That’s an important step, for sure, but that’s not going to push the majority.

I’m that guy for plenty of people and the number of times a conversation starts with “so I bought…” is crazy. It’s basically the first thing anyone says to me when they need help.

I’m as happy about this news as the next tech enthusiast, but bluntly, it’s not a big shift. Going from … What? 5% to 6%? That’s great and all but it’s hardly moving the needle.

If we want a significant shift we need OEMs selling prebuilt PCs with some flavor of Linux pre-installed, that’s as easy to use as the competition (Windows/mac) with compatibility that’s both good enough and transparent enough that people don’t need to think about it much.

Before we get Linux OEM PCs on store shelves, we need to figure out that last bit first.

That still hasn’t happened yet. We can’t even agree what window manager should be used, nevermind any of the dozen or so other critical services on the system…

The thing that makes Linux great is that anyone and everyone can, and does, make stuff for it. That’s also the thing that’s going to hold it back from being put on store shelves pre installed on prebuilt PCs.

For anyone that does mostly office work/paperwork, yes.

For everyone else, not so much. The refresh on eink displays is often orders if magnitude longer than with traditional displays, so forget watching YouTube or something, on a display like this.

Almost every display in existence does 60+ Hz. This is required for light emitting displays, since humans generally see 60Hz flickers of light as solid light (consistently on), so they have to run at that frequency to produce an image that doesn’t look like it’s flickering on and off.

With eink, it’s only reflecting light, not emitting it, so update times can be and are, a lot slower. Due to the mechanism that’s bringing the relevant pigments to the surface, which isn’t fast, you’ll see these displays measured more in seconds per frame than frames per second. Partial updates of the screen can be done much faster, but full frame updates can take several seconds. Eg, adding one more character (while typing a document), is a quick update and can happen many times per second on most eink displays, changing the whole screen, which happens often in video content, takes 1+ second(s) to complete.

So for the office drones that deal with email and text files all day, this is great. For any media content including TV, movies and video games, this is utterly useless.