I see, the second link in the summary only lists the top 16 contributers, well, I suppose it's only a matter of time before someone mods my original post down.
This isn't really new though, this has been something Dell has said every since Acer and MSI started complaining about a higher return rate on thier linux based netbooks. In fact, it's basically not news. Anyways, the point of my reply is that it's not just a price negotation stunt, Dell has been saying this all along, and it seems like they have no reservations about continueing to sell some linux-based computers, though I doubt it will become a more common option or be actively promoted by them anytime soon.
But if you want to find something that's NOT a netbook, then things get harder. In fact, I found the best approach was to google "dell ubuntu laptop" instead of trying to find them on Dell's website. At that point, it's clear you know what you're looking for (lcomputers w/ linux OEM installed) and you're buying from Dell becuase you know they've got it, so while the original claim is not %100 on the mark, there's some truth to it.
Not to mention that the "old" lightbulbs generate at least twice as much waste heat as the new ones, which is great during summer when you've got no air conditioning.
Posted by Jamie on August 05, 2009 at 05:20 PM CEST #
This will be great for my netbook. Maybe the UI will use up ALL screen space so that I don't have to see, you know, the actual document I'm working on. That way I can spend all my time clicking various buttons and won't have to bother with how the document turns out.
If you're using Windows, you can always use a vintage Open Office, if you're using Linux / Mac you might have to compile it yourself. Of course if you're using Linux you can also use Koffice and Abiword.
I know you probably won't believe me, becuase until I tried it myself I wouldn't have believed it, but windows 7 doesn't really use a significantly larger amount of system resources than windows XP. I'm sure you've seen articles that have some comparitive benchmarks between the two OSes. Ignore them. Grab a copy of the beta of the Windows 7 beta for yourself and try it. It will surprise you.
I recently installed windows 7 on a somewhat old 1.40 Ghz Celeron Pentium M laptop with only 756 Mb of Ram and it ran great. If this thing can run Windows 7, then so can any x86 netbook on the market today. Now I'd still rather have a good desktop linux on my netbook, but I'll take Windows 7 over XP any day (as long as I'm paying <$40 extra for the license and don't need to join a Samba/NT domain) and I'll take Win 7, Win XP, or even Win2k over Android any day, at least it's any OS for a COMPUTER for god's sake.
Re:That's cool and all.
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.
But you can also compare the prices to send small packages (1-6 lb in weight) via USPS vs UPS and FedEx and you'll find that much of the time, the post office wins, albeit by a significantly smaller margin. All in all I've got no complaints about the US post office.
HP originally used Suse (SLED) for the 2133 but IIRC there were some pretty bad issues with drivers, they may have sorted that out by know, or the move from C-7 w/ chrome to Atom w/ gma 950 might have taken care of their driver issues for them, but while you can still get SLED as an option on the 2140, none of their "pre-configured" models ship w/ SLED or FreeDOS so it's somewhat more expensive then just buying a 2140 pre-configured w/ XP.
The Mini 1000 uses a heavily OEM-customized Ubuntu which, acoording to HP, has "the command-line interface disabled".
And I also think the article is pretty much rubbish. I think what really happened in the market was that, in the beginning, with the EeePCs, XP was too expensive and bloated for the hardware, so Asus shipped w/ Xandros, which was cheaper and tailored for their hardware, and a number of people were actually happy enough with it. After the Eee's success, more people, (Acer, MSI, etc) got into the market, but not all of them put the same amount of effort as Asus did into actually verifying that their linux distro would work well on their products; at the same time the machines had become more powerful thanks to intel releasing the atom platform and Microsoft had begun selling heavily discounted versions of XP home to OEMs for netbooks, which gave a lot of OEMs a good reason to at least offer a windows of version.
