4 ms·

This is kind of underwhelming given that we already have the Raspberry Pi.

shanpc 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Our motivation for this project was to accelerate the growth of PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed on them, particularly at a low price point. We looked at the Raspberry Pi, but it provides too little CPU horsepower for most basic computing chores - its hard to run a decent GUI or browse the web on it. Not knocking the Pi one bit here (!), but we think a desktop computer would need a bit more firepower than the Pi. Also, being a crowdfunded project, we're able to provide this at a price-point that System76, ZaReason and other pre-installed Linux providers aren't able to provide right now (they're great companies too, so do support them if you like Linux pre-installed on your desktops/laptops!)
georgemcbay 13y ago
I love the 3 Raspberry Pis I have, but this thing would eat them for breakfast for general computing tasks where size and power consumption aren't huge issues. Having said that, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and others make "nettop" devices that are very similar to this one. Generally theirs are cheaper but with 2GB RAM standard and no SSD... for about the same price as this one you could get one of those others plus the extra RAM and a (small) SSD today at the advertised price... just with slightly more work in upgrading the RAM, swapping out the drive and installing Ubuntu yourself. The extra work seems like a small price to pay though for getting a system right now instead of putting down money and getting a system in 2014. That sort of long lag time to delivery without any sort of associated price break is what killed the Ubuntu Edge phone for me, and I can't see myself investing in this thing either (sorry @shanpc).
- orclev 13y ago
  That was pretty much my reaction as well. I built a small system similar to this for my grandmother a couple years ago. If I recall I paid about $150 for the base system, and another ~$150 for an SSD for it for a grand total of $300 plus a little extra for a keyboard/mouse and a USB DVD drive. Initially installed Ubuntu on it, but later swapped it out for Mint on account of Unity just getting way too weird. Basically you could do this yourself for right around the exact same price point if not a bit cheaper with the minor inconvenience of installing the OS yourself.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  In my experience, Ubuntu doesn't run well on Atom. Perceived performance is far inferior to, say a $260 Nexus 7. Even if I knew someone who wanted a low-end desktop, I would not recommend they support this project because of the enormous performance disparity between the two possible processor families (Atom vs. Celeron). If the project were to come to fruition, and you ended up with an Atom, it would be enormously disappointing. And let's face it, these days, if you're not willing to put together a desktop (which you can trivially do at this price point assuming you're willing to make the same price/performance tradeoffs), you're probably not in the market for a desktop, but rather a laptop or a tablet. That's just where the market is at these days.

Thanks for the feedback! Our motivation for this project was to accelerate the growth of PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed on them, particularly at a low price point. We looked at the Raspberry Pi, but it provides too little CPU horsepower for most basic computing chores - its hard to run a decent GUI or browse the web on it. Not knocking the Pi one bit here (!), but we think a desktop computer would need a bit more firepower than the Pi. Also, being a crowdfunded project, we're able to provide this at a price-point that System76, ZaReason and other pre-installed Linux providers aren't able to provide right now (they're great companies too, so do support them if you like Linux pre-installed on your desktops/laptops!)

georgemcbay 13y ago

I love the 3 Raspberry Pis I have, but this thing would eat them for breakfast for general computing tasks where size and power consumption aren't huge issues. Having said that, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and others make "nettop" devices that are very similar to this one. Generally theirs are cheaper but with 2GB RAM standard and no SSD... for about the same price as this one you could get one of those others plus the extra RAM and a (small) SSD today at the advertised price... just with slightly more work in upgrading the RAM, swapping out the drive and installing Ubuntu yourself. The extra work seems like a small price to pay though for getting a system right now instead of putting down money and getting a system in 2014. That sort of long lag time to delivery without any sort of associated price break is what killed the Ubuntu Edge phone for me, and I can't see myself investing in this thing either (sorry @shanpc).

orclev 13y ago
That was pretty much my reaction as well. I built a small system similar to this for my grandmother a couple years ago. If I recall I paid about $150 for the base system, and another ~$150 for an SSD for it for a grand total of $300 plus a little extra for a keyboard/mouse and a USB DVD drive. Initially installed Ubuntu on it, but later swapped it out for Mint on account of Unity just getting way too weird. Basically you could do this yourself for right around the exact same price point if not a bit cheaper with the minor inconvenience of installing the OS yourself.
shawn-furyan 13y ago
In my experience, Ubuntu doesn't run well on Atom. Perceived performance is far inferior to, say a $260 Nexus 7. Even if I knew someone who wanted a low-end desktop, I would not recommend they support this project because of the enormous performance disparity between the two possible processor families (Atom vs. Celeron). If the project were to come to fruition, and you ended up with an Atom, it would be enormously disappointing. And let's face it, these days, if you're not willing to put together a desktop (which you can trivially do at this price point assuming you're willing to make the same price/performance tradeoffs), you're probably not in the market for a desktop, but rather a laptop or a tablet. That's just where the market is at these days.