Later . . . Jim

And there are more major vendors selling Linux PCs than ever. What does that tell you about the demand for desktop Linux?

I just picked up my eeePC yesterday ( Nov5 ) from a local retailer. It is a cool linux ( Xandros ) OS that appears to just do everything I need.

-Wireless works out of the bos
-Internet no problem. Google, and open office.
-configured printer no problem, usb mouse and external monitor, no problem.
-I have got-to hand it to Asus, They did an awesome job on the idea and Xandros
for the clean sleek OS. I am in love.
-took me about a day and found ctrll+alt+t and I got terminal (nirvana from there on )
-openOffice, google apps, webcam, and the list goes on and on…

-Just for curiosity I bought an 8Gig SD card and now am installing ubuntu7.10 on it.
From what I read, it needs a bit of tweaking but it works, … and well. Ongoing experiment

I would never drop 2G to buy a laptop but for $400, all I can say is WOW.

Asus/Xandros in one yank pulled the bottom out of the laptop market. This thing sings.
I am in Love, as much as you can be in love with a laptop.

I apologize if I sound too excited ( even though I am ) but this is just a shining
example of how Linux is so versatile.

Windows just struck a deal to offer XP on the eeePC, I am sure the MS engineers are going to be working long hard engineering hours to compete with the Xandros version.

Vista has very small chance of running on this thing ever.

This is a monumental day for Linux, Congratulations, and yes it brings a versatile tiny linux laptop/desktop to you today.

Showed it off to my friends at work, and just seeing the desire in their eyes made me smirk. Needless to say a few of them will be running out to get one of the few 3EPCs that are showing up in limited quantities.

The thing is just so COOL.

I bet M$ did not know Xandros was putting this sweet heart together when they signed
the patent agreement, I don’t agree with it, but in this case I think the pluses outweigh the negatives. I was watching a movie last night on Linux with Hah, legally paid for codecs. Yeah baby

Congratulations to Asus and Xandros, Job well done!!!

Next year the thing will probably have a bigger LCD and be half the price I paid yesterday. You know waht, for that price, I can buy another one next year. Bring
it on. My wallet is singing eeePC

PS: I am totally not affiliated with either Asus or Xadros, just very impressed at what they pulled off. Cheers.

… and yesterday my niece, a vet student in Hawaii, IM’d me asking how I was doing. I mentioned the push towards KDE 4.0 and she said, “Yeah, my friend $NAME in Florida is really excited about the release.” My niece is not a techie in the least, but it’s the stuff of conversation these days among more and more of populace.

Every year we see this expansion … online desktop or not. I think tieing the “web” with the local desktop is an exciting and even critical set of developments that will see increasing investment, but they will not be the silver bullet that propels things.

Instead, look at the Toyota model of growth. Yes, I know that means the boring work of actually paying attention to how markets work historically and outside of just the IT world … but you may find eye opening parallels.

They had less than 2% of the market in the 70s, hardly more by the end of the 80s …

I suppose you would’ve discounted them too, just like GM, Ford, Daimler/Chrysler (or the companies that would become Daimler/Chrylser), etc did. We know how that turned out.

History may not repeat exactly, but it does as they say certainly rhyme.

Growth is happening, the rate of growth is increasing and the entire community is making strides that 5 years ago people were saying we couldn’t. Well, we have. People keep pouring it on, and we keep moving.

Not to self-impose a troll tax or anything, and I did read the entire post ;), but there may be one important point missing. We saw recently some server market numbers that indicated a slowdown of Linux while Windows remained strong. Peter Galli had a better followup article explaining why it is difficult at best to accurately measure the number of Linux servers deployed and in use. Basically, because it is free and open source software, easy to download or boot from disc on most hardware and distributed and copied repeatedly (and legally), Linux is far different. Hardware bought without software pre-installed doesn’t count for Linux, even if the open source OS is installed on it later. And, of course, there is the use and repurposing of old hardware that, ironically, may be counting for Windows market share. You don’t run Windows or Mac on those machines. It’s almost always Linux.

There are also other reasons, such as industry norms and practices that make research and analysis of Linux different.

I would argue the same hidden deployment holds true for the desktop. Three out of four computers in my office used to have Windows, but now have Linux. I doubt they have been accounted for in market research. Do I think that this hidden relevance is anything more than 5%? No. In fact, I’d guess it is more on par with Mac OS X at ~3%. That’s still not much, but it’s a big reason for a little relevance, particularly if it means introducing end users to Linux.

JL

And the less relevant Linux becomes. If the browser is the platform then does it matter all that much what the OS is underlying the browser? I don’t think so.

It’s similar to the world of Java. With Java as the platform, do people care so much what the OS is that they’re using?

The Linux success story is the server.