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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: 3, Funny) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:42PM (1 child)
It was an awesome computer and lasted her six years until she accidentally set a chair on it.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:55PM
That much weight must have compressed it into pure diamond, sell it and buy another.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:43PM (16 children)
Companies that have been specializing in Linux boxes for a while, like System76, are saying "Whaddaya mean, we don't have Linux on a desktop?" Heck, the desktop I'm writing this on was purchased retail from a local shop with Ubuntu on it.
The main reasons non-Android Linux doesn't dominate the marketplace have to do with marketing, and supply chain management that makes the Linux boxen more expensive than their Windows counterparts. The lack of marketing means that the average Joe thinks Linux is for weird long-haired geeks, and the supply chain problems mean that Joe is now thinking "Why pay more for something harder to use? Plus it can't run $GAME!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:59PM (4 children)
There was a time when the preinstalled-Linux desktop computers cost slightly less than the preinstalled-Windows ones. That came to an end because people buying a computer would see that they looked the same and the Linux one was cheaper. Then once they tried it they brought it back because it turned out they really wanted Windows.
So because of the extra costs of handling refunds, stores balked at selling the Linux machines until the price was raised. Now the rubes saw that Windows was cheaper and ended up with what they thought they wanted and the stores no longer had problems having to take back the Linux machines. Of course, Linux sales also plummeted, and they eventually became rarities.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12PM (3 children)
I disagree but no longer have the supporting citations to back up the claim. The !@#$% search engines do poorly with old news, that the odds of refinding the relevant articles is poor to non-existent, especially once M$ started a misinformation campaign on the topics in the trade press to bury news of their influence on production.
From what I remember, the diminished sales of the GNU/Linux devices was solely due to M$ forcing the manufacturer to completely stop selling the devices except with Windoze. There were some returns but they mostly had to do with Windoze underperforming on the netbook hardware. There was a lot of analysis on this for a very brief time before it was countered by the disinformation.
Either way, I had one for a long time and it was great for certain tasks, after I put on a different distro and customized it. Eventually it got old enough that it failed to even turn on, but only after had seen a lot of travel and many, many hours of use. Usually I had OpenBSD on it with a lot of networking utilities. Though one time I even used it as a netboot thin client to demo LTSP.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:18PM
I still have a couple around. They make great devices for controlling guitar effects, music equipment, as a media centre extension (MPD controller, etc). Quiet, low power, and cheap. Really the only complaint I had about them was the crappy screen resolutions ... which really were not much worse than the average laptop at the time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
Hendrikboom was talking about desktops, not notebooks. I remember a time when an effort was made to sell desktops with Linux in the high street, and Hendrikboom described exactly what happened - customers returned them as soon as they got home, switched on, and said "WTF is happening? I can't see Windows!".
But that was never the only factor. I understand that Windows PCs (at least back then) came loaded with adware, crapware, and malware that the retailer or manufacturer was paid to pre-load, and of course that crap only worked with Windows. But those payments were more than the Windows licence cost to the seller, so despite Linux being free they lost money by not shipping with Windows and the crapware.
A final factor is that (at least back then) MS expects a royalty on every PC sold (unless there are special agreements) and will claim "piracy" and threaten to withdraw the wholesale pricing deal with any vendor who ships PCs without Windows, even if they still pay MS the royalty.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:38AM
A final factor is that (at least back then) MS expects a royalty on every PC sold (unless there are special agreements) and will claim "piracy" and threaten to withdraw the wholesale pricing deal with any vendor who ships PCs without Windows, even if they still pay MS the royalty.
Yes, "piracy" was the official public excuse M$ used to convince politicians and vendors as the reason to stop selling hardware without an OS pre-installed. However, M$ didn't want to bring attention to the fact that GNU/Linux was the reason buyers were asking for whitebox systems. Their marketing arms FAST and BSA do that as well and come down very hard with their audits if they start to find less than 100% M$ in-house. If I recall correctly, for some years M$ had packaged their proof-of-purchase holograms or whatever in such a way that they were not retained by most businesses and never made it into the recordkeeping systems.
