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Shuttle's $200 Linux PC Part of a Trend?
eldavojohn writes "With $200 machines being all the rage these days, it's surprising that more coverage hasn't been given to Shuttle's KPC which is an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB HDD. With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?"
that NASA had actually put Linux on the Space Shuttle. Darn! What a disappointment! Figures, though. NASA could never spend as low as $200 on a computer; what, when they can gold-plate the sucker and buy a computer for $200 million?
AND it comes in patriotic colors! Where could it go wrong?
disapointing, i seen at NewEgg a few similar Shuttle BareBones kits had CD/DVD drive bays...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...but it would certainly be a good inexpensive network storage option for many folks.
Just for the record; I'm not proclaiming any great knowledge in this area.
I just wonder if the business model won't be fruitful at first and slowly fade into non-existence.
The allure of low priced PCs for the neophyte is a great one but one of two things are likely to happen: They'll either find out that they want more and end up willing to spend more and probably choose Windows for the software support or they'll find that the machine suits their purposes and latch onto them for a larger than normal span of time and repeat customers will be next to nil.
I've found that people who pinch a penny when buying hardware are normally not good business for vendors. They'll make a machine last to their dying day.
So while the initial repsonce is going to be great but don't expect to see lots of these people as return customers in the next few years.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If you do not want to play games and all you need is office, mail, some MP3-ed music and watching an odd DVD that is more than enough.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Hopefully soon the OLPC will be available to buy here in the UK. It seems to fill a niche of being ultraportable (7 inch screen), good battery life (9-10 hours, 2-3W consumption, long life NiMH battery) and low cost ($200, dropping towards $100 in the future perhaps).
I've already got several desktops and laptops, but would buy one of these in a second, given the chance.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
With those spec's you could really have a nice looking interface with Linux. Vista equaling in fact. But looks (gui wise) aside I hope that if this PC doesn't break into the home market, the exposure generated in the news will get people asking around at least.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Alright. I've said it OVER and OVER and OVER. And I still mean it. If you want to help Linux double it's presence in the small business sector, get a rock solid, customized, easy to use WINE installer for Quickbooks and make it compatible with new versions within 90 days.
Businesses, once they see it in action, will scoop up $250 boxes and switch because: they don't have to pay for the VM and the Windows license, they don't have to pay for yearly anti-virus subscriptions, and they don't have to deal with windows update constantly breaking and changing things.
But, I do look forward to the next version of whatever eye candy you guys are working on. Rotating xterms on a cube is really, really impressing the suits.
Well to a new computer user, Linux can be just as friendly as MacOS, or Windows. They all have equally steep learning curves.
Considering what people would want out of a $200 machine, I would say that Linux can be even more user friendly. On a bare bones machine, people don't have the expectation of being able to do 'anything' give them their large icons for a preconfigured email/web/word/musicplayer interface and that is what they will stick to.
For a $200 PC, I would prefer a linux distro. And this is coming from someone who prefers using XP for most of my computing needs.
Obligatory car analogy:
I love my pickup truck for its cargo capacity, not its gas mileage.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Ditch that moldy 'ol eight minute abs routine! Seven minute abs is where its at! With a touch screen!
As recently as a couple days ago I couldn't find a single source of information on this system beyond a picture and price point. TFA is dated yesterday. But even with that being the case I've seen this system on digg and reddit. So I'm not sure how more coverage could be possible.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
- Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive
. What it won't have:- an optical drive or a PCI Express slot.
Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in- red, blue, white, and black
each with a different icon stamped on the front.WOW, So I can get all of this for $200? For that price I think I could build one with a Linux distro and include an optical drive. And I could etch a design of a pretty butterfly on the side for my girl.
Seriously, they couldn't spring the $20 for a simple DVD-R drive? What happens WHEN (not IF, WHEN) you bork your OS somehow and render it unbootable (or, at least unbootable without some herculean effort)? I gotta send it to Shuttle to reinstall the OS? I think not, varlet.
With specs like those, Linux may become known as a "low quality" operating system. To the masses, at least.
/.er can spend a couple hours reconfoobling a box, Joe Consumer doesn't have that luxury - he's got bills to pay, sleep to steal, and enough grief from the rest of his life. He doesn't want to know what a goddamn compiler is, he doesn't give a shit about GPL dogma, and he couldn't care less who Stallman is - he simply wants his box to do what he expects and wants it to do.
I'll explain: Joe Consumer buys a system for $200. He realizes that he can't run his Windows apps easily/at all, that it's "different" and "difficult" from what he knows (Microsoft, again), and it's kind of slow. He'll associate Linux with incompatibility, difficulties, and piss poor performance. And he may tell his friends.
I haven't even addressed the poor schmuck trying to bring home work from the office.
The typical
Be careful what'cha ask for, ya know.
Oh, yeah: save the argument about "educating the masses". They don't care and trying to shove propaganda, dogma and excuses down their throats will only drive them further away from Linux.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I can imagine that many here will have a hard time seeing the utility of a device like this because it doesn't have the horsepower for gaming or 3D rendering. But I think back to how many WebTV users were in my site logs and realize that most people can get by with relatively modest hardware requirements. A 75% solution would run basic productivity software, email, chat, view pictures, play movies and run Firefox.
I'd get one for the times I don't feel like hauling a full size laptop. Many times 75% is plenty.
I think the popularity of appliance type devices in Japan may signal the market is somewhat bigger than many at Microsoft are willing to accept.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How many people do you know that only use a computer for myspace and music that had to
shell out $1000+ in order to get the hardware just to run Vista?
I've seen plenty, and it pisses me off. All that hardware and money wasted for an OS
that's overpriced to begin with.
*** Steps off soapbox ***
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
did someone say "year of the linux desktop"?
I used to love their hardware and I've got three setting in front of me now. The last case I bought was a lemon. I happen to have identical parts because I was building two machines at once so I was able to swap out the parts and it was definitely the case, it would reboot halfway through loading Windows. I even had an independent shop check it out and they said there was a problem with the motherboard. I shipped it back expecting a new case. They returned it in a week claiming it worked fine but they had reloaded the bios. I rebuilt the machine, same exact problem. I called them up and they said there was nothing they could do it wasn't their hardware. I explained about the fact I'd built eight of their systems to date and they were about to loose a customer. They weren't impressed. I wound up eating a $400 barebones and turned around and got a top of the line Alienware system which has been working like a champ ever since. I've been building my own systems for ten years now but that soured me on the whole deal. The Alienware wasn't that much more and it was turnkey. I just don't have the time and money anymore to fight with vendors. Few seem inclined to support hardware anymore. I just didn't like their attitude. They're pretty little cases and easy to work on but the quality is uneven from model to model and they don't seem inclined to back their own products. I'm sticking with Boxx and Alienware from here on out.
Application, Application, Application
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
but does it run Linux?
