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Asus Slaps Linux In the Face
vigmeister writes "From Techgeist, 'Linux just got a major slap in the face today from Asus. One of the highlights of Linux going mainstream was the wildly popular Asus Eee PC preinstalled with a customized Linux distro geared towards web applications. While I personally never got what the big deal was, I was still happy for all the Linux people out there waiting for this day, but it looks like the cause for celebration won't be lasting much longer.
Asus and Microsoft have teamed up and have made a site called 'It's Better With Windows.' The page touts how easy it is to get up and ready with Windows on an Asus Eee PC, while slyly stating that you won't have to deal with an 'unfamiliar environment' and 'major compatibility issues.' While it is silly to state such a thing since Asus built the Linux distribution specifically for the Eee PC, I give Microsoft two points for snarky comments.'"
I thought it was already pretty easy to "get up and ready" with my EeePC. Well, Asus will have to live with their decision.
My next motherboard will be a Gigabyte.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just so that I can cost the bastards some money by demanding a Windows Refund on it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Don't get me wrong, I like my EEE but Asus completely screwed up. The interface was poor, the updates were rubbish and in fact some of the updates would break it. It's quite possibly the worst Linux distro I've seen. I might as well buy a normal smallish laptop with an SSD as I still have to uninstall the OS and put my own on with an EEE.
In a way their Linux distro is more of a slap in the face for Linux than not using Linux.
I've had much better luck since putting my own instance of Ubuntu onto the machine which I prefer much more than I would Windows or that custom Xandros OS.
This isn't the end of the world. Can't we all realise that there's a market for both Windows and Linux?
Those who want Windows on their netbook can buy it, those who don't can buy Linux. See?
Ultimately this is business, and it ain't pretty.
ilovegeorgebush
I was introduced to the eeePc when a friend bought one. It came with their version of Linux installed and he called me for help. I have been almost exclusively Linux since the early on and I was literally unable to help him. We were on the phone and with the graphical shell they put on the Asus, he couldn't find anything. He got frustrated and installed Windows. He ran for a short time before he screwed up Windows. At that point, he brought his Asus over and I installed eeebuntu. It has been a love affair ever since. I even offered to make his machine dual boot and was turned down. Now I have my own Asus running eeebuntu.
... it's just marketing....
There are some people that would like to take an organization's word for what the words mean. Asus made their own cut of Linux to work with the Eee and now they've caved to Microsoft pressure to eat their own words. Worse, it's a lie.
The integrity of such an organization then becomes suspect, as if they lied about this, then what else did they lie about? Trust is broken. And we then know them for what they are: an organization that will capitulate, lie, send mixed messages, all in the names of sales desparation. Too bad about Asus....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
OK, but that's very 80s and 90s thinking. The whole idea that systems have to be static, fixed, rigid is very much in the past.
There is no reason why releases have to be so long apart. That thinking comes from a license fee driven mentality; when you charge people for an upgrade, they must have something for it. So there is a huge incentive for feature bloat; look at "ribbons" v. "menus". I've yet to see a substantive difference in use but it's a brand new feature that's used to justify the huge cost of an upgrade.
Now look at the way linux develops. It's incremental, it's fast, and it relies on repositories. It doesn't have an attachment to the past. So a vendor doesn't have to customize the software to each distro, that's the distro maintainers' job.
Distro maintainers in linux are much like the OEMs in the MS world. They're ultimately responsible for making stuff work. The problem currently is that the major commercial vendors just plain don't understand how linux works, and so don't want to trust, support, or even acknowledge the package maintainers' role in making their product work.
The flip side is that the linux community has a short bullshit fuse; with flux and change being the norm, a commercial vendor has to be just as nimble, just as competitive, just as flexible as an open source project. Most of them simply cannot do that as they have too many internally competing goals.
So a piece of software that is not being actively developed is likely to be dropped in favor of some other. Look at what's happening to MySQL right now.
Let's have a dramatic reenactment, shall we?
Hi, Mike Sharp here. We've got a site going where we will talk about the benefits of running XP on your devices. Can we get you to link to it?
The ancient operating system you keep trying to kill?
Yeah, (ha ha), exactly.
I haven't heard the magic words....
Please?
No, the other magic words
Oh, your next 15,000 OEM licenses are essentially free.
There we go!
And... scene.
Asus is a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer. They fund Linux because they know it drives Microsoft crazy and they get better procurement conditions. So when they say "windows is better" than mind that before it was "no choice", and as all competitors know it advises to the opposite. Microsoft will not stop Asus' wise Linux investment, and Taiwanese open source efforts like LXDE.
Hardware manufacturere need a Linux strategy to get like Asus a super return on investment. AOL invested in Mozilla and Microsoft paid them a shitload of money to stay with their browser engine, a few years later the IE dominance is gone. The business of open source with Microsoft, you invest a bit in open source and Microsoft gets really scared and throws money at you.
Asus thinks Windows is better because they now get it almost for free. But the very reason for that was their progressive Linux embracement.
The campaing is a fake. Somebody took Asus EEE commercial videos and slapped a crappy looking badly aligned 'It's better with Windows' Slogan over it. Fonts aren't MS branding and the layout of the website is notably amatureish. You all have been trolled, so chill. It's a compareatively elaborate troll though, I give him that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We need a new mass-market/"newb friendly," distro, and we need to make sure that this one is NOT Debian based.
FreeBSD has the following technical advantages over anything Debian based that I've been able to see, and these could be recreated most easily with a non-Debian based Linux. These might be under the hood things, but they would definitely filter up to make life easier for the end user.
- Single point of daemon loading at bootup with /etc/rc.conf.
- Comparitive ease of kernel recompilation that is so much greater than Linux, and Debian in particular, that it isn't funny. The config file is tiny, and completely documented.
- Package management which doesn't subpackage, or have incomprehensibly stupid, bogus dependency declarations. Said package management also uses the directory structure of the filesystem itself as a database, so it can be used on low-powered systems which would have difficulty running an SQL database engine.
These are simplifications which, IMHO, Ubuntu very badly needs to adopt.
Can we all agree never to use the word 'polish' when evaluating an OS, ever again?
It does not convey any information beyond a vague dissatisfaction with UI elements; It's not a useful term. It can mean anything from, "I think brown is ugly." to "The clipboard widget has obscene error messages."
At least try to distinguish between aesthetic and technical issues. "Polish" has become a catch-all term for anything that someone dislikes about linux. The worst part of this is that it's distro-specific, or specific to one desktop environment, or specific to one WM/UI. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and the Moblin UI are all 'linux desktops', and presumably all have varying degrees of 'polish'. All of them behave differently and look differently: the only common interface in linux is the terminal.
I think it would be extremely fair to call the terminal a very 'polished' interface, and I hope that idea will dissuade you from using the term in the future :)
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.