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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: 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.