If you have six kids in school, this might be just the thing you need. I don't have any kids that I'm aware of, but friends do and their kids fight for PC time for papers and projects. I've donated old PCs from to to folks for just this reason. And your kid learns a Linux distro as well as Windows / Mac at school.
Yes they are, WHATCHA GONNA DO BOUT IT!? Want some manly man pictures scratched in the side? Buy an etching gun and go crazy. Do That or get a bottle of glue, some penthouse, playboy and hustler centerfold pictures and glue them all over the thing. Yeah that'll fix them gay designs and schemes.
I use wine to run an old version of quick-something at home and select kid-friendly games. It's not the impediment you think it is.
Qemu is the silver bullet. Let's say the company has legit Dell-sourced windows licenses. They can switch over to linux and run the windows partition through qemu in a window/fullscreen on the Linux desktop. Qemu is plenty fast enough to run quickbooks especially on recent hardware. There. Problem solved.
Except qemu has been around for a while and it's not the Linux killer app. Neither is wine. I'm not slagging qemu or wine, but merely pointing out that Linux will succeed on it's own merits. Smaller benefits include qemu and wine, but they aren't the killer app that drives adoption.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm hoping that the introduction of very low cost PCs is going to open up computer usage, and more importantly the internet, for the developing world. Sometimes we like to think of the internet as a global community, but that really isn't the case. Most of the internet is still the anglophone countries and Europe.
Of course, cheap PCs alone aren't going to do it - there is still the question of the infrastructure to provide home internet connections to the world. However, that is more likely to occur in a situation of widespread computer ownership.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's you. You are the gayest thing ever. HTH.
The article linked to from the slashdot article was missing some info, such as what linux distro it will have preinstalled. This one says it will be Ubuntu. All I could find on shuttle's own site was this press release.
Find free books.
Most of my household uses Linux, but I doubt I'd buy this thing. For a bit more, OK quite a bit more, I could get a Mac mini which is smaller, cuter has DVD etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'll take the $99 barebones version, please. Along with a dual-core Celeron and a gig of RAM. I've got a hard drive already, thanks.
Seriously, though, computers this cheap are impulse-buy territory. So it's not powerful; since it's not running Vista or 3D games, it doesn't have to be.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Hi, I don't have a computer at home to play games.
Because I'm the neighborhood geek, people ask me about their problems. One problem is what to do with the old machine when they upgrade.
My advice for the past six months has been: buy it a new hard drive ($60) and install Ubuntu. The hard drive is what fails at 4-5 years, but the rest will keep on ticking and thanks to the thriftiness of Linux, doesn't slow them down.
They don't care that it's not Windows XP or Mac OS X. All GUIs look about the same for the tasks most people do.
With these newer cheap machines, I'm excited, but wary. Would I rather install $200 of junk or do a $60 upgrade to an older, but once more expensive machine with better hardware?
The Shuttle boxes I've worked with so far have been high quality but have tended to overheat. However, they were a good deal more expensive than $200. I wonder what corners got cut, and whether a five year old Dell that cost $900 when it was new would have these problems?
Either way, my compliments to the Ubuntu team. That's a convenient and reliable OS distro.
technical writing / development
Virtual machines are stupid
What inspires such wanton disregard for a legitimately great tool?
and difficult for normal users to comprehend
I never tell my end users how anything works, so why would I even begin explaining their application is running in an emulator?
and use.
A clickable shortcut and the end-user is using their windows app just like the every other app. Let the productivity begin!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It wasn't that they wouldn't spend $20 for a dvd drive.
It's that they wouldn't spend the extra 5.25 drive bay space
and cabling for something that's only needed once in a while for os-installation.
And when you're trying to make a small low power device, that's at a premium.
For that once-in-a-while need to reinstall the os,
there's certainly no need to go to the extreme of sending to the factory.
My company uses a lot of small linux appliances like these (esp for firewalls)
and I keep a external usb-cdrom on hand... use it to (re)install the os,
and thats the only time it's needed. Rest of the time it would be wasted space.
And I only had to pay for 1 drive, to use on ALL the systems.
So after 100 of these, that $20 would add up for me.
If you're thrifty, you don't buy brand new stuff. (I've never owned a new car, being temperamentally incapable of buying an item that loses thousands of dollars in value the moment you start using it.) You can get a decent used laptop for about $200 off eBay. Not as powerful as the latest models, but more than powerful enough for 90% of what people use home computers for.
That's not what the Linux-bundled PCs are about. They're about people being just plain tired of fighting with Windows. God knows I am — and I'm a bloody ubergeek, somebody who's been fiddling with computers since before most of you were born! I continue to use Windows because I have a lot of intellectual capital invested in it, and because too much software that I need is difficult/impossible to run without it. But if anybody showed me a good alternative that met my needs, I'd drop Windows in a heartbeat. Never mind saving money, I'd pay extra.
It's not a laptop. Next!
Not flamebait, but the truth. Cute little laptops have been either underpowered or the preserve of the rich till now, so Asus and everybody else knocking out workable, durable, cute machines is newsworthy. A desktop box that costs 200 dollars? where's the news in that? You can find those on every high street, and loads of people have brought out cute looking ones so nothing new there either. Plus it's not 200 dollars and press the on button, for Joe Public it's 200 dollars, spend some more on a monitor, then plug it into the wall. SO more like buying another desktop. Yawn.
Someone needs to show me how to do this with a W2K nonbootable master and a 1GB stick. Problem is that the machine is strictly SATA. MSI-6702 MB and 2 Samsungs. Boots till the ntfs.sys missing or corrupt and no amout of replacement helps.
This is one reason now would be a good time to get the desktop side of things working properly. The suits say, "Is Linux really ready?" and you can hand them that press release, and reply, "Yes. All I'm trying to do is save you money."
I, for one, cannot wait to deploy machines with a smiley face or flower decal on the front panel in my Linux HPC envionment.
Colo NOC: "Now, which server do I need to reboot?"
Me: "The one with Barbie on the front panel!"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
But, one of the main problems to Linux adoption is the install process. Have you even seen XP's install? Its much more complex then Ubuntu's install (albeit much easier then Gentoo's). The other problem is most people don't know any other OS other than Windows. While it is true that some of these machines will be running Windows, the most will be running Linux on them because people just go with what they have.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Unless you can get IBM to kick out some cheap PowerPC PCs that you could sell with Linux. As we all know, XP/Vista won't install/run on anything but x86. Maybe if DEC/Alpha was still around and Windows still created HALs for these (I'm pretty sure they abandoned that support tree a while back).
Either way, it would require some low end, non-x86 CPUs and maybe that's an oxymoron in itself.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
"With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?"
No. People will install Windows, legally or otherwise. Most people don't like Linux for desktop.