I used to buy servers without pre-installed operating systems * and do remember when the vendors were forced to stop. Later, some got around that prohibition by offering FreeDOS, but I think that too has been stopped also in the name of "piracy". The growth of the whitebox systems was clearly based on the growth in Free and Open Source Software operating systems, and M$ needed to kill off the options without bringing attention to the competition. Blaming "piracy" was a successful ploy from M$ and successfuly distracted from GNU/Linux. Even today it is impossible to get whitebox systems and finding vendors that -- in practice -- will sell with GNU/Linux is very, very difficult. With hardware arriving with Windoze pre-installed, I am sure that many managers, even if they are not active M$ fifth-columnists, still fall victim to the sunk costs fallacy [psychologytoday.com] and continue to throw good money after bad.
* Some in purchasing at that place were real rats and bought systems with Windoze pre-installed anyway, paying extra for it, even though they were explicitly told not to. The systems were to be used as either devel systems running GNU/Linux or production systems also running GNU/Linux. Shockingly the top management was ok with the unnecessary Windoze purchases even though they otherwise fought against any and all expenditures. I checked up on the place many years later and found that their general IT department was gone, and that the Windoze resellers had gone from a 5 person unit to having over 200 of those flunkies. Needless to say, the actual employees affected got little done and the organization had completely lost its international standing.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:00PM (10 children)
[...] and the supply chain problems mean that Joe is now thinking "Why pay more for something harder to use? Plus it can't run $GAME!"
Sadly that myth just keeps going. Most distros have been far easier to use than Windows since about the turn of the century. There were some good usability studies posted back then that noted the fact that KDE had surpassed Windoze in ease of use for regular desktop activities. Maintenance has been easier since the Red Hat 5.2 days, in spite of the RPM hell problems. Somewhere along the line around ten years ago ease of installation leapt ahead with Ubuntu. UEFI seems set out to end that but having it preinstalled would render that checkbox moot. System76, Pogolinux, EmperorLinux, Slimbook, and others do well there. However, while their quality is good, shoddy hardware can still appear cheaper if one only compares the list price.
Now as then it is the OEM that is the largest barrier. So, I agree that it is marketing and missed opportunities with the supply chain blocking wider adoption. The latter is due to a lot of (possibly illegal) horse trading going on in regards to Windoze pricing. Tragically, customization is not a thing any more. It is one of the FOSS desktops' strengths but not one that can be mareted any more due to the public being so subdued into accepting the defaults. Ease of use is a big strong point, as are ease of maintenance, (relative) security, and a wider selection of non-game applications.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:54PM (5 children)
I know they get brainwashed, but is the public psyche really that pliable? I suppose it's really a case of your own product's marketing needs to align with and feed off the marketing campaigns of the competitors because it's a lot harder to fight the tide that's constantly washing over the collective consciousness.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM (3 children)
One of the takeaways from the case between M$ and Netscape, even back then, was that over 60% of people kept the defaults exactly as they are. I have a lot of anecdotes that convince me that the percentage is much higher nowadays. However, those are only anecdotes. It is past time for another proper study if it could get past all the political obstacles in place.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:23PM (2 children)
That's sad if it's true, because it suggests we're breeding nations of compliant drones that do not wish to question what is put in front of them or think critically. I'm extrapolating a lot from your example, but if I'm right, that's very bad for democracy.
I do have to wonder how they got that 60% figure though. The people who say yes to surveys and who used to leave the old "Send details of my experience to Micro$oft" checkbox checked (wow, asking before slurping, THOSE were the days!) probably are the same people that keep all the other defaults.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:06AM (1 child)
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:37AM
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
With GNU/Linux distros and any of the BSDs or BSD distros/forks, I'd agree a little. The defaults have gotten much better and people are getting quite usable defaults. Mostly, however, people nowadays come to GNU/Linux without IT experience and instead have a lot of baggage inflicted from long-term use of legacy systems, sometimes concurrently with GNU/Linux.