Then what happened was that the OEMs who implemented their linux offerings poorly (ACER, early HP, etc) shot themselves in the foot, and it's not really surprising they had such high return rates and, given their high return rates and, consequently, a tarnished reputation for their linux-based offerings, it's not surprising that they mostly discontinued their linux-offerings. Meanwhile, the companies that had implemented linux-based products from the get-go fairly well (I'd say ASUS and Dell, at least) are still offering those products and are presumably making enough money off of them for it to be profitable for them to continue to sell them, along-side Windows-based models, of course. (Admittedly, the linux-based EeePC has become much harder to find, but they're still out there and Ubuntu-based Dell computers easy to find if you buy direct from Dell)
I think the real problem with trying to sell an x86-based netbook with linux installed is a product differentiation issue; either you can artificially jack up the price of the windows model and use the linux-model as a "economy" model, then try and drive your customers to purchase the windows model (in which case you're actually kind of screwed if people buy the linux model so you may as well put a very minimal effort into making the software/hardware combination work) or you have to sell linux as a desirable product, which I think OEMs view as dangerous because they don't want to step on Microsoft's toes, in addition to the fact that it's actually difficult to point out good reasons to the average Joe why he should use linux. (few viruses, wizzy compiz or Kwin effects, slightly cheaper price, I can't think of much else) while it's very easy to come up with ways to hype Windows to the average consumer (it's familiar, it runs applications you're already familiar with, or quote any of the Microsoft FUD) and it's just not expensive enough that you won't convince most people to just buy the Windows version and be done with it.
One can hope (well if one is either a linux-enthusiast or a Microsoft-hater) that ARM or Windows 7 might change the game; both offer the possibility of driving the relative cost of Windows-based vs. Linux-based netbooks up and ARM has features you can sell to a consumer (battery life, onboard 3g, etc) but it looks like you're only going to see these things sold with Android pre-installed, and I just don't know how well that will fly; I'd love to buy an ARM-powered netbook with a real desktop linux distrubution installed (say, Ubuntu, Debian, and Xandros all have ARM ports), but I wouldn't buy a computer running an operating system designed for phones and MI
I wonder if this will spawn a trend where every single distro ships with thier own branded firefox version. Meaning that in distro reviews, we'll have the mandatory screenshot of the login screen art, the defualt desktop background, and the firefox branding. Great.
I would welcome this for Arch, though, we have to rebuild firefox from source or we're stuck with the ugly "built from source code" icons.
I don't think the point is that we should eliminate "the flavours", I see this more as saying "hey, we're all looking at things from a similar perspective, so let's push that", I mean, sort of like saying OK, let's not just push Linux, let's also push *BSD, OpenSolaris, and FreeDOS... all at the same time, I mean who CARES that the *BSD license is not copyleft? (well... BSD developers I guess, 'cause they can't use GPL'ed code, but anyway), it's definitely an open source project and it's a project that's free in spirit.
I would have to say the best KDE experiance I had was with the old kde3 based kdemod on Arch Linux. But the KDE4 based kdemod was pretty nice too.
Unfortunately, thanks to how much ATI graphics drivers suck, I'm on Kubuntu right now, and 9.04 seems to actually be fairly good.
I must say, I really like the "screen-profiles" package they shipped (of course this wasn't kde specific), on the other hand, memory usage is through the roof, like 2500 M with firefox (4 tabs) + kmail + Amarok + Whatever automatically starts up after KDE login. Luckily, on my desktop I've gone tons of memory, but there's no way I could use Kubuntu on the netbook which I ordered from Dell a while ago (it's taking a ridulous amount of time to ship.. oh well)... so actually:
- Does anybody know of a good netbook-oriented distro that is KDE-centric? - How about XFCE-centric? (XFCE is my fallback for systems that can't handle KDE, I actually like the new 4.6 quite a bit)
1) There's no intrinsic tie between KDE and linux either, so if you want to tag the story with a penguin then you may as well add a daemon as well.
2) KDE is the desktop of choice for both Desktop BSD and PC BSD, as far as I know these are the only 2 desktop oriented BSD distributions out there, so actually BSD is linked in more to KDE than GNOME.
3) KDE in theory (and practice) ports to other platforms as well: WIndows/OS X/Other unix, but in practice, I don't think you see anything like the same usage rates of KDE users vs. total OS users anywhere but in BSD and Linux -land. Just out of curiosity:
Does anyone use KDE on "esoteric Unixes" (AIX, HP-UX, Irix, etc)?