1. many FPS games do these days support linux, Quake4, Doom3, UT200whatever 2. Crossover. With this is is as easy as putting the disc in and going for supported apps. For some apps like steam it will do everything for you including downloading the installer. This means all Halflife and HL2 stuff is supported without a single trip to the store even.
that is a bad move as you can get systems with slots and a bigger case for not much more and you can get much better parts
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3517104&CatId=2328
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2948208&sku=TSD-80AS6
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2967707&CatId=2264
for about $40 more you can get a much better cpu, better on board video with pci-e x16 and x4 slots + pci slots, 2gb of 2x1gb 4-4-4-12 ddr2 800, 80gb 7200, 8MB, SATA-300 HD.
Just add any matx / atx case and psu.
My dad, is an example of this. Despite my repeated warnings (and refusal to "fix" his machine if it gets hosed) my dad downloads random stuff from the Internet. He runs McAfee (I think) and hasn't had many "big" problems, so he continues to do it.
I could recommend that he switch to Linux, but he'd be frustrated (and he doesn't care about "more secure" since he hasn't seen any negative effects yet) every time he downloaded "freeware <insert utility name here>" and it wouldn't run on his Ubuntu box.
There are a lot of people like my dad out there.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
"Windoze"? "M$"? 1997 called, he wants his creative spelling back.
The reason MS is very afraid is very simple. With prices of hardware dropping to a couple of hundred of dollars and below people nowadays get machines that do everything they need and it will probably be the most powerful computer they ever bought. With these tight margins, hardware makers proceed the next biggest cost factor they can cut and beat the competition again. That next element is Windows. Windows biggest enemy if falling hardware prices. When it was only a couple of percent of the whole price, no one noticed. Now it's in tens of percents.
Obligatory bad car analogy: Its like the high end car manufacturers fielding vehicles in Le Mans or other races. Their entries aren't cheap and aren't the same thing you can buy at your local dealership. But they demonstrate a commitment to pushing the cutting edge of technology. And some of the lessons learned do in fact make it into the production models.
Have gnu, will travel.
The whole entire purpose of SFF small form factor computers is you get a complete computer in a small space. Functional words computer + complete. If you need large add on plug in things to make it functional, then what's the point again? Might as well get a minitower and be done with it. Internal drives optical or magnetic are just cheaper than externals usually, and every geek out there has a bunch that still work they can use. With no provision for an optical drive, the machine becomes less useful, even if it doesn't ship with one, it should still be easy to add one inside.
From the perspective of the average user, XP's install is the easiest by far. They take the computer out of the box it came in, plug it in, turn it on, and XP is right there.
It might be viewed as cheap, but that's because the first thing you see is the word GRUB.
But this is about a Linux PC and putting Windows on it, therefore the argument with "the computer came with it" is null and void about this particual computer for Windows.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
A $200 computer can help anyone. This looks like it will
make "a great little barebones system", "a great little entry
level server" and with the option of putting a cheap core duo
inside it will even be a nice cheap answer to the mac mini.
A cheap PC doesn't "make microsoft money".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
when it comes to learning. While I've never sat anyone who's totally new to computers down in front of a linux box, I've let plenty of friends try out the relatively "Windows-like" KDE-based PCLinuxOS. Typical complaints I get are:
1. Why do the fonts look like that?
2. Why are the windows different? (in reference to GTK vs KDE apps, which are similar but not 100% the same)
3. What the hell is wrong with Firefox's save file dialog box? (This one pisses me off too, I hate the Gnome/GTK file dialog box - it's very different from the KDE ones and confuses people)
4. Why doesn't the Windows key do anything?
Sorry. The learning curve of OSX and XP/Vista might be similar to users switching between the two because their OS and software is *consistent*, but Linux is a whole 'nother story, especially when you start mixing QT/GTK applications. Believe it or not, there are people out there who don't want to try new things and just want their shit to work.
I love Linux etc etc etc, but unless you stick to JUST GTK applications (and lets be frank, Gnome is radically different than Windows) and don't ask stupid questions like "Why wont my MP3s play?" when you're running Fedora, usability is going to be a bitch.
Linux has flash, and flash lets you play many of those cheazy internet games that many non-tech people like to play.
Yeah, but what XP owner is still running the same original installation? My mom, for example, has reinstaled XP several times over the last few years. Granted, it is from one of those "recovery" CDs where it actually includes most of the drivers for the machine so it is easier than a vanilla install, but still.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Every time twitter posts on Slashdot, an angel loses a wing...
...and then the wing falls from heaven and lands on a kitten, fatally injuring it.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The hardware to run Vista Premium is $650 at Walmart.com.
The Dual-Core Vista Premium desktop with 2B RAM, 320 GB HDD and the 20 inch widescreen monitor is fast becoming the norm at entry level.
The OfficeMax Christmas special was the $800 Dual-Core HP Premium Vista Premium laptop bundled with an HP multifunction printer and a 6.2 megapixel digital camera.
How many of those who are drawn to these social sites own cell phones, digital cameras, photo quality ink jet printers, camcorders, mp3 players, webcams, a video game console?
How many are billed monthly for cable and broadband Internet? How many are subscribers to XBox Live?
The Geek refuses to see what is perfectly obvious to everyone else. The computer, the high tech gadget, sells to the middle class. The family with significant disposable income.
Nobody here seems to realise the potential for these as thin clients. I reckon businesses could save a lot of money by going somewhat back to the old days again: Buy one powerful Linux server for a bunch of users each with super-cheap almost disposable thin clients like this.
They tried the "Give One Get One" campaign in America, then gave up on it.
They don't want to distribute these things on the free market. They hated dealing with ordinary things like delivery failure and product returns. They hated all of the, "Hey, this thing sucks. Help me make it work!" mail they got.
Most of all, they hated the fact that some people who were strong project enthusiasts got one, were finally able to form their own opinions, decided that the thing sucks and it's nearly a crime to promote them as a great education solution for the 3rd world, and became strong project opponents.
They realize now that the Give One Get One campaign was a mistake, and they're never going to repeat it.
I thought that right up until 2 weeks after I bought my shiny new box, The damn thing blue screened on boot.
1 hour to reinstall the OS.
1.5 hours to reinstall the drivers and antivirus.
2 hours to install the nessessary software (Acrobat, Flash, Quicktime, Google Desktop, Skype)
30 minutes for Microsoft to patch itself up.
I am quite good at such things, and none of the questions asked during the process caused me any grief. God help Joe Sixpack in the same state.
To be fair, XP does give you a nice ride out of the showroom. It just gives you a bit more grief in the garage.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
I love macs -- really. But if I have a 16MB spreadsheet, whether in Numbers or OOo 2.3 or even Excel 2008, it's too cumbersome, even on my MBPro Dual 2 with 2 gigs of RAM. On that same machine, in Windows XP in Excel '03, the difference is night and day, from saving files to entering formulas to simply moving around on the spreadsheet.
Similarly, I'd love to use a "hip" solution like an online SQL ledger or some poorly implemented FileMaker Pro app, but I need to get work done. It takes me about 45 seconds in Quickbooks to start a new PO, fill it out, and fax it to my vendor though the fax server. In all my travels, from writing checks to automatically reconciling bank accounts to simply running reports, QuickBooks saves me the most time.
