I've gone in to several stores and taken a look at their netbook line-up.
The Windows netbooks are given glossy posters, with screensavers showing their specs and other marketing babble.
The Linux netbooks sit at the end, with the screen blanked and with no marketing whatsoever, other than a bold price tag.
Netbook manufacturers and retailers in general are failing really hard at marketing the selling points of these machines properly ("Comes with a free Microsoft Office-compatible Office suite and hundreds of other applications" and other benefits of the platform, better battery life, shorter boot times, etc..).
What worries me is that people will see this half-assed exercise and conclude that the Linux on consumer machines experiment has failed, when in reality it was never really given a chance in the first place.
I find the linux they tend to put on these netbooks is crippled and streamlined to do only a few basic things. Perhaps that's making people think linux is useless?
I found the linux that came with my acer aspire one totally unusable, but I instantly swapped it to ubuntu 8.10 which whips windows ass any day.
The problem is that they install totally worthless versions of linux on these machines because they are incompetent. Also the linux was modded to look like windows which would be confusing for anyone.
They don't mention that, at least on amazon.com (haven't looked at .co.uk), the XP machine also happens to be the top of the line vs. the ones sold with Linux have half the specs (1024 vs 512 MB ram, 6-cell vs 3-cell battery, tiny SSD vs. 120GB+ hard drive).
I bought one with WinXP, and immediately threw Linux on it. I'm willing to believe I'm in the minority in doing so, but to say the _only_ reason people might be buying Windows is for Windows' sake, and not even mention this possibility to debunk it seems disingenuous to me.
I installed Ubuntu on my eeePC and the wireless works fine on my WPA2 network. Though I don't recall having a problem with the default Linux OS, either.
I've gone in to several stores and taken a look at their netbook line-up.
The Windows netbooks are given glossy posters, with screensavers showing their specs and other marketing babble.
The Linux netbooks sit at the end, with the screen blanked and with no marketing whatsoever, other than a bold price tag.
Netbook manufacturers and retailers in general are failing really hard at marketing the selling points of these machines properly ("Comes with a free Microsoft Office-compatible Office suite and hundreds of other applications" and other benefits of the platform, better battery life, shorter boot times, etc..).
What worries me is that people will see this half-assed exercise and conclude that the Linux on consumer machines experiment has failed, when in reality it was never really given a chance in the first place.