The Asus Eee: How Close Did the World Come to a Linux Desktop | Hacker News Reader

The Asus Eee: How Close Did the World Come to a Linux Desktop

linuxjournal.com

10 pointsmariuz6 comments

the eeepc netbook from 2007(?) is still my distraction free coding machine. it was the first cheap portable with ssd and sold with linux ($350 vs $450 with windows)

sadly Microsoft deathgrip made it shortlived, as the article describes so well.

and if you want a modern example: blackberry Priv! an android phone with flagship specs, and a freaking physical keyboard + gesture trackpad combo hidden under the OLED curved screen. it is my ssh and vim machine on the go! and you know where you could buy it? on freaking craigslist! even amazon never carried it. verizon and bestbuy? they only ever only had ONE unit, so you couldn't pick up color/storage. or see it in action because apple and google forbade any store from showing those phones.

its the retail death grip now, instead of the OEM deathgrip from the 90s the article mentions.

Alas, no root on any of the Blackberry machines, beautiful though they are, due to a 'trusted' boot chain to which nobody except Blackberry has the key. This is a dealbreaker to anyone who wants to do any non-trivial hacking, such as a chroot - a group which I imagine has some considerable overlap with those who insist upon the ever-rare physical keyboard. Such a pity.

this is exactly the same with all other devices. just because you chose to use a leaked version of odin to root your samsung, with a leaked version of the firmware, built with a leaked version of the kernel and a leaked version of the binary drivers' firmware blobs... doesn't make either case better.

one you don't have root, but already gives you the hability to filter each app permission (which was the only thing I did with root) via a system app they provide, the other you are pretty much doing the same as running a pirated version of windows.

not defending either btw. android sucks in this regard. my point before was mostly to highlight how google and others now have the same invisible hand that Microsoft had before.

I've had a Linux Desktop since 2001. [And a Unix Desktop before that since 1991.] What the world chooses to do on its desktop is the world's business.

Incidentally, I had a EEE-PC 901 Linux laptop in 2011, upgraded to 128 MB SSD. I found it was very handy and light, but it wasn't anywhere near as pleasant to use as my Lenovo ThinkPad.

I had a 2G surf back in 2008. The main flaw was there was no easy way to update Firefox so you were stuck with version 2.0. And soon XP netbooks came out and took the momentum out of Linux ones.

I had one of these, and installed Linux on it (it came with Windows). But the hard drive was so noisy I couldn't stand to use it. That was the fatal flaw.

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