It has huge downfalls - unbelievably botched major upgrades (I wait six months till I switch), non-weighted inventory (sad, but true), and poor performance (though this has gotten much better since they finally moved from a flat file to a real database.)
However, at price points under tens of thousands of dollars, it's still the best option. It's the last piece of software that I couldn't easily replace. (Explorer -> FireFox, Outlook -> Thunderbird, Office -> OpenOffice). It's just frustrating that no one in the Linux community can admit that they are unwilling or unable to offer a truly competitive product. There's no straightforward, multi-user accounting app with anywhere near the functionality, period. And, all I'm saying is, if you want to be ruling the small business market, which is by far the largest piece of the pie in the US, you have to get serious about that side of the solution.
From the perspective of the average user, XP's install is the easiest by far. They take the computer out of the box it came in, plug it in, turn it on, and XP is right there.
/media/usb;sync" in order to avoid the Linux usb stick flash memory plug/unplug problems... and that is one of the problems I have most frequently in Linux (FC8 and Ubuntu, waiting endlessly for a safe unmount after copying one or two files...).
You misspelled OSX. I understand, those keys are very close to each other.
Seriously, although the only time I have used apple machines is in Apple stores (I do not have cash to waste buying overpriced hardware) I agree that for the end user, they are the most friendly machines. Now Linux... even a Ubuntu machine preloaded from any vendor will be a pain in the ass to configure for the end user. Just today a guy was suggesting to "cp whatever
I keep saying that those kind of "rough edges" that we can not name but that pisses us off very frequently while using Linux are what makes it not usable for the common user. (I am writing this from KUBUNTU 7.10.. btw I prefer Ubuntu + some KDE apps which I can't live with like Kile, kubuntu is sooo unreliable)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
First of all, it probably will help the FOSSies. Second it will hurt Microsoft.One or two people running Linux will not hurt them, but when a couple of millions do, then there will be a market for Linux oriented products, more hardware venders will ship Linux drivers, more software will be ported to Linux from other platforms and as more people get aware of Linux some Linux software will be ported to Windows.
The main reason for chosing windows is that all your friends have it, all your documents are created by programs that only run on windows, you can go blindfolded into a store and buy a WiFi card and it will work, and not the least almost all PC:s ship with windows included. Some people may not even know that there is choise, and the people who do, may think that this choice is only for geeks. Nobody runs Windows because it is such good software. They run it because it is good enough, and get the work done.
Most Linux distros will run just fine, on these low price boxes, in fact it will look much better than any windows+hardware combination Microsoft can offer. The lower the threashhold there is to switch to something else than windows, the bigger the chance that poeple will switch, especially if the alternative is free. Free as in free of licensing costs. Free as in free of speach. Free as in free of problems with copyprotection, activation keys and licence management.
In the end this will make it impossible for Microsoft to sell Windows Vista Ultimate, or its successor for $49 and they will have to switch to a more service based business where they give away their OS completely for free. In that situation they will have nothing to gain from not being interoperable with other systems. I'm not saying Microsoft won't be able to make money from this, but most Linux companies will have a head start in this new market. Above all, they will be in a position where
they don't have a near monopoly advantage. So yes, a new ultra low price PC market will hurt Microsoft in the long run.
You also have to consider that the number of poor people in the world that doesn't allready have a PC, but can afford one if it is priced low enough, most likely is much bigger than rich people that allready have a powerful PC that they replace every three years or so. This means that there will be much more room for expansion in hte low price market than in the high price market segment.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
you are comparing apples to oranges.
when it comes to pre-installed machines, they are both pretty much the same when it come to ease of installation.
when it comes to installing it yourself, Ubuntu is easier and faster.
you are comparing a manual install of Ubuntu to a pre-installed Windows XP. since these machines are preinsatalled with Linux, this apples to oranges comparison of yours is even more ridiculous.
We - by the standards of the last 15 years - are witnessing a miracle just now: The area in which Windows is just one choice of various is growing for a change. I don't care if Linux takes over - that alone is a good thing. It's all matter of when exactyl OSS will gain critical mass and become a serious competitor. .Net as closed-source kernel modules or something like that.
It is not unlikely that we will then see Windows using a Linux kernel someday. With DX and
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's already been done 8 or 9 years ago. Sadly, it doesn't actually have Barbie on the front, and the company making it went bankrupt.
But you could run Linux on it if you wanted to!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
My day job requires me to work with Linux. In fact, my Windows box is for email (corporate uses Exchange) and my doc tool (Adobe let FrameMaker on Linux languish and die). A lot of what I do involves installing, testing, and documenting software that runs on Linux. I even write man pages.
When I was new to Linux, I tried asking some noob questions on various forums (after unsuccessfully searching for answers--which I noted in my posts) and was surprised by the "stoopid noob!" responses I got. I mean, I understand that people tend to be less polite in anonymous on-line communication, and that a lot of early-Linux-adopter-geeks are lack practice with social skills, but I was still surprised. It's like my not knowing the answer was a personal affront to some of the folks responding.
From the outside, it's not a friendly place. I think it has gotten better, and continues to improve, but there's still a long way to go.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?
So... will people who want to spend as little as possible go for a cheap PC with a free OS, free Office package and lots of other free software..?
Well, that's a poser isn't it?
Your average user will love this computer: it lets them spend $200, and they can just throw a pirated copy of Windows on it.
Since the $200 Shuttle doesn't come with an optical drive, I don't think the average user will be technically savvy enough to install Windows on it.
It never happens.
Hardware prices fall - suddenly the Dual Core PC is everywhere - bringing the more muscular and versatile Windows or OSX PC well within budget.
The buyer won't know Emacs.
But he will have heard of Print Shop, Quicken, Paint Shop Pro and a hundred other programs that for him will be a damn sight more useful.
The multifunction HP printer with OSX and Vista drivers starts at $50 at Walmart.
Games remain in print forever - and for $10 at the bargain bin you can bring home the A-list titles that would have strained the bleeding-edge tech of three years back.
Don't forget about ARM.
I had a small silent Pentium III 800 Mhz with only XDM and IceWM preconfigured stocked somewhere, waiting for the day it would make somebody happy.
Today was that day. My mother called that nobody could repair her expensive computer.
I took the train, placed the computer, upgraded, created an account, installed firefox and gaim and added her printer.
She was ready to do all she does with computers; browse, gmail, print, chat.
If this old computer can make her happy, I'm sure these powerful 200$ boxes can make many others happy.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
that was pp's point. That pre-installation is a hindrance to adoption of linux.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Unless Apple plans on abandoning the Mac mini it's high time for a tech refresh and a price cut right now. Because for a few dollars MORE than $200 I WILL get a computer that runs all those apps the naysayers claim this one won't. $600-$800 today is too high a price for that unit even if it is an Apple.
