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The Linux Journal reminisces about the Asus Eee and considers how close the world came to getting a GNU/Linux Desktop as a result of it being on the market. While the article is a bit light on the machinations that Microsoft carried out behind the scenes to impair their utility and cap the growth of netbook sales, especially any with GNU/Linux pre-installed, it does cover a lot of other important aspects about the netbook phenomenon. The Eee was really one of the first if not the first netbooks available. Being small and relatively inexpensive, the netbooks were not practical to use for running the slow, bloated, legacy operating systems that remain all too common among original equipment manufacturers (OEM) even today. Instead the Eee came with a good distro pre-installed and could accept just about any light 32-bit distro in its place. It is hard to overstate how popular these machines became.
It's almost impossible to believe, a decade later, how popular netbooks were in the wake of the Eee. Way past popular, actually: the netbook was the best-selling computer in the world in 2009, with seven-fold growth from 2008 and some 20 million sold. That accounted for almost 10% of the entire computer market at a time when the recession saw desktop computer sales fall 12%, the worst decline in its history.
[...] Netbooks and the Eee were so successful, in fact, that research analysts who followed Apple—whose top executives had famously called the machines "junk"—warned the company that it had better do something to compete. Mac sales fell in 2008, the first decline in five and a half years, and an analyst told Computerworld: "Vendors are waking up to the fact that people respond to so-called 'good-enough' computing. They don't really need all the power of a Core 2 Duo CPU most of the time."
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:00PM (10 children)
[...] and the supply chain problems mean that Joe is now thinking "Why pay more for something harder to use? Plus it can't run $GAME!"
Sadly that myth just keeps going. Most distros have been far easier to use than Windows since about the turn of the century. There were some good usability studies posted back then that noted the fact that KDE had surpassed Windoze in ease of use for regular desktop activities. Maintenance has been easier since the Red Hat 5.2 days, in spite of the RPM hell problems. Somewhere along the line around ten years ago ease of installation leapt ahead with Ubuntu. UEFI seems set out to end that but having it preinstalled would render that checkbox moot. System76, Pogolinux, EmperorLinux, Slimbook, and others do well there. However, while their quality is good, shoddy hardware can still appear cheaper if one only compares the list price.
Now as then it is the OEM that is the largest barrier. So, I agree that it is marketing and missed opportunities with the supply chain blocking wider adoption. The latter is due to a lot of (possibly illegal) horse trading going on in regards to Windoze pricing. Tragically, customization is not a thing any more. It is one of the FOSS desktops' strengths but not one that can be mareted any more due to the public being so subdued into accepting the defaults. Ease of use is a big strong point, as are ease of maintenance, (relative) security, and a wider selection of non-game applications.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:54PM (5 children)
I know they get brainwashed, but is the public psyche really that pliable? I suppose it's really a case of your own product's marketing needs to align with and feed off the marketing campaigns of the competitors because it's a lot harder to fight the tide that's constantly washing over the collective consciousness.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM (3 children)
One of the takeaways from the case between M$ and Netscape, even back then, was that over 60% of people kept the defaults exactly as they are. I have a lot of anecdotes that convince me that the percentage is much higher nowadays. However, those are only anecdotes. It is past time for another proper study if it could get past all the political obstacles in place.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:23PM (2 children)
That's sad if it's true, because it suggests we're breeding nations of compliant drones that do not wish to question what is put in front of them or think critically. I'm extrapolating a lot from your example, but if I'm right, that's very bad for democracy.
I do have to wonder how they got that 60% figure though. The people who say yes to surveys and who used to leave the old "Send details of my experience to Micro$oft" checkbox checked (wow, asking before slurping, THOSE were the days!) probably are the same people that keep all the other defaults.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:06AM (1 child)
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:37AM
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
With GNU/Linux distros and any of the BSDs or BSD distros/forks, I'd agree a little. The defaults have gotten much better and people are getting quite usable defaults. Mostly, however, people nowadays come to GNU/Linux without IT experience and instead have a lot of baggage inflicted from long-term use of legacy systems, sometimes concurrently with GNU/Linux.
