Boule is your Arch man,  I think.

I don't want to understand Linux (I once understood DOS well enough to do all necessary items but came to learn that all that DOS learning effort expended was a huge waste of time as it went away in 4-6 years and I knew a completely obsolete PC OS language that I never used any more).

I find lots of people understand Linux so well they have fixed every issue on Mint 9.0 so completely there aren't any needs to be met, really.   I can count the number of times I have ever had to resort to the Linux command line interface EVER on one hand (and that was stuff researched and copied and pasted from a forum).


LINUX LAZY is my style now, jest a crusin' along on old dead hardware using me an obsolete outdated Linux distro and a having me a grand old time doing it  .....


fer free, Bill, fer tee totally freeeeee   .........    

OK, I know its a hobby wish -- but what in the world can you DO with the extra speed?   Your Peppermint is a quick like a bunny distro already, will you be able to see or feel or taste the "faster"?

An 8 core AMD FX chipset -- and here I am with an early Athlon 64 bit chip (one thereof) jest cooking along in fine fettle.

I can see your 8 cores all lined up on the porch in their rocking chairs, all leaned back and silent.  A command comes, and first one speaks, then the next, then the next 2 split a sentence, then the buffer charges up and lets fly with the final 4 cores each spitting one syllable/cycle worth of the same word/calculation.  Then they all rock once and go silent again as they wait to do something.

Issue becomes its all done so durn fast that your video buffer has to stop the data blast from the fast assed data bus and string the information back into proper order and then slowly put it out as properly paced video at the correct frame rate.

Here is your quandry --

MicroChoke needs all that Intel can put together for processor count, bus speeds, and all the separate component quickness that the video suppliers and everybody can offer.   MicroChoke is built expecting them separate components, busses and buffers and the code is so bloated and fat that Explorer 9 can choke down all 8 cores to "slow" even now.

...... on the other hand,

Linux code is tiny compared to MicroBloat, the average item can generally execute in a single clock cycle on a 32 bit chip.  Indeed it was what, 5-6 years before any of the 64 bit distros showed ANY sort of speed advantage over a 32 bit distro of the same brand/type.   For the first 2-3 years the longer file names in the 64 bit distros actually slowed things down a little bit so the 64 bit distro was a bit slower than the 32 bit distro (and yes, the code was optimized for 32 bit instructions, what Linux coder doesn't optimize his code for the current crop of CPUs).

Run this logic forward into the ARM age.  Right now ARM processors use 32 bit instruction sets, soon to ramp up to 64 bit file names so it can struggle to run MicroBloat's new fat slow 64 bit ARM code.

Android and Linux are still tiny and most 32 bit instructions will still execute just fine in a single clock cycle on a single cpu system on a chip.  Arm processors are very fast in line executers as the processor(s) and the buss and the internal systems memory and the bus are all trace lines on the same piece of silicone.

For $7 today you can buy a single core chip that will out spec my old white Hewlett Packard box that is sitting by my feet.   Both systems will "multi-thread" but only by inline execution that is coordinated by the bus.

Next year or so, that $7 chip will be a parallel processing dual core A-15 or perhaps a 4-8 core A-9 with a lot of shared internal memory on the bus.  The internal video processor is already a quad core Mali 400 today, but it will be an 8-12 core Mali 624 by then -- all burned at 22 nanometer on the same piece of silicone the size of your little fingernail.  

The entire computer functionally is on that one piece of silicone.  Your power supply will be a cell phone charger at 7-10 watts of power draw.  And that will be overkill on reserve watt capacity as the chips won't draw steady but 1-2 watts with ramp up to 5 watts with all cores running at full blast.

And when the heck will this ever happen in Linux?  If Linaro keeps up their good work, Android and Linux will be sitting there spitting tiny 32 bit instructions at 2-3 gigahertz using NATIVE hard float drivers that suit the new ARM chip exactly -- that are part of the Linux base code (not a durn driver really of any sort  --  the system itself, not an add-on).


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Have you noticed the new class of Linux PC watches?  You talk to them, not type on them.  Siri has grandkids now that will organize your day's activities from your wrist and tell you how to turn the car to get there.

Have you seen the Bluetooth projector glasses that track your eyeballs to move the cursor on the visible only to you screen?

We have some CRAZY stuff coming up in the next 5 years !!!

They will be passing laws against "computing while driving" ....