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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?"
Hmm. Most slashdotters only have a 2" penis.
I am a software engineer with a degree living in South Africa. I like Linux, but bluntly put - I will not use it for my own machine soon. My work place only uses Microsoft, our customers only use Microsoft, so I only use Microsoft. Even further put, out company has two sub contracting divisions. One doing installations and support, and the other which I work for being development. I don't work for free. I never will - I rather become an electrician than consider becoming a linux developer. My 2c worth! I worked very hard for this career - you don't like it, then sell your computer and watch TV.
Maybe they can't find the Linux versions, since XP is outselling them. Hence, they will ship more of what is selling.
The fact that they are dropping the linux distro version is de facto evidence that they are not selling as well.
Supply and demand. If the demand was so high for the linux versions, they would be SHIPPING more. That's the bottom line, whatever sells, is what the companies ship. It's not like Asus doesn't know how to market a computer, build a computer, or ship computers, they are one of the largest OEM's out there. Anyone second guessing them needs a shot in the arm of some serious reality.
Sucks, to be sure. I like Linux. BUT, like most people, I tire of the endless "getting something to work". I also tire of the constant "That's not what I've seen with (insert MS OS here)....". XP / Vista works. Just use some decent hardware, stop trying to get your bleeding edge graphics card or 1999 ATI PCI card to work, and you won't have NEAR the problems.
And for the "rebooting" necessary when installing MS OS's, get over it. It really causes problems because you have to reboot 2 or 3 times when installing?
And lastly, WTF is this "Windows sucks, because after I install everything I want, it takes FOREVER to boot up"... That's the fault of the software, not the underlying OS.
Ubuntu takes JUST as long as XP on identical hardware, after installing only a few programs on either one. Basic, simple, fact of life. Just because you can fork a process to background when booting up (I ran across forking the networking to background on Ubuntu to speed up boot process..... Sure, it works, and also requires me to wait up to 30 seconds after the login screen appears to have NETWORKING... Hence, it takes another 30 seconds AFTER the login screen appears to be an actual capable o/s (I use it for file serving as well as a basic living room PC)).
Sheesh. Common sense prevails.
--Toll_Free
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.
Anyway, you can lump me in as another story similar to your friend's. I'm a computer programmer and consider myself to be in around the 95%+ percentile of techsavvyness. I can do stuff in the command line, and am not freaked out by it, but a good 75% of my attempts to follow instructions online on complex operations still falls into what I like to call the 'magical incantation' method of making things work, where you get a command that will supposedly do what you need, and you enter it in exactly like you are told to invoke the result. Along the way, you wince everytime you see an error message or warning pop up, not knowing whether or not this is the expected result or something is wrong with the incantation.
I got an EeePC loaded with Linux. Like everytime when I try Linux every few years, I came in bright eyed and hopeful, thinking this time would be different.
I needed to get foreign languages installed on it. Spent approximately 3 hours following forum posts and hacking at it. Everything apparently installed, but it just would not work, no additional language options appeared. No idea why, maybe a conflict with something Asus installed.
I needed to get Blackberry charging drivers installed. Found some magical incantations that were supposed to compile and install the drivers. They didn't. Couldn't figure out why.
Wanted to customize the shell, the way I would customize a start menu. Found out that this involved editing config files in notepad, and if I screwed up with a typo, this could potentially be a major problem. Was told I could create some safety margin by making a mirror of the config file in my user directory and editing that. For some reason, changes to the config file in my user directory were not followed by the machine.
Needed to install a VPN client. No support from my company, since I'm probably the only one who needs a Linux VPN client. I managed to get it working myself nonetheless, that was a moment of pride. However, it was much more unstable in its connection than the Windows clients I use on other computers. It would just randomly lose the connection, forcing me to redo work.
After probably around 10 hours invested in trying to make this thing work, I said screw it, and returned it and got a Windows machine.
My previous most recent attempt had involved installing Ubuntu (GG I think) on an older computer. I wanted to create a silent system, so I bought a 2GB flash drive. Ubuntu said it needed 2GB to install. It lied, it needed 2.001 GB to install, and kept dying without a good explanation of what was going on. Another few hours lost.
I will commend Linux for its improvement. I've tried it a number of times now, and in the beginning it was insanely difficult to do anything. Now it works fairly well as long as you don't try and do anything that's unanticipated. If you do, you're right back in command line magic incantation online forum land. If you can get it working, it's twice as powerful as Windows ever was, but good luck reaching that without a good mentor or LUG.
You're right, I'm sure if I poured a few hundred hours into it, I could become extremely comfortable in Linux. However, I just wasn't (and am not) willing to attempt the learning curve, not when it's this steep.
FU.. I have been a linux user (first redhat, then debian, then slackware for a long time, and now ubuntu desktop). If you can't figure out how to use linux, don't use it.. FU.
Again, FU, buy a fucking XP machine or a Vista machine and use it - don't use linux, who asked you to ? You almost sound like a republican campaign you moron.