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Falling Hardware Prices Favor Linux
An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting arguing that, as hardware prices fall below $250 for laptops and desktops, Linux should gain as the Microsoft tax stands out in sharper relief. "In previous years, if you were spending US$1500 and up on a laptop, the Microsoft tax you were paying didn't seem like such a big deal. XP or Vista was pre-installed, fairly convenient... But as the price of hardware for small basic machines comes down, (think under US$250 by the end of next year), then software price starts to become a big issue. Why would you pay the price of your new laptop again just for the software, when all you want to do is really basic things?"
Linux will never 'take off' until the Linux people stop answering almost every question with the equivalent of "Go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." Most people just want to at a tasty Linux sandwich, and they have no aspirations to be master chefs.
As far as I know, Ubuntu is the only distro that mostly understands this. Just a coincidence that it's the most popular desktop?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
This is one of thos cliche phrases that are, oh boy, so stupid, it's not funny anymore. i don't pay any MS tax! I GLADLY pay to use their products. Even if there are free ones. I like Windows (and am VERY PROUD of being a Windows user), I like programming for Windows, I love Visual studia and .NET. So I am a custommer not a tax payer. End of the story.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MS isn't stupid. If linux begins to seriously cannibalizing their market, they will simply reduce Windows OS price to 50-100USD, with even bigger academic discounts. That would cut into their profits, but it'll keep people happy and maintain their OS dominance.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
... but for now a $400 computer with Windows sounds pretty good to most people, too. And the learning process (particularly if they choose XP over Vista, as they can for now) will be significantly less arduous for the average joe user with some previous Windows experience. Not that the friendlier Linux distros (Ubuntu and its ilk) are hard to use, but they're more intimidating than what people already know backwards and forwards.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This makes the assumption that Microsoft cannot drop the price of Windows. They have lots of side products and the cash to drive a price war for a long time. I think Microsoft charges oems maybe $30 for installing windows. That may sound like a lot but then then people spend $5 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks
Add this to the list of things which should make Linux gain marketshare. Off the top of my head, the list includes: Microsoft's problems with XP/Vista, Apple's problems with 10.4/10.5, Apple's switch to Intel, the latest Windows virus, the introduction of the iPhone, the introduction of the iTMS, the fact that Balmer is a sweaty ape, and on and on.
The reason that Linux is, and will remain a niche player in the OS desktop market have almost next to nothing to do with technology. I think many posters here have at least a minimum familiarity with Linux, at least enough to know that a well-maintained Linux system can easily do all of the things more normal computer buyers need. It can check email, surf the web, handle digital pictures, play music, load music onto iPods, balance checkbook and find porn. The problem for Linux is that Windows and OS X can do all these things as well. Given this, there's no reason for an average consumer to switch.
What about hardware lock in? What about free, as in speech and beer?
No one cares.
I will repeat that: the average consumer doesn't care about either one. Most consumers already hold themselves in a sort of vendor lock in. If they've had a good experience buying from Dell, odds are they will continue to buy from Dell. If they've had good luck with Macs their entire computing lives, odds are they will stay there. And it's not just with computers. We all know people who will only by Hondas, or Fords, or Black & Decker or Bose. This isn't a technology issue, it's a marketing and consumer loyalty issue, and no amount of fancy kernel engineering will change that. It's the same for free speech and beer: your average consumer doesn't see the cost of the OS, because s/he buys one with the computer. My brother ran the OS his Powerbook came with (10.2.8) for years. He only accidently upgraded to 10.4 because he brought his machine to me to fix an unrelated problem, and I said something like, "Holy shit, you're still running 10.2.8." It was all the same to him, and I'm not sure he noticed the difference between 10.2 and 10.4. I'm sure he will be running whatever version of 10.4 his MacBook Pro came with until the next time he sees me.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
If my mother were to walk into best buy and buy a Pavilion dv9000 with Ubuntu preinstalled, she's going to have to go through what would have to be hell for her and back to get it running: boot options like "nokvm noapic noacpi", blacklisting bcm43xx, installing ndiswrapper over a wired connection, manually installing flash for their 64-bit system.
