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"Good Enough" Computers Are the Future
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the PC World blog, Keir Thomas engages in some speculative thinking. Pretending to be writing from the year 2025, he describes a world of 'Good Enough computing,' wherein ultra-cheap PCs and notebooks (created to help end-users weather the 'Great Recession' of the early 21st century) are coupled to open source operating systems. This is possible because even the cheapest chips have all the power most people need nowadays. In what is effectively the present situation with netbooks writ large, he sees a future where Microsoft is priced out of the entire desktop operating system market and can't compete. It's a fun read that raises some interesting points."
It's simple to install. Adding applications is easy. Updating is easy. Seriously, what's not to like?
All my servers run linux, but I've been windows-on-the-laptop forever. When I bought my new laptop, I decided that I'd try Linux, and that I'd give it 6 full weeks before making any decision. I had to switch back to windows after 6 weeks. In the end, it wasn't any major drawbacks, but rather a sort of "death by 1000 cuts" laundry list of mildly infuriating things--- nVidia drivers that Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a black screen rather than letting you see a command prompt in character mode; mouse sensitivity/acceleration limits too low; double tap/double click detection erratic; terrible IM clients; support for user-defined hotkeys is crude and inflexible; flash objects in firefox intermittently fail to render in foreground; and any other little things that devs haven't gotten around to fixing, or think aren't broken. I could fix them myself, but I just don't have the kind of time necessary to climb the learning curve of a dozen different projects. The Linux GUI just isn't there yet. I love the command line, and hate to lose the convenience of the rational file system, but the little annoyances drove me nuts.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.