Yesterday, while looking through the Comdex news feeds, I stumbled across a Mini Mi 1000 HP product announcement from HP. The Mini Mi retails from just $329.99 and ships with Mobile Internet, a "user-friendly, all-inclusive interface built on Linux". What caught my eye on the product page wasn't the description of the GUI, it was what followed on the next line. Preceded by "Please note" in bold, the HP page states "the Linux command line interface is disabled on this edition."
I contacted HP to ask why it had disabled the Linux command line interface. HP offered the following statement from Jonathan Kaye, the Director of Consumer Notebooks at HP:
The HP Mini 1000 with Mi is designed for the consumer who wants to do the main activities with their computer such as email, browsing the Internet, and chatting without worrying about operating systems or what is inside. HP is focused on the user experience and developed the HP Mini 1000 with Mi for the mass consumer market that wants a complete mobile Internet experience and not just a Linux computer. As this is HP’s first product with a custom user interface built on Linux, HP is very open to customer feedback that could help improve the experience.
I write from a very particular viewpoint: I am, at least as far as Linux is concerned, almost exclusively a command-line user. For me, the notion that there could be a Linux distribution without command-line access sounded strangely like Heresy. And yet, could there be a greater vote of confidence in the consumer power of Linux distributions than HP's decision to move forward with this version of Mobile Internet?
In a move that closely parallels Google's Android release, HP has produced a device targeted at the consumer marketplace rather than at the casual Linux hobbyist. Its device focuses on what most end-users actually do with their systems: e-mail, browsing, chatting. My father, who now owns his very first Linux-based netbook, remains blissfully ignorant that Unix does not refer to concubine guards. He takes his netbook on the road and keeps in touch with family and friends, and as long as his system does this reliably and seamlessly, he has no need or desire to push the boundaries further.
It is this transformation from workstation to portable consumer electronics that really defines the newest generation of netbooks. They are becoming more and more like smart phones and less and less like desktop systems. They empower end-users to do more than simply check a few stock prices and dash off a few e-mails. And as they do so, Linux is finding a new, firm place at the heart of these units.
But as Linux does its job, slick GUIs provide a fence. They separate users who need to accomplish whatever task they working on from the inner workings of the platform, which provides more streamlined architecture to support those tasks. This may set off power users, who have long been used to command lines, system preferences, and editable configuration files, while it insulates regular consumers, who just want a system that works. TiVo has adopted this same approach for a decade: shiny GUI on the outside, hardworking Linux on the inside.
As you can read in the statement, HP has not ruled out reevaluating its decision, should there prove to be a consumer demand for command line access. At the same time, their decision reinforces the reality that Linux has finally gone commercial in a big way, just not necessary the way some of us might have imagined.
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