What are you talking about? You would of course buy Ubuntu preinstalled precisely because you would have to do none of these thing. The OEM has installed and configured Ubuntu with the hardware working. (If not you would rightfully complain just as you would about a broken Windows installation.)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I was just having a conversation with a buddy of mine about this subject this afternoon. Rather than desktop/laptop prices though, our talk centered around servers. I was pricing Dell blade servers today. Do you know you can get a blade chassis with 10 blades 'loaded to the gills' for around $60K? Now granted, that may not be small potatoes, but for the horsepower involved (each blade has dual 3GHz Quad cores with 16GB RAM and dual 146GB drives) it's peanuts. My use revolves around one use and one use only...Xen on CentOS. That $60k is a lot of jack to the average /.er, but compared to what I would have had to (and did) settle for a couple of years ago, it's practically free. Man, what a great time to be in this industry. The more commoditized (yeah, I realize that probably isn't even a slang term) hardware becomes, the better for me/us/anyone using FOSS solutions. Love it! Love it! Love it!!!
As hardware prices fall below OS cost, it will be possible for Microsoft to 'bundle' the hardware with the OS. Perhaps the next Windows family will be 'Windows Laptop', 'Windows Home Computer', 'Windows Server', each coming with the hardware pre-installed. The current situation only appears to be something of a conundrum because we are accustomed to thinking that the hardware should be the most expensive part.
Loose lips lose spit.
OEM's don't have a lot of incentive for selling $250 computers, as the profit margins are very tight in such a low price ranges (even without MS tax). It's not like 06's $700 desktop can't be built today for $250, or '05's $700 destop couldn't be build for $250 in '06, and so on. As hardware prices fall, OEMs simply up the specs of their base systems so that they maintain their profit sweet spot.
The article really has it wrong. Falling HW prices make paying the "MS tax" more palatable. Someone who was set to pay $1200 for a system with Vista Home, is now looking at paying $800, or will pay $1100 with Ultimate and more kick ass hardware that works with the OS rather than buying a kick ass cheap machine that may not work with the free, cheap OS.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I certainly do not see Linux as a cheap knock off, but OSS in general is free, so it is kind of hard to push it as anything else other than cheap. Cost in OSS has no relation on quality, however, which actually is OSS's biggest business problem... Love it or hate it, but people associate low cost with cheap quality. That is just the way it is...
:-)
From my perspective, I hope we stop calling always calling it Linux, and rather just focus on the distro, such as "Ubuntu" or maybe "Dell OS"... The beauty of Linux is that it excels when it is in the background designed for specific tasks, such as in Tivo's, or even embedded devices.... For example, do we call Apple's OS "OSX NextStep/BSD"???
This is one of thos cliche phrases that are, oh boy, so stupid, it's not funny anymore. i don't pay any city tax! I GLADLY pay to use their services. Road repair, fire and police are all great things that I appreciate, so it's obvious that this is not really a tax. Even if it's mandatory for people who don't use those services. Oh, wait...
I've got no problems with your use and enjoyment of MS software (I used to know a lot of perfectly reasonable people who agreed with you, although that number definitely seems to be shrinking), but why the hell am I forced to subsidize it? The fact is that "MS tax" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe the mandatory, non-negotiable bundling that's usually offered even if you do want the bundle.
Unless Linux vendors produce what people want, there will not be that much anticipated uptake at all.
If one has to download and configure not less that 4 pieces of software just to get a basic mail-server functional, using the command line and editing text files which can be prone to errors...
If one has to put up with slow loading software (read OpenOffice.org) running on ugly interfaces that sometimes look incomplete (read KDE and GNOME), then we in the Linux world will wait a long time to get noticed especially on the desktop.
But it's getting better on the server front. The Apache web server for example does not require that many add ons [if any], to get it fully functional, and the upcoming release of KDE looks very promising.
On the GNOME front, I am not impressed by its inability to do basic file operations in the file dialog.
Those that argue that this functionality should be restricted to the file manager have never explained why one can still create a directory/folder within this same file dialog. With their argument, it should be removed. Period.
matter that much either.
The fact is-- many businesses going the open source route save money, but many pay more. Those that pay more understand that the money they save on software license fees can go towards making their entire operations more efficient, and they usually will send significantly more on consulting labor in this regard than they saved on software license costs.
Open source software is not the low-cost cheap solution. It is actually the high-end, more expensive solution which provides a great deal more power and flexibility than the truly cheap alternatives.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When I posted the above that was the only comment on this article. I didn't do it to annoy or offend or "riding the top post just to get their post seen", just clicked on the first bit of the page that caught my eye when looking for "reply".