Yeah, unfortunately, as a desktop OS, Linux is still only 90% there. Which means it looks nice at first, you can even fall in love with it, but after you've been using it for ten hours, you reach a moment where you either go down to the command line and invoke the arcane incantation (e.g. "cp whatever /media/usb && sync"), or you bang your head on the monitor for a few hours, then reach for the XP reinstall disk.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
>Sure, until MS gets Intuit to break it
I would be willing to bet almost anything that MS has gotten Intuit to agree to not support Linux. For the last few years, I have done my taxes with TurboTax for the Web with FireFox/Linux, and it works fine (complaining a little about not finding Acrobat Reader for pdfs, but that's all). Each year, I always check to see if Intuit provides any help info regarding Linux, and there is absolutely nothing. Search their site for "linux" and you get *zero* hits, not even "Sorry, Linux is not supported". This compares to several thousand hits if you search for either "Windows" or "Macintosh". I asked about this by email, and got a very terse reply that "It should work fine with FireFox on Linux, but we don't provide support", and regarding the zero search hits for "linux" the reply was just "I have no comment on that".
Do they run Mac OS...?
...
While I'm at it:
- can it blend?
- what does it do to you in Russia?
- I'll take the CowboyNeal option.
- You insensitive clod.
-
- profit!
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
Fair and square. You've got a point, but the saying goes the first install is always free. Once windows gets filled with viruses, spyware, and other maladies, said "average user" is left with but one option: have somebody else reinstall XP on his/her computer.
I don't know anybody that does play games on their computer. I guess that's the universe balancing itself out.
I have a nice little Linux palmtop running on a 330 MHz OMAP2420 cpu. It cost about $300 new, including touchscreen, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, FM tuner and built-in camera.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hello,
Ok. I admit it, I play
However... Most people I know, don't play games on their computer, and if they do, it's one of those super simple "freecell" like games. You should not assume that your demographic group is a uniform representation of the general population.
What I see is the shared headless Linux box my co-worker and I used to have, made with company hardware that needed to be used elsewhere, but in a form factor I can tuck away in a cabinet with no worries and very unobviously.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
"IMHO any person running a small business should at least take a course in accounting"
It's the customer that should be fixed.
I imagine these could be inexpensive computers for schools quite easily. Our school has a ton of old P3's running Windows 2K. When Win 2K support ends in 2010, I suppose they could be replaced with these, but I don't know if Samba would let students still use their networked accounts.
The Gospel according to lolcat
"Linux runs on everything from wristwatches to supercomputers"
Wristwatches need Linux to about the same degree as a watchband does. This is more about the Linux "brand" than it is about the same OS running on wristwatches and supercomputers.
I think I played checkers on the Mac at home maybe seven times, tops. No games on my mini. Don't miss them at all.
And realize that if you want to have companies use your software, helping them save money is a damn good start. Helping them transition to Linux by making it compatible with a piece of business software that sells millions of copies per year is even better.
This story was about Linux and small businesses. Obviously, if you are writing software for the sake of writing software, you usually wouldn't consider the needs of small businesses. Code away at your own project; I know you don't owe me anything. But, if you ever decry the popularity of Windows for SMBs, re-read my previous posts.
Office Depot ran a nice special a while back $249 (+$50 shipping)... HP box (new, not refurb), Intel dual core 2140 @1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, Windows Vista Premium. All I supplied was a monitor. For the $300 spent, it seems the Windows tax was negligible in light of HP's better box specs vs. this Shuttle Linux box. It suits my needs well and the hardware has been flexible with all of the OSes that I have installed on it.
The parsimonious will always find a good deal whether Windows or Linux is involved. But I am glad Linux is around to add much needed pressure in the consumer market.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy
External USB DVD drives are more than common nowadays. I don't see what would stop anyone from actually plugging one and installing windows or whatever.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
I have always hated the file open dialog box on Red Hat and Oracle Enterprise Linux (haven't tried Fedora, but assume its the same), and assumed it was Gnome. When I got Ubuntu, I was presently surprised. That being said, I still like KDE a bit more, and it has better apps (Amarok, K3B, Konsole). If they could only lose that annoying bouncing cursor and naming everything with K :)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Are you mad? XP's installer is worse than even Gentoo's! Press F6 to install a SCSI/RAID driver my butt! What if the user doesn't want to baby-sit the install? Even OEM installations aren't a bucket of laughs!
Linux isn't quite as good as treating the user as a danger to him or herself by hiding important details from the user, but it at least doesn't waste your time with inane things like floppy-only driver installs and timed you-miss-it-you-reboot driver installations. And thank heavens it doesn't have to reboot a zillion times during the installation (Vista, I'm looking at you!)
I'm sorry, but you're just plain WRONG!
Consider yourself spoken to.
Ubuntu is definitely the best looking implementation of Gnome/GTK I've ever used. I was quite impressed with it, but still dislike it compared to the (yes, I know they're Windows-like) dialog boxes of KDE.
;) but wish they had spent more time polishing KDE-3.5's UI (why didn't they release more themes, damnit!). I'm hoping the graphics artists working on KDE4 will make that desktop look much cleaner and more organized than 3.5's!
That being said, I also still like KDE more as well
BIOS's also commonly have PXE boot capability these days allowing someone to boot over a network to perform an install. But the guy said "average user".
How's the family, by the way? I'm sure they see you a lot more now that you can only post twice a day on Slashdot! Hahahaha!
All the big manufacturers don't really want you to restore from optical drive anymore. Many don't even give restore DVDs, you have to burn your own. I imagine this Shuttle PC would have a recovery partition and a way to boot to it through the BIOS.
Now if the hard drive dies, there's still no problem. It's Linux and I assume it's all OSS - they can post an ISO. Dell can't do that with their Windows distributions. You'll have to find a USB drive, or move the HDD to a separate machine... but that'll be pretty rare. Shuttle can just sell you a preloaded HDD if you're really stuck.
You might want to tell that to every IT shop in the world. We use Microsoft because it does things no other operating system does, it's a product targetted at the enterprise segment, and they have been taking our feedback on how to improve the product for over ten years... and using those suggestions.
No IT shops run Teh Lunix because... it sucks. No IT shops use OSX because it's not made for enterprise markets, and it really sucks in that capacity.
Teh Lunix is good for a machine which has to do a specific task, will only do that, and won't see much actual use (aside from it's limited role, which is why it's used as a web server). But you know what? That's the ONLY way you can really use Teh Lunix. If it's every day use... well, good luck on that. I guess if you want to put up with all it's limitations, and you know how to use it, well then it's viable. But nobody really goes TO Lunix, which is why they have a market share of less than 1%. Nah... they would be better off saving up a little more money, and catching a Dell on sale. I've seen really good machines, with a flat panel monitor, for a bit over $350. And best of all, they run Windows XP, which means you actually USE the computer for something.
