Acer laptops with Ubuntu Linux available now

Suddenly it seems that every PC/laptop vendor pushes its own "mee too!" Linux thingie. This is not surprising per se, considering advantages of Linux, but... it's so sudden! :)

Sudden is good. But this sudden has been many years in the making. If the Rascals from Redmond had not laid an egg with their last OS this might not have been as sudden.

It does seem as though a tipping point has been reached, and all of sudden formerly timid hardware vendors are moving forward.

Don't know if the tipping point is here now, just around the corner, or eternally around the corner.

What I do know is that Microsoft OS and accompanying software have become incredibly expensive relative to hardware that is powerful enough to easily handle the tasks most people want to do.

When margins are low and you're competing on price, saving that Windows money and instead installing an operating system without Windows' virus troubles but with a full slate of free, useful applications can look like a pretty good marketing move.

With Apple announcing a subnotebook that STARTS at $1.799, a bunch of similarly small laptops running Linux and selling for $400 (and eventually less) opens up a whole new market. Sure, you can't compare the two products, but if Linux can claim the low end while still being a good OS for everything from embedded devices all the way up to supercomputers, it'll just be more gravy for open-source.

Point to consider:

Celeron CPU's are still available in new systems.

Newer/stronger isn't always better. Like I said on another thread, an Abrams tank may get you from point A to point B, but when point B is the grocery store, somehow it just isn't appropriate for the task.

I got 20 bucks that says in five years Linux is the de facto OS on laptops priced under a $1000, which will be 90% of the market by then.

Dino is right, the only computers that can run Vista without it seeming like someone gave your computer quaaludes are gaming machines and really high end PC's. Outside of those niches the market is not going in that direction whatsoever.

OEM's can make much more money selling reasonably priced low to middle end laptops and desktops in vast quantities than producing very expensive high end machines in much smaller amounts. The hardware requirements for Vista make it difficult for OEM's to make the profits they are used too. Besides, referring customers to distro websites and Internet forums has got to be less of a headache than dealing with Microsoft.

It will be the millions of $200-$800 laptops that make the slow moving column of water we have been riding turn into a cresting unstoppable wave.

Quoting:I got 20 bucks that says in five years Linux is the de facto OS on laptops priced under a $1000, which will be 90% of the market by then.

And I got 20 bucks that says your 20 bucks will be worth a lot less then than it is now. ;-)

But seriously, looking at the review of TC's book on Slashdot:

Quoting:I think there is also a lot here for that reader who has lobbied to get Linux in the door and now faces the task of getting their Linux machine to play nice with the rest of the network.

(From http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/16/1513207 )

Looks like TC got that book out just in the nick of time.

Quoting: Dino is right, the only computers that can run Vista without it seeming like someone gave your computer quaaludes are gaming machines and really high end PC's

High end meaning very high end, not just "pretty dang good PC".

>the only computers that can run Vista without it seeming like someone gave your computer quaaludes

I have to tell you, I am getting real darned tired of having my new grin at me and say, "Dude!! Not now, man, you'll ruin the mellow."

That $650 dual-core AMD64 HP laptop I put Debian on for my Mom is one heck of a nice machine. Without the VISTA overhead and awful bloat, it really shows how much better it is than the last laptop she got in 2003.

It's hard to communicate that fact. All this fantastic hardware _just_ to run the OS means that the applications still do what they always did. But if you take an OS and applications that run just fine on a 350MHz machine, and put it on a new one of _any_ price, it screams.

If it weren't for the new fad of wide-screens, I'd consider getting a new one myself. I paid a lot of money in 2003 to get more than 768 pixels vertical, I don't see why I should go backwards now. Yuck.