I think I've posted maybe 20 comments ever on this site, this is I think the first one I've posted with the new system in place. I hope that you'll be able to overlook this small omission.
Sorry you feel so strongly about it - next time I will look that little bit longer so as not to offend.
regards, the_leander
I take a certain amount of pride in the market adoption of linux. Granted I haven't written a single line of code on the whole of my computer, but I have helped many a new user on the forum of my preferred (yet not current) distro, fedora. I think that this is a nice way of helping out within the community, and it is the whole community who builds the system, packages it, ships it, distributes it, and gets others to consider adopting it. When I have more money I'll probably donate as well, and I feel that what I've done - and what everyone else in that system does - makes us all a kind of "we". And that leads to a certain pride.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
ESR has a proposed solution to this in one of his essays: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
Basically, the solution is to build in an (optional) method to the mainstream Linux distributions so that users can purchase and install legitimate codecs, or get them with the distribution pre-installed. The parent company of Lindows purchased the rights to the codecs' IP already, so it's really a matter of taking them and working the licenses into Ubuntu or a similar, more popular distro.
Yes, this would make the resulting distro non-free, in the same way that pre-installing a proprietary video driver would, and it would mean that there would be a charge to the user for each machine that they got with Linux on it. However, it would still be far cheaper than Windows (remember: Windows has to pay for the same IP licenses, it's just built into the cost of the entire OS; with Linux, that would be your only cost), and as a result you'd get a machine that could deal with modern multimedia and video out of the box, or with at most a one-click install. None of the current hunting around on forums for instructions that come with a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, informational-purposes-only" disclaimers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Thanks for bothering to click the link.
Do you want to do that and try commenting again?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
So the true way to get Linux to the masses would be to write Linux crapware, and then pay the computer vendors to put that Linux crapware on Linux laptops?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's right, I did make this claim.
And I know why the effect didn't bite. It's because the big OEMs get their cost of Windows installation offset by the fees that crapware manufacturers play to get their demo versions and adware and spyware bundled into the distro. For an outfit like Dell, those fees are probably large enough to make installing Windows a net profit generator.
This would also explain why Linux configurations generally cost more that Windows configurations with identical hardware. It's not conspiracy, they're just trying to maintain margin in the absence of the crapware fees.
>>esr>>
The whole "people don't care about what technology they are using" argument fails the moment users realize they can get free stuff. For example the mainstream adoption of bittorent to download movies. All of a sudden everyone knows how it works and where to look for torrents etc.
And when Linux means that their laptop costs 1/2 as much, all of a sudden everyone will be recommending packages out of Ubuntu.
The one flaw with this whole thing is that it is absurd to think that Microsoft would blindly price themselves out of the market. Microsoft will sell XP for the next 10 years at $15 a pop if that is what they have to do to stay dominant. They charge $100/machine only because the market will bear it.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
"So what's up, Joe?"
"Man, I'm bummed. I got this pretty hot new laptop for three hundred bucks but it didn't come with Windows, and I don't have a copy of it anywhere."
"Oh? Hmm, I've got the disc right here in my drawer. Hold on, I'll burn you a copy." *takes out a CD with 'Windows XP' and a serial number scribbled on it in marker*
egypt urnash minimal art.
Eric Raymond predicted several years ago that eventually falling hardware prices would have this effect.
A couple of years ago when I saw him at a conference I asked him if that was still his prediction and he replied that he was no longer so sure, because he thought that it was possible that Microsoft would simply cut the price of the Windows OS (to close to zero) to cancel out this effect.
That hasn't happened, but I think it's more than possible that it might.
*I* predict that by 2020, cement will be free! That cold fusion will destroy every energy company in existance, and that everyone will be using iPhones.
Or, we can toss these stupidly speculative articles and actually cover something that's happened, or currently happening? I thought this was *news* for nerds.
Oh, and by the way, you'll never see a laptop or a desktop for $250, because at that price point there's no point in selling them at all unless your shop is selling thousands of them a month. The same thing has happened to PDAs. You can now only get a Palm Tungsten E in a bundle with a wireless keyboard because the technology has been on the shelf so long that it's not worth $300 by itself anymore. In 6 months, you won't be able to get them at all, replaced with something else at that price point.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Since a $500 dual core laptop (pretty sweet deal) comes with Vista home pro, it feels like Vista is free.