With the legacy systems, the situation with default settings is more difficult. On OSX it is more or less impossible to customize the interface. On the Vista series, particularly Vista10, not only is the interface hard to customize, but the changes get wiped out at arbitrary intervals by "updates", "upgrades", as well as whims of the M$ resellers posing as IT departments. Also, their "reformat, reinstall" mantra which they bleat does equal damage to customizations because they are so damn hard to restore, not just zapping third-party applications. The difficulty grinds people down and they just resign themselves to accepting the defaults. That carries over to all systems they use, good or bad.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:10PM
If you want to understand why non-techies aren't into customization, you need to stop thinking like a techie. Most people actually see retaining defaults as a *good thing*, and they're not necessarily wrong about that either. They don't want to customize, because they don't want to learn how the machine actually works. They want to be able to ask the guy sitting next to them or the neighbor kid or whoever how to accomplish some task, and they want step-by-step picture instructions (any text must be less than one sentence per photo) that they can follow exactly on their own system. If a single icon is different -- even if it's not an icon they need to use for that particular task -- then they assume something is broken. They don't see the computer the way we do; they see the computer like they see a microwave oven. It's an appliance with a certain predefined set of functionality which is activated by pressing a certain predefined sequence of buttons. And they just want to be able to memorize the button sequences that they need. And changing settings away from defaults just means learning new buttons and losing the ability to follow other peoples' instructions.
Most people don't have any clue what their systems are capable of. And they don't care. And a disturbing number of these people are even "software engineers"....
Go ask people sometime what they really *want* to do with their computers. In an ideal world, if they could have someone developing some custom software just for them, what would it do? Most people will look at you like you've got two heads; they'll barely even comprehend the question. Or they'll just say they want the software they already have to work faster or crash less. But new software, new interfaces, or even something as simple as a macro seems to be too imaginative for most people.
On the one hand, I want to say that people shouldn't be using computers if they don't understand them. On the other hand...I don't necessarily know all the inner workings of my microwave, and I don't want to. I look at what the store has and I pick one and I use it as designed. We've all got limited time and energy and we can't dig into every detail of every object we come into contact with.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
It isn't any of those things, it is just Microsoft. EEE proved that, put ANY non-Windows unit in stores that has minimal fit and finish work and they will sell. The only reason the EEE project was even allowed to occur was as a research project based on the success of OLPC, Asus and Intel were trying to design a similar low spec laptop but based on more "off the shelf" tech. It was only allowed onto the market because it really couldn't run Windows and nobody thought it would sell many units anyway. When they couldn't make enough to meet demand Microsoft took notice.
The next evolution of EEE was the 9" model and Microsoft was ready. They offered up XP for free and made it clear it was an offer that wasn't going to be refused. Asus was selling a lot of EEE PCs but selling a lot more Windows laptops worldwide and couldn't afford to lose that business so they accepted the offer and sold two versions, stores tended to only stock the Windows one because Microsoft made sure THEY played ball. You could order the Linux version, same as System76 and such. The Linux threat was mostly ended... until distros like Ubuntu adopted the EEE and made sure everything worked "out of the box" on one and people started loading them up since Windows was pretty unusable on one. So next Microsoft leaned on the, now multiple, hardware makers to adopt 10 and 11" screens so Windows would work. The SSDs also faded away in favor of spinning rust, bigger batteries to power it all. They became slightly smaller laptops and neither fish nor foul found few takers. The rise of the tablet ended this sad chapter as people found another way to escape Windows.
Then Google, seeing these things come to pass and seeing the hunger that existed for a laptop that actually worked, launched the Chromebook. Note that Google has one thing going for it that no other PC vendor has. No business relationship with Microsoft. At all.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:25AM
Just as an add-on comment, I owned both a 7" and 10" EEE. They were cute, but dear God were they an Operation Hairshirt. The 7" model had a barely-usable screen, barely-usable keyboard, and minimal storage space crammed with a Linux distro hacked up to fit into it. It was barely upgradeable/expandable to do anything else, e.g. plugging in a USB device other than a HID or storage device, it took an insane amount of hacking around just to be able to get it to recognise a GPS device. The 10" was less painful, but not by much. I don't think Microsoft had to do much to have it fail except sit back and wait, you needed to be a serious enthusiast to put up with it.
