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A Windows CE Shell For Netbooks
nerdyH writes "Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and Lenovo Ideapad S9 usually ship with SSD storage and the Linux operating system in low-end configurations, or else with hard drives and Windows XP Home at the higher end of the market. Therefore, customers who want a "Windows experience" have no choice but to shell out for extra RAM and disk storage, potentially impacting battery life. Perhaps not for long. Quarta Mobile says its open-source (yes, open source) "MID-Shell for Windows Embedded CE 6.0" provides a Microsoft-based alternative to Linux for low-end devices with SSDs (solid state disks)."
If you want Windows, don't you want "real" Windows, to run all the programs you're accustomed to? Windows CE is the suck.
Screw that, I want linux on the high end. That's right, I want the best hardware you got, and I want it with linux. capice?
Whats the point of CE when you have limited amount of useful applications for it. You get a netbook to limit the stuff you have to carry around, not to limit the number of things you can do with it.
The reason existing netbooks (doesn't whoever bought Psion own that trademark) suck so much is that they're using bloated x86 chips from a company that doesn't understand the mobile market. Put a Cortex A8 SoC in them and we'll see some real battery life from the form factor. CE gives manufacturers a 'safe' operating system to put on them, and the rest of us can replace it with something more sensible afterwards.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Let's see - instead of using an OS that has tons of great software for it, has no licensing fees, and is quickly source-modifiable by the manufacturer, we can instead use an OS that has lots of crappy software for it, costs money, and takes several quarters for the maker to fix bugs. Hmmm, tough one... Also, what part of the "Windows experience" in WinCE is that valuable? Win32 apps don't work on it, so that's out. Can anyone name a good office suite for WinCE? What, is the Start button that awesome? Are WinCE clickable icons so much better than those under Linux UI's? Cmon. Really, as a long time Windows dev and an avid WinMo developer, I just don't see the value for netbook makers.
> WHY?
Because Microsoft has nothing that plays in this space, and because of past design decisions, there's no way they can reduce the requirements on their current products to function on these devices.
The Microsoft development model has for many years depended heavily on computers getting faster, disk getting denser, memory getting memoryer. The low-power solid-state PC market came on the scene faster than an OS design cycle -- no time to prepare, nothing to do except concede that you're not a player, or blow the dust off off WinCE and try to make it work. Or convince manufacturers to increase hardware specs until they're like, you know, real laptops. At the expense of the very factors that make them so appealing in the first place -- price, size, weight, heat, battery life, carbon footprint.
To be fair, the hardware requirements for Linux has gotten steeper with time too, but at a much slower place, and for that and other reasons, Linux is much better positioned to compete in this space.
There's a couple ways I see this playing out. The majority of people who actually try the devices with Linux will be pleasantly surprised that the "experience" is not that much different from Winders for what they do, and will appreciate the long battery life, low heat, and low heft.
The people who get WinCE-powered devices with the expectation that they're running Windows, will rapidly run into issues and will blame it on the device. WinCE then becomes almost a disruptive technology, setting people's expectations that the devices are not usable unless they have enough guts to run "real" Windows.
What amazes me is that a vendor would allow this to happen. Putting WinCE on these devices is at best a short-term strategy. When people figure out that their applications won't run, they're going to be upset. Which would you rather have, a user who buys a device with OpenOffice already installed and figures out he can edit his existing documents just fine, or a user who buys a device and then discovers that Office XP won't install? Which one is going to be clogging up the support lines and leaving venomous reviews on Amazon?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
With all the good press that Linux gets by default, it is nowhere near an embedded OS.
Yea. You'll have to convince all the NAS manufacturers and router manufacturers that took a look at Win CE and decided to go with Linux.
I wonder why?
Why does everyone keep insisting on pushing CE? Any 'low end' x86 device these days is capable of running XPe. And XPe doesn't restrict your application pool to a minimal set of buggy, broken, poorly maintained, half-useful apps the way CE does. Just let it die already! Please, for the love of god let it die! (troll / flamebait / honest opinion from someone who's been forced to use CE for nigh on 10 years... take your pick and mod accordingly)