It might be different, if you saw the price tag for $350 for the same laptop without Vista - but until then you think that you got a decent laptop and it comes with free Vista.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Not so fast! When hardware prices are high, it makes sense to use GNU/Linux or BSD on barebones legacy hardware. Falling hardware prices means that it is cheaper to feed Vista's gluttonous hardware requirements.
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
If my mother were to walk into best buy and buy a Pavilion dv9000 with Ubuntu preinstalled, she's going to have to go through what would have to be hell for her and back to get it running: boot options like "nokvm noapic noacpi", blacklisting bcm43xx, installing ndiswrapper over a wired connection, manually installing flash for their 64-bit system.. These are not things that your average non-geek is capable of doing. Until they don't need to do those things to go on facebook, download music and watch movies on youtube, Linux on the laptop is simply not going to happen.
I walked into a store and bought a PC with Linux preinstalled. When I got home I was able to plug it in and use it just as you describe. I didn't have to fiddle with and settings, boot options, or install additional software. Heck it was several months before I did install more software. Heck, I plugged an Ethernet cable in from my router into the net card on the PC and immediately was able to surf the net. On the other hand when I plugged the router into my Windows PC I had to go through and setup the settings for the PC to use the router.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Unfortunately, the lowest priced hardware tends to be the hardest to get working with Linux."
This is also true of Windows. For those who have tried to get a Toshiba laptop functioning properly using a boxed version of Windows XP, they'll see no difference with Linux.
Most OEMs bundle "their" Windows with their hardware. Toshiba, for example, images a version of Windows XP with all the drivers for their hardware installed. If you were packaging Linux with as an OEM, you would do the same thing.
When using a boxed Windows XP, the Toshiba laptop here needed video card drivers, WiFi drivers, and audio card drivers downloaded and installed. I would expect the same to be true with a comparable Linux distribution. I'm sure that before HP ships a Linux machine, they have installed all the drivers for the hardware in the machine. Additionally, the lower end hardware has probably more "customized" Windows images on it.
Ask anyone who has rebuilt a laptop from an original Windows XP installation. Then ask them how many drivers were need to bring the machine to the OEM bundle performance. The same would be true of a Linux distribution.
- The install process. In linux, if you need an application that you can get via apt-get, good. Otherwise? Compile your own. Which means that as the libraries get replaced due to security or other issues, you have to recompile those third party applications. Also, you have to figure out by yourself which development packages you need. And so on and so forth. Are we kidding? On a Mac, I drag these things in the application folder and that's it! Also on linux, once something breaks in the dependencies, good luck fixing it.
- Video. I like 24 inch and 30 inch flat panels. Getting them to work under linux is a pain. If the card is too old, Ubuntu does not support it well. If it is too new, neither. Also, 1920x1200 is not a standard resolution. Oh, and once you get it running, try to have your laptop automatically adapt to the native resolution of the LCD you happen to connect it. You need at the very least to restart X. And don't dream of dealing with the fact that, at work, my laptop is on the left of the flat panel (and I like to use them both), and at home, on the right. On a Mac? You plug the LCD in and you are done. Nothing to tinker with. Rearranging the logical position of the screens? Just drag them around.
- Configuration files. In linux, everybody assumes you love the command line. I needed recently to have a file containing an encrypted partition to store there my email. In linux, the instruction began thus: "It is very simple. Create a file
/etc/idontknowwhat containing the list of partitio...." are we kidding? And if the partition is on a USB stick I have to do it on every PC on which I want to read my email?? On the Mac, I just create an encrypted partition with the disk and that's it, no tinkering with configuration files.
- Wireless. In linux, after a few times I suspend/wake up my laptop, and change networks, always something goes wrong, and I have to reboot to see the network again (on a Thinkpad X40). Never had issues on my Mac.
- I can get frequency scaling, disk spinoff, and all that to work on linux, but just because I am (or used to be) a hacker. On a Mac? No issues, it just works.
And the list goes on and on... I have come to the conclusion that linux is fine if you (a) like tinkering with computers per se, or (b) install it on a server. Otherwise, it's essentially a way to waste your time.This is also true of Windows. For those who have tried to get a Toshiba laptop functioning properly using a boxed version of Windows XP, they'll see no difference with Linux.
