Asus To Phase Out Sub-10" Eee PCs

jeevesbond writes "The Register reports that Asus president Jerry Shen has revealed his company will be phasing out all sub-10" Eee PCs. According to Shen, the 'standard' netbook next year will be a 10" model with a hard drive running XP. Shen also said XP is outselling GNU/Linux on netbooks by a ratio of 7:3. This is somewhat contrary to news from the UK earlier in the year that GNU/Linux units were out of stock while XP machines sat unsold. Are Brits more open-minded than the rest of the world when it comes to choosing an OS?"

Comments

Angst at the Laptop Makers

[Zombie Ryushu]

This not only goes for the Eee, but alot of Laptop makers too. We have to find a way for XP to stop steamrolling every pro-Linux operation that shows up. OLPC, Classmate, EeePC, one way or another, Linux has to find away to bury XP. I'm serious. The Linux movement cannot continue to take losses like this.

I say that somehow, we find a way to make retailers lives a living Hell if they want to continue to shovel XP only models of stuff, and I want some way concieved of to REALLY damage MS's bottom line and make them bleed.

Technical, Legal, I don't care, find a way to win, and make it happen.

XP more functional anyway

[Phizzle]

Get the XP version so you can run all the boring real world software and run Backtrack 3 for your naughty Linux needs - works GREAT!

Re:XP outsells Linux, guess why

[gomoX]

The MSI Wind has the same distro, I actually tried to use it because I had heard good things about it. I tolerated the thing for 3 days. Honestly, if you think that GUI is not crap, you should try Ubuntu someday. Suse Enterprise Desktop looks and feels exactly like KDE 2 felt on RedHat 7.2. You know, all the crowded dialogs with zillions of options (including some particularly obscure ones that don't even get mentioned on college networking classes) that could have been parted with using simple autodetection?

Please. Ubuntu is at least 5 years ahead in usability. And don't get me started on package management.

Re:Well "Works With Linux" is a feature to me

[Computershack]

LIAR. Even the system requirements on your distro page state 256MB for Gnome. From: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements Ubuntu should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly. * 700 MHz x86 processor * 384 MB of system memory (RAM) * 8 GB of disk space

Re:Well "Works With Linux" is a feature to me

[theLOUDroom]

In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

Is it that hard to type "Microsoft" and "Astroturf" into Google and click on one of the top links?
LINK
LINK
LINK
LINK
It is pretty clear from a simple ONE MINUTE investigation that MS does hire astroturfers. Why bother to imply the opposite?

I'm probably going to get modded troll or flamebait for this, but everything I am about to say is 100% true to the best of my recollection. And no, I am not an astroturfer for MS. In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

It would REALLY help you to be taken seriously if you actually provided enough information for people to be able to check your story.

Phrases like "loaded with Linux" and "magical incantations that were supposed to compile and install the drivers" are EXTREMELY VAGUE.

Also, your expectations seem unrealistic. You put an OS that by itself requires 2 GB on a computer that only has 2 GB disk space. To put it bluntly: What the heck were you thinking? Of course it didn't work. Even if it did install, you would have been out of disk space the first time you created a document or applied a software patch.
Sure it would have been nice to get a warning about it, but when you're within less than one percent of the minimum, does it really take hours to determine that might be the problem?
Was is really out of the question to install an OS that only required 1GB? Wouldn't that have been the reasonable choice from the get-go?

Your comment about being afraid to edit text files seems pretty odd. If you're as tech savvy as you say, you would have experience with the Windows registry. Is that really preferable to just editing a simple text file? (Sure you can pick a specific UI feature the is in a config file in Linux and is a GUI option in windows, but I could turn around and point out a similar feature the requires registry hacking in windows.)
Say, why did you want to edit this anyways?