Really, there's no reason to use Lunix. If anyone has messed up their computer so much that they need to blame Microsoft for it and wants to get something else... they are going to get OSX. Aside from it's limited server niche, there's no role for Teh Lunix. I've been advocating Lunix devs to start focusing on mobile devices, since that's a role it can do really well in (primarily due to lack of competition), but they both aren't interested in it (since doing the tough work is boring, and prevents them from cranking out a few dozen text editors) and don't have the vision necessary to do anything other than chase Microsoft's tail lights. Rather than break new ground in a bold new world, they are just following the leader. And that's why Lunix will never have more than a 1% market share.
Go to about:config and set "ui.allow_platform_file_picker" to false. That'll give you the older and more sensible Mozilla file picker instead of the Gnome abomination.
Eat the rich.
On my machine at home I am either A. gaming B.composing music or C.doing multimedia (3d, graphics, video editing) all of this could be awesome on linux as it is a well designed kernal and OS, but there is little to no software comparable to what I use at home (though a lot of it STILL is not vista compatible so as you would guess I am sticking with XP for a while)
No, there's also the option that many joe sixpack users take: Leave it the way it is until it gets bad enough, then throw it away and buy a new one with a clean XP preinstalled.
One of our home PCs is a 10 year old Dell XPS T450, which has a 450MHz Pentium III and its original 20GB ATA disk (we also have a couple of new PCs). Its principal use is probably running Stepmania 4 with a couple of USB dance pads, which is why it's in the kids' play room. It also works just fine for web browsing, playing media from our server, and so forth. Starting gimp or inkscape or other large-ish applications takes longer than on the newer machines, but once started, they seem to work OK.
This PC currently has Ubuntu, but has also had PCLinuxOS. It was upgraded from its original 128MB of RAM to 384MB, which made a significant difference to graphics editing, and use of OpenOffice, but made little difference to web-related activities.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As you mention USB, my experience when I first plugged a cheap MP3 player in was as follows:
Fedora - After 2 seconds, icon for MP3 player appears on desktop, fully functional.
Windows XP - OS tries to map MP3 player to drive letter G:, but G: is already mapped to network share. There are plenty of free drive letters. Network share and MP3 player are now both 'sort of' mapped to G:.
Reboot (with device still plugged in) results in MP3 player correctly mapped to G: and network share not mapped at all. I'm unable to remap the network share since it is mapped by a logon script I don't have access to (alright, this bit is my problem, not windows, but why can't it correctly map the MP3 player in the first place?)
Anecdotal evidence? Sure. But it shows that what you say cuts both ways - sometimes Linux *is* easier and more user friendly than Windows.
So does Windows run on 1024-core x86-64 SMP systems now?
Troll harder.
Quick answer: No.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
I didn't say people have computers at home *to* play games. I said that people who have computers at home tend to (maybe sometimes) play games on them. I thought about it a bit after reading these comments and, to be honest, I was kind of surprised my post was marked "Troll", but I stand by my original statement... I don't know anybody who has a computer at home who doesn't also play games on that computer.
One of the problems I always had with OSS was the lack minimum hardware requirements for the software. If you were on an underpowered PC it was just a matter of download-and-pray. Fair enough, the diversity of available systems and the lack of huge commercial testing facilities for amateurs meant it was never practical.
However, with a small core of uniform low-end Linux platforms emerging on the market, each with a relatively broad base, wouldn't it make sense to start a scheme of developers' standards: Run on XO, Runs on Eee, Runs on Shuttle, etc?
Even if the main developers don't want to invest in all the hardware, there could be sites set up to encourage reciprocal testing and optimisation between different dev teams.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Somebody who bought a $200 pc because of the price isn't going to also buy an external DVD drive just to install Windows on it.
http://www.mhall119.com
This sounds interesting. Did you build it yourself or did you buy it pre-built with the touchscreen included?
The article is about a box with Linux preinstalled. Therefore, the user experience is exactly the same - plug it in, check your e-mail and what have you.
And as for real installation...have you ever *tried* to setup XP from scratch? It's a nightmare! Horrid partition utilities, random driver install keys...give me my Ubuntu!
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
Yes. Yes it is. People who are considered 'thrifty' often have much more patents and are willing to put a little effort into what they want. I think that those with a thrifty mindset are the perfect people to push (or pull) Linux into the mainstream.
I currently run WinXP at home, along with both Mac and PC laptops. I'm getting less and less happy with the performance & o/s of these machines, and besides I'd like to be able to casually access the net while my wife hogs the main desktop... for these reasons I'm looking into buying a solid state Linux box that I can use really just for net access.
There are plenty of options around now (all around $200, which is fine by me) - and I think this is going to become a big trend in the next few years. The concept of having a dirt-cheap, reliable, low power, always-on computer _in addition_ to the main household PC, being used (at first) only as a web client, is very exiting. My TV screen already has a VGA input - the idea is to have a backup PC running full-time so I can switch over to Linux and check my mail just as easily as looking something up on teletext.
I've been contemplating making the switch to Linux for a year or so, but this way I don't have to switch. I can keep the Windows box around and migrate slowly - the low cost of the hardware and environmental advantage of having a 1-watt processor make it an easy decision. Good times.
BTW - The Microclient Sr looks like the machine of choice.
Those are the specs of a Nokia N800
Throw the bums out!
The entire gaming console market would seem to disagree with you. That entire business model is based on the premise that you make almost no money on the hardware, and maybe even lose money on it, so that you can make a killing on all of the software that is sold for it.
It is easy to find functional equivalents, but not necessarily to find the *same* apps, and in certain domains that is important. I use Linux and a Mac, mainly, and Windows when necessary. A couple years ago I bought a Mac Mini for the kids (now 2 and 5; we bough the mini specifically so I don't screw with it like my normal boxes :).
:) he just wants to play Pokemon games :)
I set up a Windows (well, dual boot with Linux) at home, for kids 'educational' games. Yes, I know there are several kids games for Linux; but the selection is much bigger with Windows; I tend to buy older versions of games, which are republished for about $5 each. About half of them are Windows only, and the other half also support Mac ('classic' which means pre-intel macs). They are not really worth the hassle of using Wine, and running VMWare on a slow machine is painful. So, although *I* like Linux better, for that domain Windows works much better. My 5 year old doesn't really give a hoot either way, of course
Of course, Linux feels much better for this things, but if you need to use Windows, try XLiveCD, which is a version of cygwin that boots from a CD. It has bash and many of the shell utilities (plus an XWindows server), which makes Windows *almost* usable if you have to :). Since there is no install you don't screw Windows :) you can also put it on the network and just map the drive when needed
Godamn "submit on change" drop-down menus.... I wanted to mod "insightful" not "redundant".
Posting this comment about how "submit on change" drop-drops are crap in order to remove the redundant mod I just did by mistake.
Let me ask you this, what was the killer app of the 90's? Email. Do you need 3rd party software to do that? Now, what is the killer app for this decade? Web (new improved, 2.0 or whatever but no longer the world-wide wait). Do you need 3rd party software to do this?
