[jkot]

And people pay $80 for this?

ARM device from China will be cheaper, smaller,more power efficient and will run Ubuntu just as fine.

> 2.8Ghz P4 or better CPU (pentium 4 is very very green)

> 80GB SATA HD (spin it yeah, Ubuntu comfortably fits to 5GB)

> VGA port ???

[pmontra]

Plenty of TVs and monitors still have a VGA port, so that's not a surprise. Furthermore this is basically a PC from 10 years ago and not a top notch one (I'm looking to HD, CPU and network card - I had a laptop with 10/100/1000). It's interesting that you can still run a 2014 OS on that hardware. There is probably some value in using an Intel chip instead of an ARM one even if I bet that most Linux software runs on ARM too (all my Linux boxes are x86_64).

[melling]

People never stop making excuses. VGA is dead.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#videoVGA

[Karunamon]

End of life according to who? That's not how it works, one company doesn't just declare something EOL and everyone else stops using it out of obligation.

VGA will stop being used when it stops fitting most use cases out there, and not before. The connector standard is capable of 2048x1536 at 85hz, which, making an educated guess here, is probably a higher resolution than the monitor you're using right now. Most monitors and TV's sold nowadays are 1920x1080.

4K will probably be what finally kills it off (3840 x 2160), but I'd give that another 2-5 years before the hardware reaches enough market penetration for manufacturers to stop including the plug out of necessity.

[vacri]

VGA is terrible. The specs you just rattled off don't account for the innate fuzziness of the analog signal. I've reduced a lot of eyestrain from various people by confiscating their VGA cables and telling them they're forbidden from using 'the cable with the blue ends'.

Yes, VGA still has to be used for devices that only accept VGA (like a lot of projectors, very few of which can handle those specs), but apart from that, it should be avoided because the image quality is just that bad.

[Karunamon]

Those sound like bad cables to me. I'm typing this on a 1920x1080 display, connected via VGA, and next to that is an identical monitor connected over DVI.

The displays are identically sharp and colorful. Nobody would be able to tell you which is connected over which interface.

[puzzlingcaptcha]

It's so dead that I had to separately buy a VGA adapter for my laptop, so I could use the bloody conference projectors everywhere.

[melling]

Beats me. When were the projectors purchased? Lots of legacy crap around because people are slow to adopt standards that are a decade old. That kind of equipment will linger for years.

The warning has been going out for quite some time:

http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/issue287may282013

You're wasting your money if you buy a PC with a VGA port and no HDMI port.

[zerohm]

The point is to recycle parts, not to make another great micro PC.

[jiggy2011]

x86 still has more software available and the option to run Windows.

[mark-r]

The Windows license will cost more than the PC. Unless you want to run a cracked version, it isn't worth it.