The particular difference that I saw is that my cheap WiFi card came with a Windows driver in the box, but I have been unable to find a working Linux driver for it and I've been unable to get a wrapper around the Windows driver to work under Linux. When I start seeing cheap hardware shipping with Linux drivers I'll believe that Windows and Linux users see no difference. Can anyone point me to a WiFi card for my desktop that does ship with a Linux driver?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
This may be true for DVD and other standard-definition video formats. But high-definition formats such as HD DVD and especially Blu-ray Disc generally have tighter compliance and robustness [wikipedia.org] requirements. I don't see how a Free kernel on commodity hardware can conform to these.
While the kernel is open source drivers and software don't have to be. For instance Nero Linux, which supports both Blu-ray and HD DVDs, isn't. Other software capable:
- High-def DVD SoC supports HD-DVD, BlueRay, Linux
- Playing HD DVD On Linux. It seems everything's in place to play your HD DVD discs in Linux. The kernel supports the UDF filesystem, the recently released BackupHDDVD C++ for Linux can decrypt the content, and the latest VLC and Mplayer can play it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Neither.
OEM Linux disappeared from Walmart.com in late January.
Walmart.com's cheapest Compaq Presario has an Athlon Dual Core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, DVD burner, GeForce 6150 SE graphics and runs Vista Basic. $348.
Top of the line at $1900:
The HP Elite with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 3 GB RAM, 2 500 GB HDDs, ATSC tuner, etc., running Vista Ultimate
And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?
Where they have always been: In Limbo. Non-existent.
1) HP Vista laptops ship with recovery DVDs, there is no reason to create one.
This is incorrect. My HP vista laptop (HP Pavilion dv6258se) didn't come with recovery DVDs. I had to go through the annoying 'let us make you a recovery dvd. PS this is a one time process, don't mess it up' and of course... it failed to burn the 2nd one. At least it let me restart the process completely including remaking the images before burning again, total time of well over an hour. I'd guess different models have different recovery disc methods.
Having had to fix a bootloader issue, I can clearly say that these home brewed recovery DVDs are not a real vista DVD set. They have no recovery capabilities, they are the standard proprietary reformat the HD and start from scratch sort. I had to use a 'real' vista DVD.
On an entirely different matter - I'd suggest staying away from HP if you want to switch wifi cards. They vendor lock specific cards requiring a BIOS hack to get something like the latest atheros cards to work. A totally unnecessary annoyance.
I'm here to help. There are plenty of good wifi cards out there that linux supports out of the box. Here's one that works flawlessly out of the box. Also, if you don't mind telling me which card you have I may be able to help you out. Email me at chuckyb21 at hotmail dot com if you would like a hand.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Really? Until perhaps 2000, Windows didn't come with MP3 support. To this day, it still doesn't come with AAC support, and WMA is a joke.
Windows doesn't include popular video codecs, either. Divx/MPEG-4 is everywhere, but NOT included with Windows... Everyone's still forced to download the codec from Divx.com... And, you guessed it, they provide a Linux version as well.
So, nobody is going to take Linux seriously, because it requires a couple clicks in Synaptic to install every audio and video codec you could ever want (MPlayer/libavcodec). But everyone takes Windows seriously, because it forces you to trawl the web to find every single individual video and audio codec you want to use...
I can see you're right. Linux* is going in the wrong direction... It should be MORE Windows-like, and make multimedia encoding and playback infinitely more difficult.
And as for MP3s... The patent expires in a couple years, and the point becomes moot (see: GIFs).
* (Disclaimer: I'm actually a FreeBSDer... Long live Slackware)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... cheap hardware means cheap Vista-capable computers. Don't forget the swing goes both ways.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You are either making up a good story are just full of crap.
Costco.. model dv6604cl Purchased this week.
The slip in the box states;
Restore your system without discs
Your computer includes a new system recovery feature that does not require CDs or DVDs.
If you need to repair your system, you can do it from the hard drive or from your own set of recovery discs.
To burn your own set of recovery discs, select Start> Recovery Manager > click Advanced Options > Recovery disc creation.
Having personally broken the HP security tape on the box and completing the inventory of the contents, I can assure you there are no recovery discs in the box. At the bottom of the page it states,
Important: HP recommends that you create recovery discs to be sure that you can restore your system to its original factory state if you experience serious system failure or instability.
If you want to order recovery media instead of creating your own discs, contact HP at:
htt;://www.hp.com
Copyright 2007
Hewlett-Packard Development Company I.P
The truth shall set you free!