A tale of two plug-and-play Linux boxes

Stan Beer
Monday, 05 November 2007 07:51

Opinion and Analysis

As many of us who watch the Linux market know, the past week has seen the announcement of two markedly different plug-and-play Linux computers. I was excited by one and not the other. To my surprise, the one that didn't interest me has taken off like a rocket to the moon while it is still too early say how the other will do. The good news, however, is that desktop Linux has finally gone mainstream.

The two boxes are of course the Asus Eee PC, a lightweight sub-notebook, and the Everex gPC, a fully configured but low grunt desktop. Although both machines are at opposite ends of the spectrum of personal computing and really can't be compared like apples to apples, they both have one important thing in common - an easy to use plug-and-play interface complete with applications powered by a Linux operating system transparent to the user.

For my needs, the Asus portable didn't seem useful. With a 7 inch screen, no optical drive and 4GB of Flash RAM storage, I couldn't see myself using it to do work. Writing, editing, posting articles to a website and composing a daily html newsletter requires a reasonable sized screen for my eyes, a comfortable keyboard, and a decent amount of storage. For recreation, I sometimes watch DVDs and surf the Web to read articles of interest. Again the Eee PC didn't seem to fit my needs, so I panned it.

My mistake was to extrapolate my needs to those of millions of other users. According to Asus, the Eee PC is selling at a rate of one every 6 seconds - that's about 100,000 a week! If that figure is correct, that's a lot of little Linux boxes walking out the door. And the Eee PC hasn't even come on the market yet in many places such as Australia where, judging by the hostile reaction of one popular local forum to my original stories, eager users are lining up to get one as soon as they go on sale in December.

On reflection, this is one case where I'm actually not unhappy to be wrong. Any device that helps get a Linux desktop into the mass market in such large numbers has to be good for the future of computing. There is a case where I really hope I'm not wrong though.