Sure, power users who use firewire drives, scanners, raid array backups, digital recorders, blackberrys bah blah blah will still balk at linux's dearth of hardware support and advanced 3rd party software. But the other 80% of the world will do just find with a web browser. Heck, even custom databases are on the web now!
So I'd say it was only a business model 10 years ago (which might explain the eMachine debacle).
.Ellis Web Based Database
Recovery CD's are really just:
1) Put recovery DVD or CD in your CD/DVD drive.
2) Power cyle your PC.
3) Answer "Y" to reinstall,
4) Find something to do for a few hours.
5) After the recovery you end up with a bare bones system that requires you to put on all your (cough) licensed software plus all your (you did do a backup?) personal data.
What I just described is the Win2000, XP and Vista recovery process and that is normally for the same or similar machine which is hardly rocket science. If you are recovering an image (recommended) then step 4 is much shorter and step 5 may not be needed. An advantage of doing this is you get not only your OS updated to when you created your image but all your data as well. The thing is how many people do this?
With Linux I use a cloned or snapshot backup of my disk data to an external hard disk at approx 1.5 to 2GB per minute to backup and recover. I then run a simple backup script on all important file-systems. By doing this I can do a fresh install of a new Linux OS (I use Fedora 8 now) and recover all my data in approx 6 hours from initial backup to full recovery. This is not difficult to do and you don't need to be a Linux Guru. It must be noted I stated "fresh install" not "upgrade". A Linux upgrade depending your machine takes approximately 1 hour and an update may take another hour depending on your network connection. It must be noted that nothing of what I have stated costs me anything except maybe the DVD (approx $0.50) for the latest Linux distribution.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Home users want tax preparation software, with updated scripts for each year's amendments to the tax code in each country and in each state/province. The market is big enough for both H&R Block and the maker of Quicken to make products.
Home users also want drivers for peripherals that bears a four-color flag on the box but no penguin. Microtek still won't return my e-mails requesting information to develop a driver for its ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner.
I just tossed together a box from my old parts bin and a $13.25 eBay acquired ASUS P3PB-F with a 450mhz PIII. The old parts include a 15"Samsung LCD, a nVidia TNT32, 512mb PC2700 SDRAM, a SB64, a Intel NIC, a 60gb Seagate and a Sony 20x CD. I put this together in an old server case for a email/internet/movie/music/photo viewer station in the family room to keep guests off my main P4 box. This critter kicks hiney with several 2005 thru 2007 Linux/KDE distros. It even supports some lower overhead compositing effects like transparency without so much as a hickup. I haven't tried Beryl or Fusion on it and I don't think it would handle them too well, but there is no reason to anyway. Firefox, Thunderbird, Amarok, Gwenview, Gimp, Kaffeine and Open Office all run great. This box would be plenty enough for the use many people buy a PC for. About all that is left missing right now is a DVD player and a PCI-USB2 card.
wabi-sabi
matthew
These are the usual useless answers... but for the sake of being clear and precise I will answer: Anyone can borrow an external DVD drive :) And people tend to already have these (mainly with laptops).
Anyway It can probably cost you around 30$ to simply buy an USB enclosure for your auld ugly IDE/SATA/whatever DVD Drive.
But then if you have paid 200$ + 30$ you will not want to buy the 10$ USB cable...
Regards.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Can't be sure exactly as she lives on the opposite coast of the US and I'm not exactly the most eager Windows phone support guy, but I'm guessing it was just the simplest (if a little drastic) solution to the WIndows Annoyance Du Jour. It is my understanding that this is rather common practice for those either unable or unwilling to go through the trouble of effectively troubleshooting Windows problems or providing proper care and feeding. Isn't a reinstall pretty much what the Geek Squad does to solve 90% of PC problems these days?
I've been known to to do a hasty reinstall of WIndows myself just because troubleshooting it make me want to pluck my eyes out and fill the sockets with molten lead. Recently I had a problem where Windows decided there was a resource conflict between my video card and the AGP controller (I use it to play games from time to time). I'd reinstall some drivers, sacrifice a chicken, and somehow the conflict woudl magically disappear only to reappear on a subsequent reboot. Frustrating as hell. Had to reinstall.
I can effectively troubleshoot anything, Linux, Netware, DOS, OS X, Ruby, C, Python, Java, networks, you name it, but something about Windows problems in particular just get under my skin. I hate it. I have formed a career in IT around avoiding Windows support or programming unless absolutely necessary. My primary criteria for taking a job is this: "Does it, in any way, involve Windows?" Though I've been getting into web development lately and I have renewed my loathing for anything Windows by trying to make shit work right in IE6. I had heard it was bad, but damn.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
He'll associate Linux with incompatibility, difficulties, and piss poor performance. And he may tell his friends.
Ironically, that's how DOS (and later Windows) started out -- a "quick and dirty" OS on top of a dirt cheap machine. It must have offered exactly the experience you describe compared to Unix, OS/2, Apple, or whatever.
The mass market, however, often chooses the cheapest product of tolerable quality, and not the best one, nor even the best price/quality. And since a linux PC can run a few simple games, web/mail/im, and basic word processing, it *is* of tolerable quality for at least some people.
Works for Microsoft. Might work against them as well.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Whether a WinXP system or a Gentoo system is easier to install depends on what you want installed.
If all you want is a basic functioning systme, Gentoo is easier. (Well, assuming you can follow a list of simple instructions it's easier. It's not point-and-click, though.)
If you want a GUI, but don't need many actual applications, XP is easier, because Windows makes the GUI a core part of the basic system.
If you want a fully functional system with everything, neither makes the install simple or instant, but XP is worse. You know, because after a few days you get really tired of clicking Next. Gentoo takes forever to download and install everything, but there's not much user interaction required for most packages.
Of course, Microsoft has trained people to expect a computer to come with a GUI but no significant applications. I'm not sure what *use* a GUI is without any real applications, but that's what you get out of the box.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Unless you are ripping old media, flash or online storage is good enough.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you need Windows this is clearly not the machine for you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You lose.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Make unsubstantiated claims about Linux?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't want fucking PCI Express. I don't even know that the hell is that. And I don't want to get a better CPU, that will cost me $40. For what exactly? Email, web browsing, no YouTube nonsense.
So again, why should I waste more money?
My company can get me an expensive machine if they want to. I personally don't need expensive hardware anymore. The complete idea of electronics is for hardware prices to go down. I want to send a clear message to manufacturers that small is the future, big is corporate.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Wow, I can't even begin to thank you. You've made my everyday Linux experience more tolerable. :)
I would think that "people like my neighbors" is people like me:
image editing, vector graphics illustrations, home accounting, the occasional document, IM, (no VoIP for me, I just don't feel the need. but there's Skype if I wanted to), web, E-Mail. oh, and some games here and there. if I really need a good RTS game, I'll just play S.W.I.N.E., it works better on Wine than Vista anyway.
