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?"

Comments

Serving the diners or the cooks?

[shanen]

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?

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Odiumjunkie]

> and they have no aspirations to be master chefs. That's just as well, Halo 3 won't run on linu... oh.

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Xtifr]

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." Done and done. Oh, and BTW, there are no "the Linux people". You might as well criticise "the Microsoft people" based on the utterly clueless answers you'll get from a salesdroid at Best Buy. (If I based my opinion of MS on them...) But the fact is that Linux has taken off, and there are a wide variety of businesses and indivuduals selling and/or supporting Linux.

I'd say the biggest difference is that with Windows, the cost of support is somewhat built into the price of the system, whereas with Linux, it's frequently (though not always) packaged separately. This means that support for MS systems can be a great deal if you just have one system, but not such a good deal if you have hundreds. With Linux, it's frequently the reverse.

Of course, unpaid support for both systems is pretty problematic. But that's a separate matter. However, even there, Linux leads by having Ubuntu. MS has no equivalent of a free system with free support.

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I used to think Linux people were bad with answering questions, until I got a job revolving around Windows CE. Every Microsoft "expert" out there tells you URRR LOOK IN DUH PLATFURM BULDER MANUAL LOL when the manual is so disjointed and nonlinear you'd swear it was done by the author of the House of Leaves. Or a particular article in the manual never got updated to pertain to the newest version of Windows CE you're using such that you're wasting your time messing with registry keys that Windows CE stopped recognizing years ago.

At least when Linux people answer you, it's "okay do this, then this, then this, in that order -- and watch out for x, y, and z". Microsoft people are "okay look in the manual" and then the manual of the product you're trying to use just has clues scattered about in many tiny articles that you have to piece together.

Fuck no. Linux's world these days, in terms of how-tos, is leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft culture. The only reason Windows has any edge over Linux these days is "IT HAS GAEMS", and even that's only because of a self-feeding cycle among game company marketing weenies where game developers won't make Linux games because WINDOWS HAS GAEMS AND LINUX DOESNT SO LETS MAKE MOAR WINDOZE GAEMS.

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[TheNetAvenger]

Just for time comparisons, I'll let you take a brand new HP Vista laptop, Power it up, make a set of recovery disks, connect wireless, and create a couple user accounts.


You are either making up a good story are just full of crap.

1) HP Vista laptops ship with recovery DVDs, there is no reason to create one.

2) Connecting to wireless is as easy as clicking on the freaking ballon that says, networks are available, click to connect to one, and even if it is WPA or WEP, you type in the freaking number or insert the USB drive with the key.

3) Setting up accounts is hard on Vista? Wow, then you better run from any *nix. Control Panel -> User accounts -> Create new account (Type Name and Password, select security level) Done...

4) Product activation is automatic if you tell it to just activate when you are online, or one click in the control panel.

5) AV Software? Wow, that is tough, download AVG, and you are done.

So again tell us how this took you ALL DAY?

I'll call you out on this, as I just delivered several new HP laptops to family and friends that don't even understand the difference between the left and right mouse buttons, and they ALL completed the tasks you describe by themselves in under 5 minutes...

So which is it, are you really that stupid or lying to get positive SlashDot points?

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Hal_Porter]

DirectX 10 is just a thin wrapper over the WDM driver model.

So if you run a DirectX 10 game on Vista and it calls DrawPrimitive with a bunch of polygons, Windows can switch to kernel mode and make an call into a function in the graphics driver which knows how to set the hardware up to do the work. The key thing here is that all this stuff is highly integrated. There's competition between ATI and NVidia and so both have an incentive to make this as efficient as possible. Since Windows has an enormous market share it makes sense to optimize the hardware so that the device driver doesn't need to do anything time consuming. So the hardware is designed to be able to read DirectX datastructures.

Now consider on Wine. The game makes the call to DrawPrimitive. So far so good. But Linux doesn't have WDM. As far as I can tell Wine needs to emulate the function using OpenGL. All the DirectX datastructures need to be converted to OpenGL ones. Then the OpenGL driver needs to do another conversion back to the hardware format which was designed to be compatible with DirectX. And unless you have the closed source drive which is not included in most Linux distributions it won't even attempt to use hardware acceleration. And from what I can tell the ATI closed source driver isn't particularly good.

Now on Windows Halo 2 is somewhat scandalously tied to Vista or XBox 360 since Microsoft want to sell one of either to people that want to play Halo 2. But most games aren't going to be like that - they'll work on either DirectX 9 or 10.

