They lost me at 720p, but maybe they won't lose you.  Too much dosh for me as well, so I may have been looking for a way out.  US$600 today only until 1600 BST, which I don't even know what that means, it may have already passed for all I know.

 

IndieGogo link

Yeah, but on an i5 with 8G it's fine, so maybe it's the installation.  Or maybe it's operator snobbery error snobbery.

 

If you read it more carefully, they are also trying to make it a desktop, so they're not going to skimp on the CPU.  Sounds like they're also going to install Ubuntu mobile, not standard desktop Ubuntu.

I think iOS would be a better comparison.  It's a phone.

Oh, okay, I see what you're saying.

 

I got nothing, it's probably written in Java on the Ubuntu version, and native in OS X.

You ought to try Linux Mint, it's Ubuntu without the stupid ass "Unity" interface.

the difference between the mac and ubuntu versions is probably that the mac one was probably compiled with an actual optimized compiler, instead of GCC. We see 5x improvement in speed with several of the codes we run when switching from gcc to intel's compiler.

So very true Dan. Not sure why people think that building in gcc is going to be anything but slow (relative).

you can bring all the people in you want, and if you don't use a better compiler than gcc, you're still stuck wtih gcc's lousy performance.