What's black, sticky, and has just 8GB of storage?

Intel's Compute Stick, the Atom-powered, plug-this-into-your-tellie-over-HDMI femto-PC, is now available with Ubuntu pre-installed.

The Compute Stick emerged in April with a Windows 8.1 version selling for a recommended US$149. For that price you score an Atom Z3735F pushing four cores along at up to 1.83 GHz, 2 GB memory, 32 GB of on-board storage, b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth and a microSD card slot.

Intel has long said that the Ubuntu version of the Stick would cost about $110, a lower price it would be easy to assume was down to the absence of a Windows licence. But the Windows Atom ships with the free Windows with Bing, so the $39 saving means a wimpier PC: the Ubuntu Stick will ship with just 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, but is otherwise identical to the Windows version.

Ubuntu's post about the device's debut doesn't seem to mind, praising the new device to the skies in lovely marketing-ese.

Penguinistas may well rejoice in the lesser RAM – Linux is held to be far more economical with its use of system resources than Windows. But 8GB of storage? That sounds like thin client territory … if you're happy running thin clients over WiFi. Either that or Ubuntu's happy with users relying on microSD storage. ®