But at $100 dollars, you're not paying for a laptop. you're payin' for a huge honkin' smartphone, and nobody expects to play graphics intensive games or do serious word-processing on a smartphone; at least that what people like Acer, Nvidia, etc. are hoping, because they still WANT TO SELL x86 computers, they just want to add a new market segment that they can sell people devices in addition to their "primary" laptop/desktop. I don't know if they will be successful or not, but there's a chance they will.
On the other hand, this development is a big disappointment for me, because I was looking forward to ARM based computers' long battery life and integration of mobile broadband technology, on the other hand I really could get by with netbook-class hardware for about %99 of the kind of computing I would want to do when I'm away from my desktop (and I really don't want to buy/own more than one laptop) but Android isn't going to provide the software necessary for this kind of computing while, for me at least, a real desktop linux distribution would have. (and at least Ubuntu and Debian are available for the purpose). So I'm probably going to end up buying an atom or via based system afterall, after waiting all this time for ARM netbooks to become available.
Microsoft already has Operating Systems that will run on the Arm architecture, Windows Mobile / WinCE, but I don't see what benefit you would get from using them, both taking your suggestion or using Windows Mobile would still leave an operating system that might look vaguely familiar, but still doesn't act quite like users would expect, that doesn't run much in the terms of familiar applications. I would think that, like with the Linux-based acer and msi netbooks, you would get a very high return rate on something like this.
And how much benefit would the F0SS world reap by having these "non-contributors" continuing to use proprietary software? Even if FOSS gains nothing from this situation, neither does it lose anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I see, the second link in the summary only lists the top 16 contributers, well, I suppose it's only a matter of time before someone mods my original post down.
I can't answer that question, but you know what other big linux using corporation is conspiciously absent from that list?
Google.
This isn't really new though, this has been something Dell has said every since Acer and MSI started complaining about a higher return rate on thier linux based netbooks. In fact, it's basically not news. Anyways, the point of my reply is that it's not just a price negotation stunt, Dell has been saying this all along, and it seems like they have no reservations about continueing to sell some linux-based computers, though I doubt it will become a more common option or be actively promoted by them anytime soon.
But if you want to find something that's NOT a netbook, then things get harder. In fact, I found the best approach was to google "dell ubuntu laptop" instead of trying to find them on Dell's website. At that point, it's clear you know what you're looking for (lcomputers w/ linux OEM installed) and you're buying from Dell becuase you know they've got it, so while the original claim is not %100 on the mark, there's some truth to it.
Not to mention that the "old" lightbulbs generate at least twice as much waste heat as the new ones, which is great during summer when you've got no air conditioning.
Posted by Jamie on August 05, 2009 at 05:20 PM CEST #
This will be great for my netbook. Maybe the UI will use up ALL screen space so that I don't have to see, you know, the actual document I'm working on. That way I can spend all my time clicking various buttons and won't have to bother with how the document turns out.
If you're using Windows, you can always use a vintage Open Office, if you're using Linux / Mac you might have to compile it yourself. Of course if you're using Linux you can also use Koffice and Abiword.
I know you probably won't believe me, becuase until I tried it myself I wouldn't have believed it, but windows 7 doesn't really use a significantly larger amount of system resources than windows XP. I'm sure you've seen articles that have some comparitive benchmarks between the two OSes. Ignore them. Grab a copy of the beta of the Windows 7 beta for yourself and try it. It will surprise you.
I recently installed windows 7 on a somewhat old 1.40 Ghz Celeron Pentium M laptop with only 756 Mb of Ram and it ran great. If this thing can run Windows 7, then so can any x86 netbook on the market today. Now I'd still rather have a good desktop linux on my netbook, but I'll take Windows 7 over XP any day (as long as I'm paying <$40 extra for the license and don't need to join a Samba/NT domain) and I'll take Win 7, Win XP, or even Win2k over Android any day, at least it's any OS for a COMPUTER for god's sake.
Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.