With the legacy systems, the situation with default settings is more difficult. On OSX it is more or less impossible to customize the interface. On the Vista series, particularly Vista10, not only is the interface hard to customize, but the changes get wiped out at arbitrary intervals by "updates", "upgrades", as well as whims of the M$ resellers posing as IT departments. Also, their "reformat, reinstall" mantra which they bleat does equal damage to customizations because they are so damn hard to restore, not just zapping third-party applications. The difficulty grinds people down and they just resign themselves to accepting the defaults. That carries over to all systems they use, good or bad.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:10PM
If you want to understand why non-techies aren't into customization, you need to stop thinking like a techie. Most people actually see retaining defaults as a *good thing*, and they're not necessarily wrong about that either. They don't want to customize, because they don't want to learn how the machine actually works. They want to be able to ask the guy sitting next to them or the neighbor kid or whoever how to accomplish some task, and they want step-by-step picture instructions (any text must be less than one sentence per photo) that they can follow exactly on their own system. If a single icon is different -- even if it's not an icon they need to use for that particular task -- then they assume something is broken. They don't see the computer the way we do; they see the computer like they see a microwave oven. It's an appliance with a certain predefined set of functionality which is activated by pressing a certain predefined sequence of buttons. And they just want to be able to memorize the button sequences that they need. And changing settings away from defaults just means learning new buttons and losing the ability to follow other peoples' instructions.
Most people don't have any clue what their systems are capable of. And they don't care. And a disturbing number of these people are even "software engineers"....
Go ask people sometime what they really *want* to do with their computers. In an ideal world, if they could have someone developing some custom software just for them, what would it do? Most people will look at you like you've got two heads; they'll barely even comprehend the question. Or they'll just say they want the software they already have to work faster or crash less. But new software, new interfaces, or even something as simple as a macro seems to be too imaginative for most people.
On the one hand, I want to say that people shouldn't be using computers if they don't understand them. On the other hand...I don't necessarily know all the inner workings of my microwave, and I don't want to. I look at what the store has and I pick one and I use it as designed. We've all got limited time and energy and we can't dig into every detail of every object we come into contact with.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
It isn't any of those things, it is just Microsoft. EEE proved that, put ANY non-Windows unit in stores that has minimal fit and finish work and they will sell. The only reason the EEE project was even allowed to occur was as a research project based on the success of OLPC, Asus and Intel were trying to design a similar low spec laptop but based on more "off the shelf" tech. It was only allowed onto the market because it really couldn't run Windows and nobody thought it would sell many units anyway. When they couldn't make enough to meet demand Microsoft took notice.
The next evolution of EEE was the 9" model and Microsoft was ready. They offered up XP for free and made it clear it was an offer that wasn't going to be refused. Asus was selling a lot of EEE PCs but selling a lot more Windows laptops worldwide and couldn't afford to lose that business so they accepted the offer and sold two versions, stores tended to only stock the Windows one because Microsoft made sure THEY played ball. You could order the Linux version, same as System76 and such. The Linux threat was mostly ended... until distros like Ubuntu adopted the EEE and made sure everything worked "out of the box" on one and people started loading them up since Windows was pretty unusable on one. So next Microsoft leaned on the, now multiple, hardware makers to adopt 10 and 11" screens so Windows would work. The SSDs also faded away in favor of spinning rust, bigger batteries to power it all. They became slightly smaller laptops and neither fish nor foul found few takers. The rise of the tablet ended this sad chapter as people found another way to escape Windows.
Then Google, seeing these things come to pass and seeing the hunger that existed for a laptop that actually worked, launched the Chromebook. Note that Google has one thing going for it that no other PC vendor has. No business relationship with Microsoft. At all.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:25AM
Just as an add-on comment, I owned both a 7" and 10" EEE. They were cute, but dear God were they an Operation Hairshirt. The 7" model had a barely-usable screen, barely-usable keyboard, and minimal storage space crammed with a Linux distro hacked up to fit into it. It was barely upgradeable/expandable to do anything else, e.g. plugging in a USB device other than a HID or storage device, it took an insane amount of hacking around just to be able to get it to recognise a GPS device. The 10" was less painful, but not by much. I don't think Microsoft had to do much to have it fail except sit back and wait, you needed to be a serious enthusiast to put up with it.
Having said that, its great success was that it convinced manufacturers that laptops don't have to be expensive boat-anchor clunkers, but can be cheap and light. $whateverBooks wouldn't exist today if the EEE hadn't shown the way.
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:52PM
I bought an EEEPC soon after it became available.
