Windows Loaded on 96 Percent of New Netbooks

[randomizer]

Many people believe Windows XP provides greater battery life than something like Ubuntu (although I can't remember if it was by much). Given that battery life is of the utmost importance for netbooks, this is a win for M$.

 

[rocrizzo]

People are so gullible. I gave someone a netbook with Linux on it, who has absolutely no experience with computers. She loves it. Haven't had a problem with it in over six months.
Windows is only popular because of its ad campaign, not because it's better. Some of you older folks remember when there was a thing called video cassettes. There were 2 formats, Betamax, and VHS. For a while there was competition, but it boiled down to more VHS cassettes and machines were being sold, not the better Betamax systems. It's deja vu, all over again. Same stuff, different day. Microsoft will keep making and selling buggy software, as long as the suckers out there buy it, and as P.T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute!"

 

[bounty]

I'm guessing people don't want to worry if their favorite web sites will work. They know their favorite IM client works in XP. XP loads their favorite music store and uses their favorite media player. They don't have to smash their face against the wall when they realize that they have no clue how to setup their VPN to work. Do they have some stupid specialized software to connect to their financial system, or some in house MS Access database based app? If so, good luck to the Linux based netbook user.

Also, good AV doesn't slow a system down and linux users get spam the same as the rest of us.

 

[bounty]

People don't buy netbooks to prove a point. What's best is a computer that just works. Ease of use, and I mean knowing already where to click to add a camera or printer.

 

[mitch074]

I got an XP-based netbook (it was second-hand, at bargain price), tweaked to have 2 Gb of RAM. It was, simply put, a dog: loaded down by the antivirus, the puny Atom processor couldn't litterally do two things at the same time. The puny i945 IGP couldn't run better than Google Earth (to put things into perspective, a 1999 Ati Rage Mobility M1 can run Google Earth with pretty much the same speed an i945 does, same frame rates and effects enabled).

I installed a Linux on it. Thanks to virtual desktops, virtual workspace and faster graphics performance (Intel sponsors the community driver's development), I can now IM, browse the Intarweb, playback movies, USE A 3D COMPOSITED INTERFACE, and even compile a piece of software (just because I can) at full speed.

Enabling power savings gives the same, if not better, battery autonomy than XP did. Boot and shutdown are so fast that, frankly, hibernation isn't interesting to me (restoring a 2 Gb RAM print from disk is no faster than a boot) eventhough Linux does work here, and (even better) doesn't waste disk space by using the swap partition to actually host the RAM dump (while Windows allocates your exact RAM size on disk, all the time, for hibernation; in the case your RAM consumption under XP is typically 400-700 Mb, it's quite a disk space waste).

This post from an MS marketer cites a 1 in 5 return rate: for the Asus netbooks, which had an improperly OEM Linux install (not all drivers were installed, the distribution tested wasn't correctly set up for the hardware, in short it sucked out of the box), that actually was correct. Other models (from makers that went to the length of actually installing and testing their Linux install), return rates were MUCH lower.

Note: on exact same configuration, a Windows XP Home model will typically cost between 15 and 30 more bucks than the same under Linux. Cases where both would cost the same usually entail lower specs for the Windows machine (see Eee 901: installed SDD for Linux was 20 Gb, Windows was 12 Gb).

And it's actually quite hard to find the Linux models: retailers don't have them (not windows, so the staff is completely lost on them), e-tailers can't stock them fast enough.