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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the handy-little-machines dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12PM (3 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12PM (#758515) Journal

    I disagree but no longer have the supporting citations to back up the claim. The !@#$% search engines do poorly with old news, that the odds of refinding the relevant articles is poor to non-existent, especially once M$ started a misinformation campaign on the topics in the trade press to bury news of their influence on production.

    From what I remember, the diminished sales of the GNU/Linux devices was solely due to M$ forcing the manufacturer to completely stop selling the devices except with Windoze. There were some returns but they mostly had to do with Windoze underperforming on the netbook hardware. There was a lot of analysis on this for a very brief time before it was countered by the disinformation.

    Either way, I had one for a long time and it was great for certain tasks, after I put on a different distro and customized it. Eventually it got old enough that it failed to even turn on, but only after had seen a lot of travel and many, many hours of use. Usually I had OpenBSD on it with a lot of networking utilities. Though one time I even used it as a netboot thin client to demo LTSP.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:18PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:18PM (#758586)

    I still have a couple around. They make great devices for controlling guitar effects, music equipment, as a media centre extension (MPD controller, etc). Quiet, low power, and cheap. Really the only complaint I had about them was the crappy screen resolutions ... which really were not much worse than the average laptop at the time.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)

    by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:51PM (#758601)

    Hendrikboom was talking about desktops, not notebooks. I remember a time when an effort was made to sell desktops with Linux in the high street, and Hendrikboom described exactly what happened - customers returned them as soon as they got home, switched on, and said "WTF is happening? I can't see Windows!".

    But that was never the only factor. I understand that Windows PCs (at least back then) came loaded with adware, crapware, and malware that the retailer or manufacturer was paid to pre-load, and of course that crap only worked with Windows. But those payments were more than the Windows licence cost to the seller, so despite Linux being free they lost money by not shipping with Windows and the crapware.

    A final factor is that (at least back then) MS expects a royalty on every PC sold (unless there are special agreements) and will claim "piracy" and threaten to withdraw the wholesale pricing deal with any vendor who ships PCs without Windows, even if they still pay MS the royalty.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:38AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:38AM (#758832) Journal

      A final factor is that (at least back then) MS expects a royalty on every PC sold (unless there are special agreements) and will claim "piracy" and threaten to withdraw the wholesale pricing deal with any vendor who ships PCs without Windows, even if they still pay MS the royalty.

      Yes, "piracy" was the official public excuse M$ used to convince politicians and vendors as the reason to stop selling hardware without an OS pre-installed. However, M$ didn't want to bring attention to the fact that GNU/Linux was the reason buyers were asking for whitebox systems. Their marketing arms FAST and BSA do that as well and come down very hard with their audits if they start to find less than 100% M$ in-house. If I recall correctly, for some years M$ had packaged their proof-of-purchase holograms or whatever in such a way that they were not retained by most businesses and never made it into the recordkeeping systems.

      I used to buy servers without pre-installed operating systems * and do remember when the vendors were forced to stop. Later, some got around that prohibition by offering FreeDOS, but I think that too has been stopped also in the name of "piracy". The growth of the whitebox systems was clearly based on the growth in Free and Open Source Software operating systems, and M$ needed to kill off the options without bringing attention to the competition. Blaming "piracy" was a successful ploy from M$ and successfuly distracted from GNU/Linux. Even today it is impossible to get whitebox systems and finding vendors that -- in practice -- will sell with GNU/Linux is very, very difficult. With hardware arriving with Windoze pre-installed, I am sure that many managers, even if they are not active M$ fifth-columnists, still fall victim to the sunk costs fallacy [psychologytoday.com] and continue to throw good money after bad.

      * Some in purchasing at that place were real rats and bought systems with Windoze pre-installed anyway, paying extra for it, even though they were explicitly told not to. The systems were to be used as either devel systems running GNU/Linux or production systems also running GNU/Linux. Shockingly the top management was ok with the unnecessary Windoze purchases even though they otherwise fought against any and all expenditures. I checked up on the place many years later and found that their general IT department was gone, and that the Windoze resellers had gone from a 5 person unit to having over 200 of those flunkies. Needless to say, the actual employees affected got little done and the organization had completely lost its international standing.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.