No, not the first model. Its screen was tiny and its built-in linux had a proprietary driver for, I think, the wifi chip.
The one I bought was the first EEEPC that did not require any proprietary drivers. It looked like a respectable laptop with a slightly small keyboard. And it was the first EEEPC that came with Windows. I immediately installed Debian on it. I kept Windows around on the off chance I would happen to need it sometime. And I occasionally did -- Adobe Digital Editions was never made available for Linux.
I used that machine as my primary machine until this year, when I replaced it with a Purism machine.
Most of my files are still on the EEEPC, and it still gets used about once a week. I am slowly migrating stuff from it to the new machine, intending to put them on the new machine in an organized fashion -- a kind of two-space copying garbage collection.
And I still use the old EEEPC to run an obsolete, and no longer installable, version of Adobe Digital Editions on 32-bit Wine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aim on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:58PM
I got a couple back then... a 9" and a 10" version. They were pretty much impossible to get with the local keyboard, or even at all here in local shops - had to order them from abroad. Also, there were *no* Linux versions available. I had to order the Windows version (yes, I know - hated forking money over to MS) and put my preferred GNU/Linux distro on there myself.
As for the 9" version: impossible to properly type on, the keys were simply too narrow. I repurposed it as my mp3 player, connected to the HiFi. The 10" is fine though, I used it a lot, and it still sees use from my kids. A big plus for those EEE PCs was the matte screen, no make-up mirror (aka "screen") there.
These days, the 32bit CPU is of course a hindrance, modern distros are ditching support.
Still, the hardware support was better than on my still current (4 years old) i7 laptop - with its "optimus" combo of intel + nvidia graphics, only the intel part is running properly; also the fracking ethernet controller of all parts is dropping its connection regularly. I'm starting to look towards Lenovo for a decent replacement...
I'd never have gotten the 7" model though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:20PM
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.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by DannyB on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:30PM (6 children)
IMO: Chrome OS / Chromebooks are the best shot at mass market "year of the Linux desktop".
New Chromebooks with the latest Chrome OS are in the process of getting the ability to securely run Linux apps. (That means the Linux app cannot compromise the Chrome OS, and thus your Google account.) Making it secure is the hard part.
Chrome OS already runs Android apps in a separate sandbox.
So on one "cheap" chromebook device you can have Chrome OS apps, Android apps and (coming soon) Linux apps. (Or put it in developer mode, use Crouton and run one or more Linux desktops today.)
Chromebooks are cheap. They are taking over education (a good thing). That means a whole generation of students who know Chrome OS. School districts get volume pricing. They can negotiate with multiple hardware vendors. Google makes it possible to create classrooms and accounts for students, and then "join" the devices to the school so that the school has total control over the device. Everything is in the cloud. Modern apps now develop for web browsers. If a chromebook is lost, stolen or eaten, then the district can replace it, and the student instantly has all of their class work and documents available. I hear some districts get them as cheap as $67 / unit. That starts to compete very well with dead-tree format textbooks.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:10PM (4 children)
So given the set of Chromebooks in stock at a particular store, how does one figure out which do and do not have a kernel new enough to support Crostini? Or is it better to buy a Chromebook sight unseen over the Internet without having tried its screen and keyboard?
(turns on someone else's Chromebook)
(presses Space as prompted)
(presses Enter as prompted)
How should the owner of a Chromebook in developer mode that is too old for Crostini protect the Chromebook from this sort of accidental powerwash?
Good luck using apps in the cloud while offline, such as on a moving school bus.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
I keep good physical control of my device. And have backups. I don't have a better answer. I do wish there was a better answer. I think Crostini will be a better answer.
Despite this, chromebooks ARE getting huge uptake in schools. There must be a reason. Like management of devices. Cost effectiveness. Security. Ease of re-wiping for use each new school year. Etc. The cloud does work at school and probably at home. Based on videos I see on YouTube, it is apparent some districts even issue chromebooks to faculty and staff. Use Google Docs and other apps.
IMO, in time this problem will go away. I anticipate the time when all new chromebooks have the capability to use the latest Chrome OS with Crostini. Today there are lists of which devices will and won't get Crostini support. If that is a major factor in your purchase decision of a chromebook, then definitely research.
