Oh, my. So, are you going to stick with your current CPU and Motherboard , say , 2 years from now? Nah, you are going to have to upgrade.

What exactly? My current problem is:
rootfs is too small.
Default applications are ludicrous (I would happily remove marbles and mahjong, and replace chess with eboard, and uninstall MicroB and Maps; I already have Fennec and Chromium and ModRana; and replace RSS reader with Fennec extension).
mp-fremantle-generic-pr will not allow me to uninstall most of them.
Especially all these locales.
I will have to make a deb for that.

I enjoy: Fennec, ModRana, QStarDict, QtOctave, Orrery, Stellarium, MBarcode, VU Meter, QRadio, Panorama. And voximp. And CellWriter.
I would like Aptitude to work. It gives Segmentation Fault.
I also have vim and leafpad, Ship Rolling, mobile mind, Filebox, Copernicium and Easy Chem, Cell Tower Info.

"PC or Mac"
My god. People really are brainwashed.

Recent Apple desktops and laptops "powered by Intel" are x86 architecture the same as any other [common] desktop/laptop architecture. To put it simply: Windows, Linux and OSX* can run on any (requires some hacks, drivers for all hardware are not available and this violates the ToS for OSX) Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc. computer. AND OSX, Windows and Linux can run on any [recent] "Mac" desktop or "Macbook" laptop.

A history lesson:

Once upon a time, Microsoft's Windows ran on the x86 architecture [only].
Once upon a time, Apple's OSX ran on the PowerPC architecture [only].
Once upon a time, mobile devices used a random assortment of chips from different manufacturers of varying architectures.

The hardware was different. And yes Linux has been ported to nearly every architecture imaginable, it's flexible like that.

Present day, Microsoft is considering porting Windows to ARM architecture. Windows runs on x86 and x86_64 archs.
Present day, Apple's OSX runs on x86 (and x86_64) architecture.
Present day, mobile devices run on some form of ARM architecture. Symbian, WinCE7, iOS, Android, Maemo all run on ARM. NAS devices run on ARM and typically run some form of Linux.

Present day, the most popular architecture is x86. And unbeknownst to many people, their machines are secretly x86_64 (which has backwards compatibility with x86; unlike Intel's failed IA-64 arch). In fact all AMD CPUs since the Opteron have been 64-bit capable and all Intel CPUs since Core2 (except: older Atom processors) are 64-bit capable.

So ARM vs x86, fight fight fight? Wrong.

x86 is the dominant standard because of three things, it's a standard and has been (a.k.a. tradition), Windows run on it, and Intel backs it. The relationship is Intel<==>Windows, symbiotic.Intel the giant it is, isn't one to put all it's eggs in one basket, and so the "Mac" deal was very important to them. In terms of pure computing power x86 has the lead by far. In the Pentium 4 days they continually increased the clock-speed as much as possible within the constraints of keeping the processor cooled enough. In the last few years the focus has been on multi-core chips that run processes in parallel to increase performance.

In cars terms the x86 chips are the V8's of the processor world; raw performance and bad gas mileage battery life.

ARM on the other hand has one major upper-hand against x86, battery life. ARM is better optimized and much more efficient at accomplishing the same tasks with less power. However ARM has been historically slow. Very slow and only suitable for simple processing and best suited towards embedded devices. ARM has also been very portable, unlike x86 which is best suited attached to wall outlet. ARM hasn't had heat issues on the scale that x86 does. Downsides? Not standard. ARM is extremely fragmented with any kind of compatibility among chips disregarded and in many cases avoided on purpose. There is also the matter of ARMEL or ARM Little Endian which is yet another fragmentation of ARM; Endianness is a complex topic I won't discuss here. In the last few years ARM has been playing major catch-up and has begun to be able to go toe-to-toe with low-end x86 chips such as the Intel Atom processors. Which OS has been a long for the ride? Linux.

