Re: creating and maintaining accessible Linux distros
> On Jan 5, 2022, at 08:02, Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't have any experience with Qemu, but assuming it can run x86
> guests on ARM hosts at all, my expectation is that a old model
> smartphone would be incapable of running Gnome or Mate within a
> virtual machine with anything approaching decent performance,
> especially once you throw in the Accessibility stack.
OK, I'll try to unpack this a little and respond to the individual points.
VM performance - QEMU apparently has pretty low overhead (because of JIT code generation and such), even when used to support other CPU architectures. More to the point, ARM is rapidly becoming a popular enough architecture that many distros will support it directly.
GUIs and such - I'd be willing to punt on supporting GUIs and graphical desktops, at least initially. CLI-based interaction is a lot better than nothing (and some folks actually prefer it :-).
Moore's Law - Although processor speeds have stalled, systems are still getting faster every year. So, we can comfortably predict that the "old" cell phones of the future (e.g., 2025, 2030) will have a lot more speed than today's crop.
Use cases - It seems unlikely that an old cell phone will ever be a match for that year's crop of laptop and desktop machines. However, that's not the goal here. Rather, I want to get useful communication and computing pwer into the hands of folks who currently have none at all. So, a few compromises may be acceptable.
-r
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