All I can say is I am very happy with my Pixelbook. Crouton is not perfect. But it's almost as good as running an actual linux distribution install. I can do everything I want. Run GUI apps. Run command line apps. Youtube downloader. FFmpeg to convert files. Eclipse. Java.
I just make sure I keep good backups.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)
I agree that nothing's perfect about Chromebooks. Here are some more edge cases where their limits are prominent:
Children, especially with younger siblings, are more likely to lack the ability to "keep good physical control of [their] device."
Having backups, even regularly tested backups, is one thing. Time to travel from where you physically are to where your backups are and perform the restoration is another. So is recovery of work since the last daily opportunity to back up.
So much for starting on homework during the often substantial bus ride home, and so much for the ability of children whose parents are working poor or who are between a layoff and a new job to complete their homework.
If only physical stores made these lists available to shoppers without each shopper having to buy a smartphone and subscribe to a cellular data plan...
(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.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:15PM
https://9to5google.com/2018/11/01/chromebooks-to-never-receive-linux-full-list/ [9to5google.com]
This just came out. I'm not sure that it is complete, however. Still looking into it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:53PM
I have a close friend who opted for a Chromebook after being 1000% fed up with his previous Windows laptop. He couldn't be happier with it. As little as I think of Google I at least have to give them credit for bucking the trend of operating systems that use all the resources you can throw at them before the user even fucking does anything...as with Windows and Mac. Granted, it was somewhat self-serving as it allows them to go with less expensive hardware, but I can still appreciate as someone using very modern (but lean) Linux on really old hardware.
If I'm not mistaken, they also don't use systemd...at least certainly not by default, as far as I know. Clearly Google has no need nor desire to drink the RH kool-aid on that "if-I-wanted-that-I'd-use-Windows" trend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:44PM (3 children)
The company I worked for from 2000 to 2002 gave us Linux Desktops as workstations from a company that only produced Linux desktops (I think it was RedHat, but it could have been someone else). They worked wonderfully for us. And this was well before the 2008 timeframe this article references.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
I tried Red Hat at home around that time. At first it seemed to work great. Then for some reason the internet connection stopped working. I spent hours checking all the settings and even tried a full reinstall. Nothing fixed it. It wasn't a hardware issue, because putting Windows on made it work. I love Linux, but it certainly wasn't easy to use in those days. It is now.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:07AM
I tried to put windows on a computer once: I didn't have a driver disk for the modem.
Windows asked me if I wanted to download the driver. I thought "Okay!", smiled and clicked 'Yes'.
Installed Linux without a problem.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:11PM
My work computer from that time frame came from VALinux Systems [channelfutures.com].
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:54PM
There is also the "Telikin" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telikin [wikipedia.org] marketed to older folks.
(Score: 1) by zoward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM
It's an ASUS EEE 900A. The Xandros desktop it came with the single most atrocious linux desktop I've ever seen. It was slow as a dog, and felt horribly unintuitive to use. I would think if anything chased casual users away from the linux verison of the EEE, it would have been the default desktop. I'm assuming Asus must have had some kind of support deal in place for Xandros. Shortly after trying it out, I wiped the drive and replaced it with Ubuntu, after which it became a nice little machine, albeit a little cramped for space. Over time I upgraded the memory to 2 GB, replaced the 4GB SSD with a 32 GB SSD, and eventually replaced the keyboard after it went bad. It still runs well today, although I haven't used it in a while. I seem to recall having Haiku running on it at one point as well. I should probably dig it out and take it for a spin for old times' sake...
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:04PM
I miss that little trooper. It was back in 2009 and 2010 I think. It ran Linux, I think Arch, like a champ. I would even downclock it to 100 MHz (yes, that was possible) and stay in console, no X, using it as just a music player and text reader for very long bus trips.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:07PM
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).
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:11PM
They were aiming at same niche as smartphones/phablets currently have taken over.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:21PM
The default OS it came with was slow...replaced it with EasyPeasy OS...and it worked as a charm for what it was supposed to be.
Editing documents, web browsing, emails, watching a movie and reasonable battery life.
