2009: Year of the Linux Delusion

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 18 December 2008 13:27

Opinion and Analysis

Dannen also states that: “Windows is also geared towards handling multimedia, which netbooks don’t have the hardware for; small hard drives, no optical drives, and weak video cards mean that DVDs and music aren’t really an option in the first place. “

Well, I’m surprised to hear that Dannen seems to be saying video cards are necessary to listen to music.

Dannen also seems unaware of the fact that netbooks are available with hard drives from 80GB to 320GB in size, that Asus has crafted the N10 netbook with discrete NVIDIA graphics, and that plenty of people are using XP powered netbooks to watch YouTube and video downloads without issues.

You can also easily connect your netbook to a larger keyboard, a regular mouse, and a larger monitor if desired – something smaller “mobile Internet devices” only do using composite or component video cables, not the standard VGA type sockets you see on netbooks.

Dannen’s article then veers off into how Palm might succeed if its new Linux based OS is popular, how mobile Internet devices are the future, and how ARM and Canonical need a “Linux version that is clean, intuitive and downright pretty” – something that is still only in development, and will likely need several versions before it’s anywhere near as “clean, intuitive and downright pretty” as it needs to be.

He also says that: “Existing versions of Linux can usually run fine on most netbooks, but they haven’t truly been designed as Web-only. They’re usually just bare-bones desktop operating systems with simplistic interfaces.

“As such, they tend to turn off consumers, who find them clumsy to use, therefore returning Linux based computers 4 or 5 times as frequently as Windows machines”.

So, despite all of this, Dannen thinks that 2009 will be the year of the Linux revolution, with an OS for netbooks that doesn’t exist yet, and completely forgetting and/or ignoring the fact that 2009 will be the year of Windows – on the desktop, notebook AND the netbook, as so ably demonstrated by Microsoft at the Professional Developers Conference in October 2008, using the pre-beta version of Windows 7 on a range of today's netbook devices - not even those yet to come in 2009 with power, hard disk and other upgrades.

A Linux based “web” netbook is also going to be troubled by what Dannen says the “cloud just can’t handle”. He specifically notes that this is “processor-intensive multimedia work”.

Well, is a “web only” netbook with a simplified Linux OS a true computer, or just a glorified appliance?

He then goes on to point out that: “And while consumers are certainly more reliant on Web services than ever, they’re also consuming, sharing, and creating digital video, large-format photography, music and presentations that are richer and more data-dense than ever before.”

So this is an argument for low power processors and even more feeble versions of Linux being of revolutionary note in 2009, compared with the power of Windows 7 or the Mac OS X?

Taste the rainbow of the rest of the Linux revo – I mean, delusion, on page 3. If you can handle it.