I think Nokia buying trolltech helped Qt become available under the LGPL.
Well, Moblin, who boots the fastest, NOW?
But you can also compare the prices to send small packages (1-6 lb in weight) via USPS vs UPS and FedEx and you'll find that much of the time, the post office wins, albeit by a significantly smaller margin. All in all I've got no complaints about the US post office.
Oh, I finally get it now, Cat 5 cable can kill five cats, and cat 6 can kill SIX cats.
Isn't there also an Intel compiler available for Linux?
HP originally used Suse (SLED) for the 2133 but IIRC there were some pretty bad issues with drivers, they may have sorted that out by know, or the move from C-7 w/ chrome to Atom w/ gma 950 might have taken care of their driver issues for them, but while you can still get SLED as an option on the 2140, none of their "pre-configured" models ship w/ SLED or FreeDOS so it's somewhat more expensive then just buying a 2140 pre-configured w/ XP.
The Mini 1000 uses a heavily OEM-customized Ubuntu which, acoording to HP, has "the command-line interface disabled".
And I also think the article is pretty much rubbish. I think what really happened in the market was that, in the beginning, with the EeePCs, XP was too expensive and bloated for the hardware, so Asus shipped w/ Xandros, which was cheaper and tailored for their hardware, and a number of people were actually happy enough with it. After the Eee's success, more people, (Acer, MSI, etc) got into the market, but not all of them put the same amount of effort as Asus did into actually verifying that their linux distro would work well on their products; at the same time the machines had become more powerful thanks to intel releasing the atom platform and Microsoft had begun selling heavily discounted versions of XP home to OEMs for netbooks, which gave a lot of OEMs a good reason to at least offer a windows of version.
Then what happened was that the OEMs who implemented their linux offerings poorly (ACER, early HP, etc) shot themselves in the foot, and it's not really surprising they had such high return rates and, given their high return rates and, consequently, a tarnished reputation for their linux-based offerings, it's not surprising that they mostly discontinued their linux-offerings. Meanwhile, the companies that had implemented linux-based products from the get-go fairly well (I'd say ASUS and Dell, at least) are still offering those products and are presumably making enough money off of them for it to be profitable for them to continue to sell them, along-side Windows-based models, of course. (Admittedly, the linux-based EeePC has become much harder to find, but they're still out there and Ubuntu-based Dell computers easy to find if you buy direct from Dell)
I think the real problem with trying to sell an x86-based netbook with linux installed is a product differentiation issue; either you can artificially jack up the price of the windows model and use the linux-model as a "economy" model, then try and drive your customers to purchase the windows model (in which case you're actually kind of screwed if people buy the linux model so you may as well put a very minimal effort into making the software/hardware combination work) or you have to sell linux as a desirable product, which I think OEMs view as dangerous because they don't want to step on Microsoft's toes, in addition to the fact that it's actually difficult to point out good reasons to the average Joe why he should use linux. (few viruses, wizzy compiz or Kwin effects, slightly cheaper price, I can't think of much else) while it's very easy to come up with ways to hype Windows to the average consumer (it's familiar, it runs applications you're already familiar with, or quote any of the Microsoft FUD) and it's just not expensive enough that you won't convince most people to just buy the Windows version and be done with it.
One can hope (well if one is either a linux-enthusiast or a Microsoft-hater) that ARM or Windows 7 might change the game; both offer the possibility of driving the relative cost of Windows-based vs. Linux-based netbooks up and ARM has features you can sell to a consumer (battery life, onboard 3g, etc) but it looks like you're only going to see these things sold with Android pre-installed, and I just don't know how well that will fly; I'd love to buy an ARM-powered netbook with a real desktop linux distrubution installed (say, Ubuntu, Debian, and Xandros all have ARM ports), but I wouldn't buy a computer running an operating system designed for phones and MI
I wonder if this will spawn a trend where every single distro ships with thier own branded firefox version. Meaning that in distro reviews, we'll have the mandatory screenshot of the login screen art, the defualt desktop background, and the firefox branding. Great.
