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February 09, 2009 at 8:44am

I perhaps may be in the minority here I guess. I bought a Lenovo S10 Netbook about a month ago. It came w/ WinXP, but I foudn it to be sluggish and really just a waste of my time. The first thing I did when I got my Netbook home was to nuke the WinXP install and drop Ubuntu 8.10 on the machine. Been extremely happy ever since. But then again, I use Linux for everything in my house, and at work. Why risk the security concerns? Especially on a portable PC.

einstein1971

February 09, 2009 at 6:22am

Well, it seems just a month ago that some idiot reporter at MPC said that 2009 would be the year of Linux (seemed that 2008 was supposed to be the year of Linux: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/2008_year_of_the_linux_desktop).  But, hey, being continually wrong at least means you're consistent.  Microsoft didn't force HP to cave.  HP would sell their own mother to make a profit and they have no love for Microsoft.  HP is responding to the market and the market wants Windows.

Century22

February 08, 2009 at 11:17pm

I love my EEE PC. It came with WinXP already installed by a previous user.

I restored it back to the Linux version and played with that a while. It worked fine. Then I tried to install a few other programs and it became a nightmare. There are so many versions of Linux and changes in each version that is was impossible or next to it to determine what would work. Then it's just another long process to learn HOW to install something that does work. You are still very limited with it.

I restored my PC to my version of nLite Windows XP. No Hexplorer or Massenger to slow it down.

I did make a restore (SDHC) chip, to go back to EEE's Linux if I want to, but I think I'll run XP until I learn more about working with Linux.

I have Ubutu, SUSE, and others. I think I'll play with puppy till I'm ready to make another switch.

HP caved in on this one.

If they would keep working on it, we might have another standard system that works with all the netbooks.

ilfipian

February 08, 2009 at 2:22pm

There are fora devoted to each of the netbook brands that have sub sections on linux and its various flavors being used on that netbook. Some specialty flavors of linux are in open source development for specific brands such as kuki (pronounced cookie--hey it's a foreign team in Montenegro), a flavor of ubuntu for the Acer Aspire. Those boards are your boot camp and answer many of the questions and issues you would face with linux.

 To me, linux seems a natural for the netbook. Efficient OS for low horsepower systems, inexpensive to keep costs down and very secure. The security means less overhead needed for all the bloatware to combat the malware that Windows faces. And for the malware that will affect linux, there are compact simple solutions. Adblock plus and NoScript for Firefox make surfing clean and quite safe for smart surfing.

It's the perfect convergence of low cost and good productivity.  Good too for portable media entertaining.

 From what I've read, the weak point of linux on netbooks is power management isn't as good. That's a problem, but it's quickly improving with incremental solutions coming out all the time. 

shawn Harris

February 08, 2009 at 12:56pm

Well hp just showed what they are made of, not much when they cave in to microsoft.If hp would have stuck with Linux andreally promoted Linux, i think that microsoft would have to either improve  their operating system or finnally admit that linux will eventually be a strong alternative to windows based operating systems. Remember that microsoft gave us  Visata,( that really sucked and they finally admited that). This just proves that Linux is the next big operating system.

Tclynch

February 08, 2009 at 11:59am

  I took a look at it and thought about it before buying my new Netbook, but there seems to be alot of issues with Wine. I perfectly happy with Win XP on my notebook as I know it pretty well. I'm still learning Linux (prefer Umbuntu) and enjoy working with it. If there was a "Boot Camp" for Linux, I'd be a happy camper :-).

Tclynch

February 08, 2009 at 10:26am

  Well, I bought my netbook with XP installed. My problem with Linux is that various programs I like to run may/ may not run on it. I enjoy using ITunes, will it run using Linux? I don't think so. Office 07? Nope. Yes, I know about Open Office and have used it in the past, but for working at home, I still need Office 07.