SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:09PM
Yes, you read the subject right. Last week I bought a £20 120GB SSD disk and managed (with a little help, due to a recent accident) to install it in my rather old ASUS EEE PC 1000H. It is the second update to the machine has had in its lifetime, the first being a new 2GB memory module (£5).
The little one is running Debian with XFCE4. I use it as my backup machine whenever my ASUS UX305C is unavailable (has had some hardware issues recently) and the little one handles almost anything I throw at it, even web banking, which requires some patience though as the amount of JavaScript is absolutely staggering and bogs the little one down like swimming in a tar pit.
This little wonder has served me really well, running Linux since day one with hardly a hitch on the way.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?