It was the precursor of chromebook.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:23PM
The netbook, were it to be made thin and efficient, is a vastly superior form factor to a tablet. The entire problem was software...Microsoft literally drove the entire market away (and to tablets) with their anticompetitive tactics to make sure everything ran Windows. And now because of them we are stuck with annoying touchscreens on every device.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
Then you either have Linux on the desktop, or BSD on the desktop.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Wednesday November 07 2018, @01:20AM (1 child)
No, not sure what it's running, but it's white and has its own answering machine built in. My wife keeps twisting the phone, though, when she talks on it and the cord always wins up twisted aaaallllllllll to hell.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 12 2018, @02:52PM
I wrote a journal that partially discusses your obsolete phone. Actually, though, in a business they're not yet obsolete, only in homes. Most people have either Android or Apple these days.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday November 06 2018, @07:17PM (3 children)
A netbook was like a real laptop, but with the cheapest, lowest-performance Intel CPU/chipset/video available, and 25% of the screen chopped off.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:26PM (2 children)
All true, but (initially) they made up for that by being ridiculously, impulse-purchase cheap and got the job done for people who wanted an email, web browser and simple word processor.
Nobody would have bought one for serious computing or even substantial office work, but they had huge potential as a second/third system, a kids computer etc. or someone who just wanted to get on email. Basically, the niche that, some years later, became occupied by tablets and large-screen phones. I got one of the original eees to play with, and then passed it on to a non-techie relative who relied on it for web and email for years afterwards.
I think there were a few problems - first, Microsoft shat themselves (this was around the era of the Windows Vista debacle that undermined the familiarity lock-in of Windows) and threw all their weight behind getting Windows onto Netbooks, dumping a cheap "Netbook" edition of Windows XP (which they'd previously been trying to kill off in favour of Vista) on the market. Trouble is, the original netbooks barely had the grunt for Windows, so the next gen of netbooks had to be more powerful and lost the end-of-argument low price tags. Eventually, they just became entry-level Windows laptops.
Its not all Microsofts fault, though - Netbook makers had really put the minimum effort into their Linux distributions and - beyond the basic "launchpad" and setup - not really shown any attention to detail such as tailoring the standard apps for the small screen (even simple things like turning off a bunch of toolbars by default - and with everything open-source it couldn't have been that hard to strip some of the whitepace from the dialog boxes so they fit on one screen). Also, ISTR that Asus were buggers for the "Osbourne Effect" - I never got round to buying one of the "improved" EEEs because by the time anybody had them in stock they'd announced a new one....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)
"All true, but (initially) they made up for that by being ridiculously, impulse-purchase cheap and got the job done for people who wanted an email, web browser and simple word processor."
While I agree with all of what you are saying, there was another big advantage to the EEEPC: they are incredibly small and light. While many grumble about the small screen size, the small size and weight make them very easy to take with you anywhere. Before I bought my first EEEPC, I had a laptop given to me by my employer. Even though it couldn'the have weighed more than 10-15 pounds, and had a 12 inch screen, tops, it was like carrying an albatross around with me everywhere I went! Now, I just throw my EEEPC in my backpack and off I go. As you said, it doesn't need to do everything; it just needs to do stuff that I want to do on the go.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:09PM
The magic combination was incredibly small and light and cheap. If you just wanted small and light you could, at the time, get something like a Sony Vaio - but probably at least 5x the price of a netbook and, although quite a bit more powerful, probably still not powerful enough to replace your main machine.
I remember that in those days the MacBook Air (which first appeared around then) did, bizarrely, get compared with netbooks although it was really the first "ultrabook" (i.e. quite powerful laptop with a decent-sized screen and keyboard made as thin and light as possible) which wasn't quite the same thing. Of course, when Windows got pushed onto Netbooks they eventually evolved into ultrabooks and lost the original "cheap" USP.
(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?
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:06AM
...waits for you to stop choking on your drink...
Sorry about that, I'll buy you a new virtual monitor to go with your new virtual drink.
=-)p
I had one of these once.
It came with XP but was so underpowered I Nuke&Paved it, gave it Ubuntu, & had a device that was awesome for what it was.
Email, text editing, light web surfing, it all worked fine.
I wish I had another one, I'd try to get a Linux based screen reader working...