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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: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:07PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:07PM (#758550) Journal

    I had an early model for a year or two before selling it to a friend. I already ran linux 100% on all my desktops at that time so the linux part was not a novelty -- instead I turned it into a hackintosh. It worked just fine and getting it set up was fun but minor puzzle -- other than installing OSX, I never really used it, which is why I sold it off (after restoring linux).

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