Ready for the big time?
May. 14th, 2008 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lostcarparkI've been really enjoying my Eee PC, and its Linux Desktop. An estimated 75% of users have been keeping the Linux installationn (sorry, should have a source for that).
And why wouldn't they? Out of the box the machine does pretty much everything that the majority of users want. It seems to be billed as an appliance that comes with everything you need, and doesn't facilitate adding extra software (apart from OS updates). This would seem to be a deliberate decision, as it avoids the situation many Windows users find where their machine becomes so full of applications and forgotten processes running in the background, that it eventually becomes unusable.
However, it's not ideal if you want an extra program or two. There is a way around it, but it involves a bit of hacking. No problem if you know what you're doing, but not something the Linux virgin wants to face alone.
For most Eee users who want to surf the web and do a bit of word processing this isn't a problem, but for Linux to make the big time it will have to do better.
Of course other distros are much better in this regard, but more about them in another post.
And why wouldn't they? Out of the box the machine does pretty much everything that the majority of users want. It seems to be billed as an appliance that comes with everything you need, and doesn't facilitate adding extra software (apart from OS updates). This would seem to be a deliberate decision, as it avoids the situation many Windows users find where their machine becomes so full of applications and forgotten processes running in the background, that it eventually becomes unusable.
However, it's not ideal if you want an extra program or two. There is a way around it, but it involves a bit of hacking. No problem if you know what you're doing, but not something the Linux virgin wants to face alone.
For most Eee users who want to surf the web and do a bit of word processing this isn't a problem, but for Linux to make the big time it will have to do better.
Of course other distros are much better in this regard, but more about them in another post.
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Date: 2008-05-14 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-14 10:15 pm (UTC)