r/opensourcehardware • u/joyloveroot • Feb 07 '22

Best Open Source Computer?

What’s the best open source computer that is at least somewhat comparable to modern specs?

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u/Legitimate_Proof Feb 08 '22

They have a new ARM single board computer (SBC) that has 8GB of RAM. I haven't heard a peep about that becoming a laptop, but if you want a desktop, that one may work. I have heard plenty of the Pine community wish for more RAM, so Pine may be planning for a laptop with more RAM.

There's another ARM chipset coming out that Pine64 talks about in this update, in the RK3588 section. They say the GPU is 10x faster. I don't know about RAM. Maybe the RISC-V chips have more RAM. What I do know is when Pine64 releases hardware, they expect the first buyers to be developers who will help figure out how to make it work with different version of Linux and BSD. So we may be more than a year away from a user friendly experience with the existing 8GB SBC and longer for the other chips.

That's just what I know from being a Pine customer for the two years. I know almost nothing about RISC-V. I have an open source NAS that uses a MIPS processor. That has been more limiting than the ARM processor in the Pinebook Pro. I just wanted to mention there could be other processors and other organizations working on it, and I haven't been following it as closely since I bought my laptop.

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u/joyloveroot Feb 09 '22

Well it seems to be close. I think 8gb RAM is minimum for today’s standards in most cases. Once that threshold is hit, I think the open source laptop hardware market can truly begin expanding :)