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: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 06 2018, @11:18PM
The number of such children who use developer mode is definitely not the main stream.
I keep the most important backups on Google Drive. Less important things are harder to get to, but are on my own cloud server.
That's a good point. Developers of such software might consider building "offline" enabled web applications. Like Google Docs, etc.
And there are Chrome OS Extensions. Of course, I don't develop course ware for schools. (Although I do develop specialized accounting software used by schools. And it is web based. But not specifically so that it can be used by chromebooks. Mostly because web based software "software as a service" is easier for customers, it is zero install and zero maintenance for customers. So I do have opinions about how web based software might work with chromebooks.)
Wouldn't that be nice. But as I suggested, I think it is not a long term problem. Of course, we will see.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.