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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?"
I don't know about you but I am finding I use the optical drive less and less these days. It is much easier to just get a USB flash drive for portable storage and dump the remaining large files onto an external hard disk. New software tends to be downloaded rather than loaded from a disk. So CD/DVD media is only useful for movies and install disks for new OSes. If they start making faster bootable USB flash drives with downloadable image files then I probably will stop using optical drives all together.
It's possible to boot up from a USB storage device.
An ISO image is just a filesystem which you can mount. All you need to do then is copy all the files and folder structure from a downloaded installation CD image onto a USB stick of 1GB or larger, and make the USB stick bootable using the bootloader configurator thoughtfully provided. You now have a rescue "disc", albeit a USB one.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I do realize I'm in the minority, but there's a lot of software on Linux that I can't get at Windows, especially what comes with the OS. That's why my main machines run Linux and the gaming machine I rarely boot up runs Windows.
Some examples are basic shell utilities or their analogues, such as grep, tr, and dozens of others. Although possible to get on Windows, Perl, Python, and other interpreters don't run as smoothly and take more work to do on Windows. For my purposes, it's most efficient to use such tools in a shell prompt, which Windows somewhat lacks (don't get me started on their DOS emulator, which lacks decent tab completion, useful text selection support, and so on). I even have a friend who has SSHd running under Cygwin so he can SSH into his own computer and have a useful terminal emulator and shell (Bash in his case).
The same goes for the graphical applications I use, such as parts of KDE, which haven't run on Windows well yet (KDE4 will fix that). Other examples are good shell replacements. It's like having to use CDE during the days of proprietary Unix, without any good options. Sure, BB4Win derivatives provide options, but they're nowhere nearly as good as XFce, KDE, or even RatPoison for my purposes (I'm not even sure why it's not possible to have two different wallpapers in dual-head mode under Windows).
Sure, for the average consumer, Windows has what they want and the software they'll send their money in for, but for someone raised under GNU/Linux, Windows lacks the important software.
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.