I would welcome this for Arch, though, we have to rebuild firefox from source or we're stuck with the ugly "built from source code" icons.
I don't think the point is that we should eliminate "the flavours", I see this more as saying "hey, we're all looking at things from a similar perspective, so let's push that", I mean, sort of like saying OK, let's not just push Linux, let's also push *BSD, OpenSolaris, and FreeDOS ... all at the same time, I mean who CARES that the *BSD license is not copyleft? (well ... BSD developers I guess, 'cause they can't use GPL'ed code, but anyway), it's definitely an open source project and it's a project that's free in spirit.
So, I take it you're a proponent of proprietary software? Because I sure wouldn't want to use something called "hippyware".
I would have to say the best KDE experiance I had was with the old kde3 based kdemod on Arch Linux. But the KDE4 based kdemod was pretty nice too.
.. oh well) ... so actually:
Unfortunately, thanks to how much ATI graphics drivers suck, I'm on Kubuntu right now, and 9.04 seems to actually be fairly good.
I must say, I really like the "screen-profiles" package they shipped (of course this wasn't kde specific), on the other hand, memory usage is through the roof, like 2500 M with firefox (4 tabs) + kmail + Amarok + Whatever automatically starts up after KDE login. Luckily, on my desktop I've gone tons of memory, but there's no way I could use Kubuntu on the netbook which I ordered from Dell a while ago (it's taking a ridulous amount of time to ship
- Does anybody know of a good netbook-oriented distro that is KDE-centric?
- How about XFCE-centric? (XFCE is my fallback for systems that can't handle KDE, I actually like the new 4.6 quite a bit)
If not I guess I can get used to GNOME again.
Becuase real linux fanboys know it's a minix clone, not a unix clone?
The way I see it:
1) There's no intrinsic tie between KDE and linux either, so if you want to tag the story with a penguin then you may as well add a daemon as well.
2) KDE is the desktop of choice for both Desktop BSD and PC BSD, as far as I know these are the only 2 desktop oriented BSD distributions out there, so actually BSD is linked in more to KDE than GNOME.
3) KDE in theory (and practice) ports to other platforms as well: WIndows/OS X/Other unix, but in practice, I don't think you see anything like the same usage rates of KDE users vs. total OS users anywhere but in BSD and Linux -land. Just out of curiosity:
Does anyone use KDE on "esoteric Unixes" (AIX, HP-UX, Irix, etc)?
But at $100 dollars, you're not paying for a laptop. you're payin' for a huge honkin' smartphone, and nobody expects to play graphics intensive games or do serious word-processing on a smartphone; at least that what people like Acer, Nvidia, etc. are hoping, because they still WANT TO SELL x86 computers, they just want to add a new market segment that they can sell people devices in addition to their "primary" laptop/desktop. I don't know if they will be successful or not, but there's a chance they will.
On the other hand, this development is a big disappointment for me, because I was looking forward to ARM based computers' long battery life and integration of mobile broadband technology, on the other hand I really could get by with netbook-class hardware for about %99 of the kind of computing I would want to do when I'm away from my desktop (and I really don't want to buy/own more than one laptop) but Android isn't going to provide the software necessary for this kind of computing while, for me at least, a real desktop linux distribution would have. (and at least Ubuntu and Debian are available for the purpose). So I'm probably going to end up buying an atom or via based system afterall, after waiting all this time for ARM netbooks to become available.
Microsoft already has Operating Systems that will run on the Arm architecture, Windows Mobile / WinCE, but I don't see what benefit you would get from using them, both taking your suggestion or using Windows Mobile would still leave an operating system that might look vaguely familiar, but still doesn't act quite like users would expect, that doesn't run much in the terms of familiar applications. I would think that, like with the Linux-based acer and msi netbooks, you would get a very high return rate on something like this.
And how much benefit would the F0SS world reap by having these "non-contributors" continuing to use proprietary software? Even if FOSS gains nothing from this situation, neither does it lose anything.
Though a Calvanist might argue otherwise, all religions with some doctrine of "free will" or the like would claim that, yes, you do choose your faith.