Soleron on 08 April 2009
The most common use of netbooks is e-mail, office and internet. Linux is sufficiently capable and compatible to do all three, and do it faster than XP.
The reason why Linux isn't selling is because laptops with it aren't cheaper. I don't know why this is, since Linux is free and Windows XP costs, but I assume Microsoft has heavily discounted XP to OEMs as long as they obey the hardware restrictions* and market the XP version over the Linux one.
*Microsoft restricts the spec of netbooks. They're not low-spec because they have to be; it's because MS is doing it.
- Can't have flash drives >16GB or HDD >160GB.
- Can't have processors >1GHz.
- Can't have >1GB of memory
- Can't have screen sizes >10.2"
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14723