And actually, I've got Vista here and DirectX 10 works very well, even on a laptop GPU. Looking at really high end benchmarks it's not as optimized as DirectX9 on XP yet, and it will take another six months to do so. Similarly on the Linux side ATI will document the hardware and allow people to write an optimized open source driver. But the Windows side has massive advantages here - market share for sure but also the technical one that in Windows the hardware was designed to be able to do what the game asks for directly. If the graphics companies know that they're doing they can make the driver a very thin layer that just passes a pointer from the user mode application to hardware and sets it going. Wine can't do that.

MS Tax?

[El Lobo]

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.

Re:MS Tax?

[JonJ]

But for everyone that doesn't want Windows, it is indeed a tax.

Re:MS Tax?

[Glonoinha]

It was a hypothetical question, and in the hypothetical question the 'pirated' disk was reinstalled using the numbers on the little sticker on the back, so in theory the original license does cover the 'pirated' version.

I'm a SuSE Desktop 10.1 user so it doesn't really matter - but it's a good exercise for the course, worth considering.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Look for a price drop

[dokebi]

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.

A Windows license is not that expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Nope

[noewun]

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.

Re:Nope

[noewun]

No. No.

And no.

I know there's a general bias against marketing on Slashdot. Hell, even I think it's bullshit 50% of the time. But marketing--real, well done marketing, like Apple does--is a very difficult thing, and it's something which very few companies in any industry do well. Some companies do it well and poorly at the same time. Most of Microsoft's market is for shit, but their XBox division does it very well (at least in the U.S. They suck at it in Japan.)

Fr'example, let's look at the iPod versus the Zune. Apple's iPod marketing is very focused and seemingly very simple. It has one, overriding message: the iPod is music. Not 'the iPod can help you manage your music collection'. Not 'the iPod makes your music sound better'. Not even 'you can share your music with your friends with the iPod'. Simply, 'the iPod is music'. And because the iPod's product design backs this up, it's an enormously successful product because the whole thing is designed to make managing your music collection and using the device as simple as possible. There are no extraneous features, and none advertised. You aren't told what you can do with your music, or how to handle it, or how many in formats you can listen to it. You are simpye told, 'this is music.' You plug it into your machine. It grabs your playlists. You press play.

Now, let's look at the Zune, if you can find one. It wasn't sold as an mp3 player: it was sold as some weird cross between a music player and a social networking device. The message wasn't 'this thing is music'. The message was. . .

. . .well, there was no message. There wasn't a coherent narrative, or a center of focus. There was just 'here's this thing which will do stuff. With music. Buy it. . .'

Linux has no narrative an average computer user will care about.

A timely subject!

[rindeee]

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!!!

Perspective flip

[fyoder]

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.

Re:Perspective flip

[mewsenews]

The XBOX is the prototype for this.

hardware price decrases, system specs increase

[dioscaido]

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.

Not so fast...!

[bogaboga]

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?"

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.

Re:Mods: I suggest

[the_leander]

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.

Advertised?

[tepples]

Walmart sells them, for starters. Brick and mortar, or online only? If I walked into a Wal-Mart store tomorrow, would I be able to walk out with a home workstation that runs GNU/Linux, or would I walk out empty-handed except for a pamphlet about how to get to Walmart.com? And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?

Pay for the codecs.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Yes, and I know why it didn't work out that way

[ESR]

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.

everyone is a techie if it means free stuff

[acidrain]

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.

Re:Frist!

[jpfed]

Asus's eeepc (awful name) Aye- triple "e".

Re:Frist!

[digitig]

As someone seriously considering buying Asus's eeepc (awful name), I have to agree with the main point of this article with regard to costs. Well, sort of. Unfortunately, the lowest priced hardware tends to be the hardest to get working with Linux. Sure, I know the RA points out that most of the machines can run some sort of Linux, but there's a difference between running Linux and having all peripherals supported. I've spent a few weeks trying to get WiFi working under Feisty Faun on my desktop, with no success: native support doesn't work and I can't get ndiswrapper to recognise it. No, I'm not a Linux guru, nor a networking guru, but nor are 99.9% of the customers for that cheap hardware (the gurus are going to want some serious metal, after all!) so the pain of getting Linux working properly is likely to outweigh the Microsoft tax. To get FF working on my desktop I'd probably have to buy paid support (I've already tried asking in the forums), which would likely cost more than an OEM copy of Vista (which I could now upgrade to XP, it seems). Sorry, I wish it were otherwise, but Linux is still experts only, and I can't see cheap hardware changing that.

Double-edged Sword

[DJ_Perl]

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.

Re: OEM Windows or OEM Linux

[Mansing]

"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.

Dead and buried at Walmart.com

[westlake]

Brick and mortar, or online only?

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.

Re: OEM Windows or OEM Linux

[chuckymonkey]

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.

Re:please

[evilviper]

Linux *will* cost at least some money for retailers if they want customers to really take it seriously since they'll need to pay royalties to the owners of formats like mp3 etc,

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)