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OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

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235 points ChrisArchitect | 1 comments | 16 Apr 18 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.274s | source
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berg01 ◴[16 Apr 18 16:06 UTC] No.16849989[source]▶
I played with one back when it was just launched. Besides the innovative outdoor-friendly display it was an insanely bad experience. MIT Media Lab (and with that I mean Nicholas Negroponte) gone crazy.

The UX (both keyboard and software) was .. just awful.

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whitepoplar ◴[16 Apr 18 16:11 UTC] No.16850048[source]▶
Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?
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switchbak ◴[16 Apr 18 16:44 UTC] No.16850411[source]▶
I had one back in the day, and it was the worst computing experience I can remember. The keyboard was like what you'd find on a speak-and-spell, and the system had the performance of a low-end 486 under heavy swap.

I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental problems with it. Switching to an existing lightweight X window manager was a much better (but still not good) experience.

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1. avhon1 ◴[16 Apr 18 19:53 UTC] No.16852132[source]▶
The keyboard is probably a lot nicer to use if you can fit all of your fingers on it. (I usually use my IBM model M with my XO-1 laptops.) Also, the newer models are available with a chiclet-style keyboard.

As bitwize said, not only is Sugar written in Python, but it's also badly written. In one of my other comments in this thread, I mentioned the memory leak [0] which has been a problem in Sugar since 2013.

Without Sugar, the experience is better. I run dwm in debian, and it works well as long as I don't have any complicated web pages open. 400 MHz i586 and 256 MB of memory is enough to be useful. The keyboard provides ESC and F1-F12. It's just a little, weird-looking laptop with a transflective display.