Having said that, its great success was that it convinced manufacturers that laptops don't have to be expensive boat-anchor clunkers, but can be cheap and light. $whateverBooks wouldn't exist today if the EEE hadn't shown the way.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:46PM (1 child)
Why do people always have to exaggerate? This is simply not true. I'm a die-hard Linux fan, but I would never make statements like this.
The reality is that Windows XP -- not released until after the "turn of the century" -- was widely successful because it actually did a lot of stuff right (for the average user), and people kept using XP because Windows got worse (though Windows 7 wasn't bad).
Meanwhile, I've been using Linux on and off since the mid-90s, and I can definitely say Linux had significantly more issues for the average computer user until just a few years ago. Sure, Windows would gradually accumulate crap over time, eventually forcing a reinstall if you wanted a functional system. But Linux -- unless you bought a machine specifically tested for Linux and well-supported -- was always a pain in the ass if you weren't familiar with command line and config files.
I switched over to Linux for all my personal computers in the mid-2000s, but even then Linux would break things on every upgrade. Like major things -- like I sometimes couldn't boot to a GUI (which basically would make the computer useless to most people). After toying with Ubuntu for a few years (and seeing different things break with every install of a new version), I eventually went back to Debian Stable, but then had to deal with out-of-date versions for a lot of stuff.
Eventually things improved, but that wasn't until somewhere around 2010-2012. After around 2012, I feel like there are several Linux distros I could actually recommend to people who wouldn't be comfortable with a command line to solve random problems that might pop up, and installation was smooth enough that people unfamiliar with Linux could dependably do it on a wide variety of hardware. If you had someone else install the OS for you, you might be able to push back the date of usability by noobs a few years, but definitely not to the "turn of the century."
Disagree there too. It was really Linux Mint that made installation by noobs feasible. Installing Ubuntu on random machines was a crapshot for several years -- as I said, new stuff would break on my system with every new install. Yes, I could fix it, but a noob would be driven away by that sort of crap. Also, for a long time Ubuntu refused to allow enough proprietary stuff (like display drivers) to actually get stuff to work reasonably by default. You had to do the install and then follow some online guide to actually get to a computer that would let you have standard codecs to make the web work "normally."
Mint fixed all that and made installation and use seamless for noobs. Other distros are now better (and Ubuntu was important in getting stuff set for Mint to come along).
Bottom line: Linux works really well now with several major distros with little fuss. But that's only been for the past few years. Still, it is about time that the wider public realized Linux is really a viable alternative now.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:37PM
Man, just within the past year I've had to provide tech support for *professional software developers* who couldn't get Windows 7 installed. Setting up and configuring a new computer is difficult even for people with some technical skill and experience. That's precisely why pre-installs are so important. Without OEM support, installing drivers is *still* a pain in the ass on Windows too. Install stock Windows on a new laptop and you'll likely have no wifi, no ethernet (which confused the hell out of me, but it happened...) no sound, limited display resolutions, maybe even no USB support. Yeah, in 2018, no USB support out of the box. Thank god that particular system still had an optical drive so we could burn the network drivers to a CD-R. The lack of vendor support is the *only* reason Linux appears to be harder here.
My girlfriend recently bought a new Lenovo. Within a month, Windows update stopped running. We tried to reinstall Windows, and the whole system stopped booting. Lenovo sent a tech to her house to do the reinstall, which lasted maybe two weeks before it stopped updating again. At this point that computer is probably just never going to be getting updates. And hell, just look at Soylent's past articles. If you think Microsoft isn't routinely breaking stuff with updates too, then you aren't paying much attention.
100% agree about Ubuntu being nothing special. Every few years I try it again, most recently just this past summer, and never once has it actually installed successfully. I'd say Mandrake/Mandriva did an excellent job at building a user-friendly distro long before Ubuntu, although they did have a number of bad releases too (usually every other one)...but the good releases were *really* good. Even fifteen years ago I was generally able to just run the installer and everything would work. Worst case you've gotta install wifi drivers. Which, at that time, was a pain in the ass on Windows too. On Linux, that situation has improved. On Windows, it hasn't.