Vista, and even XP, feel awkward and uncomfortable. it's hard to get stuff done with them. with my Linux operating system, everything is a breeze. I get the real Vista with Linux ;-)
the first OS I used was MS-DOS, then a little Windows 3.11 and 95 (simultaneously, more or less), then I had 98 at home, then XP. after a few years with XP I felt like trying out something as different as possible, and started looking at other OSs. since July 2006, I've started using other OSs, and for the past few months have used my current Linux-based OS as my primary OS. I use Vista a few times a week, and XP most days of the week, but where I really feel at home is on my Linux system. and except for one thing, I don't think I ever used the command line where I couldn't have done things at least as easily with the GUI. even that one time, I could have probably done it with the GUI, but didn't want to be bothered. I'm not a CLI freak, but following instructions by copying them from a web page and pasting them to the CLI is far faster, easier, consistent, and more reliable.
the only trouble I have is that my DSL modem isn't supported by my OS with USB, but I can use Ethernet, so it doesn't matter.
if "Linux" is 40% there, then I guess Windows is 30%? it's hard to talk about "Linux" anyway, because each distribution is a different operating system. they just happen to have a lot in common, including the core component. but they are all put together differently. each has a different mixture of the same set of components that they can all have.
It seems that you live among some very interesting, and atypical neighbors. The folks here in my neighborhood use Comcast for Internet on a $600 Windows machine purchased from a place like Best Buy or Walmart. I don't think that your history is as indicative of the average American user as you seem to imply. They don't "image edit" they manage thier photos with either the Adobe freebie included with thier camera of whatever Vista is shoving on them. And it's guaranteed that none of the folks who live in my neighborhood are using Linux, although at least one uses OS X. in pretty much the same way save that I know he's got particular intersts in creating his own music.
The folks around here certainly are not the types that would be interested in the work in both getting Linux to server thier basic needs, nor managing WINE to run the programs they won't part from in Windows.
Face it folks like you and me who remember MS-DOS are OLD compared to the growing segments of computer users. Most of them aren't willing to suffer inconveninces or the "roll your own engine" mentality of the Linux set. They don't want to spend time building either their computers or thier OS, nor compiling stuff from sort. They just want to turn on thier box and have it work.
I don't know about Comcast, but about the rest:
all you have to do is tick a check-box and then you can run Windows apps. heck, it's easier than turning on compatibility mode in Windows. (read last paragragh for the negative side).
managing photos: plenty of Linux apps available, including Google's Picasa. my Linux-based OS comes with 2 pre-installed. I was talking about what I use my computer for, which is why I mentioned image editing, but not organizing photos.
and I wasn't talking about my neighbors, I was talking about myself.
and I'm not "old", at least not in years. I did use MS-DOS before Windows 95 came out, but the only commands I knew were DIR and CD. I only needed to know enough to get the games running, after all.
but there was no work involved in it for me, aside from installing it (no problem, since it's all both graphical and easy), because this PC came pre-installed with Vista. if a PC comes pre-installed with a Linux-based OS (gPC, Eee PC, some Dell and Lenovo models, and more), then you don't have any hurdles, not even installation. (remember, you said basic needs. for cool desktop effects and 3D games, you might have to tick a checkbox first).
I reinstalled Vista on this machine, and it was simpler, but mainly because they took away basic options like choosing your interface language and input languages. it's hell to set that up in Vista in a way that actually works the way you want.
never experienced any of that at all. I did have to add a program to the start up list (or whatever it's called) so that my Ethernet card would work automatically, on an old machine. on this machine, everything works out of the box. only exception is that I had to tick a checkbox to install the proprietary nVidia driver. again, easier than performing driver installation on Windows (although it did come with this driver included). from my experience, the image of "Linux" as a difficult geek plaything is totally unjustified. yes, I've heard horror stories, but they were the minority. my advice is this: if you buy an Acer PC, look in the booklet to see whether they mention Linux support. from my experience, if it does, your fixed. and when Linux runs on supportive hardware, it works way better than Windows. maybe it's because it's designed to work, rather than be a marketable product?
you're probably going to have a go at my "buts". well, here's the thing: I had 3 problems on "Linux". 1 was serious. 2 were easily fixed by ticking a checkbox. the serious one was experienced on a machine that, as far as I can tell, wasn't designed to support Linux. the minor two (Wine is pretty optional. the nVidia one is probably a mixture of politics, ideology, and legal issues) were experienced on a supporting system. the nVidia issue had an easy, obvious fix. by obvious I mean the OS giving you a pretty noticeable notification, and probably instructions.
Wine isn't that easy, but searching for something like "running windows applications on [insert name of OS]" should wield some usefull results. I know this isn't optimal, but as far as I can tell, it's the only real issue. people want their apps from windows, and support for this isn't always available out of the box. if they know about software repositories, they might know to search them for the word "Windows". in my OS, searching in the simple "Add/Remove Applications" tool yields immediate results, but to people used to Windows this would not be obvious. this is the only real problem I see. (again, I know nothing about Comcast, so I can't comment)
Just remember that checkboxes aren't always obvious, especially to the technicaly unschooled.
Getting a preloaded Linux box with support is a looad of difference from handing a neophyte a disc from a Linux magazine sitting on a Barnes and Nobles shelf. Linux has improved a good deal from the old days of Debian and Slackware, but I'd still be hesitant to recommend it to someone who wasn't going to have some form of knowledgeable tech support available. But mileages do vary and so do cases.
now I must apologize for accidentally talking about my OS when I was trying to talk in a general sense about Linux-based OSs. this forces me to reveal that my OS is Ubuntu.
well, depending where. when it comes to installing software, I expect it would be fairly obvious to those familiar in general to GUIs, but counter-intuitive to those familiar with MS-Windows terminology. (Add/Remove being the place to uninstall, not the place to find and install software from online sources).
when it comes to "Restricted Drivers", I expect the name is meaningless to the casual user. this is a shortcoming.
I agree, in so far that neophyte means something similar to the popular term "newbie". however, it's even worse when offering them to download it themselves. from all my interactions with people, it seems no one I know has any familiarity with the concept of a Disc Image (ISO) file. then they'd have to boot from CD, which might require configuration of the BIOS. once the CD is loaded (it doesn't matter here what OS it is, as long as the installer uses a GUI) it should be fairly obvious.
I have mixed feelings about it that have little or nothing to do with the technical status of Linux-based OSs. I'd also say it's much more appropriate to evaluate each OS separately than to evaluate them in groups.
indeed. I simply think Linux-based OSs are not inferior to other OSs like MS-Windows. it's mainly 3 things: available applications, supported hardware, and familiarity. there may be people who have certain hardware, or who need to perform certain tasks, or open certain files, or visit certain websites, and simply don't have support for that in Linux-based OSs. I know someone who is forced to do all his online banking in MS-Windows, because the websites don't work in FF.
people might not have time or patience to learn a new interface and different terminology.