In car terms ARM systems are the electric cars of the car world; fuel power efficient but can't go very fast.

x86 has another advantage over ARM besides raw power - modularity. A typical computer that runs a x86 has an upgradable processor, upgradable RAM DIMMs, bus slots (PCI, PCI-E, PCMCIA, ExpressCard), in most cases upgradable storage and USB-A female host port(s). This contrasts to ARM which have non-upgradable processors, non-upgradable RAM, typically no bus slots, soldered on storage and if you are LUCKY a USB client port that MIGHT support On-The-Go host capability.

Of course the next big rage is SoC - System on a Chip. A lot of ARM devices are going SoC. And in the other realm, Intel is cramming RAM and GPUs into their latest CPUs (Asus is referring to this trend as APUs)

The companies in the industry are the deciding factor to which architectures survive and which die, unfortunately. As much as "vote with your wallet" goes, that can only apply to individual products and in some cases individual companies, but not entire architectures, that is left to the corporate cogs.

Yes, you in the back with your hand up. What about PowerPC (PPC)? What about it? In terms of "Personal Computer" use, it's all about dead. However, it's alive and well in the server industry as well as all 3 major videogame consoles hooked up to your TV.

So, ARM vs x86? There really isn't one winner. x86 will continue to do our heavy lifting for quite some time, but ARM will continue to ramp up to scoop up portable and other device types that require low power consumption. Of course with the proliferation of ARM, Intel has marked a large target on the back of ARM, trying to push their Atom and "Moorestown" x86 alternatives; despite the Atom having about the performance of a Celeron and the power consumption too (which is to say poor).

I hope this at least opens the eyes of some people. Others it will unfortunately go way over the heads of; each term you are unfamiliar with, I highly recommend looking up on Wikipedia. I also expect many people to counter the above either with exceptions or claims that what I said falls under "exceptions" or general disagreements. And of course obligatory FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) against points I made. Also I don't proof-read, there may be grammatical errors (Firefox's spell-check should have taken care of any spelling errors though).

Also to all the people talking about throwing out their desktops:
I'll take them. Two words - cluster farm.

depends what u want to do.

i have NOT use my desktop for a month. i switched to a netbook @home. it is small. i m now in a hotel, 4am in the morning, posting from my 7" android tablet a81e. i dont have a desktop. i dont have a laptop. i dont have a netbook.

for the last 3 trips, important business stuff, not fam vac, i brought only my n900 and my android tablet. no problems for a 7 day trip on the road.

my mrs? she used to carry a 15.4 in laptop. she switched to a netbook the last 2 trips.
today? she did not carry anything! when she needs to 'compute', she grabbed the 7in android tablet, sometimes the n900. Of note, she is NOT computer literate!

bun

i've bought my first laptop 7 years ago. ever since, i have not bought a desktop.

performance-wise i'm perfectly fine with my laptop (being a gamer), but i dont need to be able to play every game on max. settings.
my next system? will be a laptop.

I've got an spare Dell CSx laptop screen at home.
What I wouldn't give for some schematics (VGA pin-outs, power diagram etc) to see if it's feasible to make that into some sort of docking station for my N900.

See http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=889433

Then ditch the rootfs. There is a guide on these forums about moving it to your opt/home partition, which you can make bigger.

Just uninstall mp-fremantle-generic-pr, the only issue it will cause is if you want to do an OTA upgrade to PR1.4 (which probably isn't coming anyway). It is just a meta-package. It's sole purpose is to list the system packages as dependencies so they get/remain installed or get upgraded when Nokia pushes out a system update.

The only Desktops in our house are the Backend, and frontends for Mythtv.

I have a 4 year old Toshiba which was a work cast off, and a couple which the family use. Mine has ubuntu on, so I have ditched Windows as well as a desktop.

I could ditch my Laptop, and use the N900 for 98% of what I do if I had a large screen with composite in, and keyboard setup.

My N900 is already my main media device. The only area it fails is HD (which it wasn't designed for so OK), and streaming UPNP media, ripped DVDs, DVB-T broadcast recordings, from the Mythtv server as they mostly buffer constantly. I can stream over wireless to Laptops OK, and if I download the file to the N90) they are OK, so it must be the N900s wireless performance, or the way the media player implements network control.

If my laptop dies, then I will probably just buy a cheap smallish Lcd tv and setup a desk station fr the N900.