...) arm-powered chromeboxes don't exist (yet?), so perhaps an arm-powered chromebook? (chromeboxes tend to be more upgradeable than their chromebook counterparts) Linux OS, kept up to date for you (with google backporting security fixes to their kernel, and of course - updating their browser), running on arm. Can be used as a simple browser-only machine, or if you are decently comfortable with linux, you can unlock its potential and use it as a fully-fledged linux machine. Your choice. If you want to avoid being part of the google foodchain, you could try dual-booting into another arm distro of your choice. Best I can think of, at the moment ...

21717117 9y ago

Android?

shasheene 9y ago

SD cards are optimized for sequential IO (reading/writing photos, video, music). For an OS root partition, random IO is much more important for general use. If the root partition is mounted from an external USB drive with higher random 4K IOPS benchmarks, IO performance should be greatly improved.