Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
And so began what now appears to be a real key niche market for Linux. Just like the Java programming language found an unexpected home on mobile phones so too Linux has found a real home on low cost computer systems.
This year we have seen the emergence of the British contender, the Elonex ONE computer, primarily aimed at education. Once more we have a low cost machine, also powered by Linux – in this case the Linos distro – as a means of keeping costs down. This can’t be scoffed at; it’s not just a low cost computer, it’s an affordable one. It’s one which genuinely permits the majority of school kids to actually have a computer of their own to work on. In addition, Elonex are deliberately eroding their margin by donating a portion of sales to giving computers to underprivileged students.
Elonex aren’t alone; this year has also seen France bring into life the absolutely tiny pocket-sized desktop PC known as the Linutop. This can be carried around with ease but it’s not a notebook computer; it has no independent display or battery – but borrowing from the Eee’s design, it has a flash-memory based hard drive. For 280 Euros you too can have a Linutop, with 512Mb RAM and at a weight of slightly over half a kilogram. It runs its own Linutop OS which is based on Xubuntu.
There will be more and more of these systems; in years to come we will find low-cost Linux computers at the final row of shelves when you through a supermarket checkout. We’ll see them continue to be hot sellers – and going from unpacked to up-and-running within minutes.
Yet, not only is price a major factor, the energy efficiency can’t be understated. Without moving parts inside them there are fewer emissions and for the most part there is no need to run any dedicated cooling like built-in fans. All up, the new generation of computers delivering Linux right into the hands of users will be lean – because they’re charged at hitherto-considered crazy prices. They will be mean – because they compete aggressively against establishing proprietary operating systems. And they will be green; let’s face it, low spec PCs consume lesser amounts of power. The Linutop, for example, operates at eight watts.
So, sure, “the year of the Linux desktop” may or may not be coming, or at least in the form originally predicted where a crack army of Linux evangelists successfully got their message out.
Instead, we find that Linux is just coming out all by itself; it’s making its way into people’s homes. It’s the perfect natural choice for system builders who are tapping into the market. It’s proving itself to work – showing that Linux is not arcane, cryptic, inaccessible, lacking in hardware support or any of the multitudes of possibly once-true criticisms that are now out of date – and also showing that it’s what people want.
David Bass
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