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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: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:20PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:20PM (#758520) Journal

    I remember them well.

    The first one was cheap, but just too small in every way. Internal storage was too limited. But the biggest limiting factor was the screen resolution.

    The second one was usable. IIRC it has 16 GB which was enough. Screen was something like 640 x 1024 which was just usable. It was still small and all solid state.

    Later I got a metallic blue one. Same screen size, but a real hard drive. I used this one for several years. It was very portable, but the flip side was the small screen resolution which was, as I said, just big enough to be usable.

    I remember reading some EeePC forums regularly. Tweaking. Tinkering. Trying several Eee specific distributions. What I liked best about the last one I had (the metalic blue one with an HD) was that I could install regular Ubuntu from a USB CDROM drive. That was nice.

    Then I got Android phones and tablets and was happy for a long time with that.

    Most recently I got a Google Pixelbook earlier this year. Using Crouton right now to run one or more Linux desktops on it. Using Xiwi each Liniux desktop runs in a separate window. The Chrome OS runs Android apps. And is getting real Linux integration of apps without having to put it into developer mode. So the future is bright. The build quality is great. It is extremely thin. Very portable. Great screen size and resolution. Great battery life. Adequate storage and battery life.

    I think of the Pixelbook or the Chrome OS as the "year of the Linux desktop". Once it has the ability to run Linux GUI apps (GIMP, Inkscape, WxMaxima, LMMS, Eclipse, etc, etc) then what are you lacking to actually call it the year of the Linux desktop? Basically Chrome OS apps, Android Apps and Linux apps all in one extremely thin laptop.

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