Do you even read your own words? How will hiding Linux make it friendlier?
Dumb post.

Linux is still largely an OS built by / for computer hobbyists, as the author notes, and has no place as a default installation on a consumer netbook. It’s GUI might familiar or made to look pretty, but the moment the user wishes to deviate from the pre-installed products, it can prove more difficult than any average computer user has a right to expect in 2009. While some of this might be considered the fault of peripheral manufacturers who don’t have Linux drivers, the rest falls to the actual OS and those who designed it – for themselves.
The method of acquiring and installing patches, upgrades and new software (or uninstalling same) is often dodgy at best, while no average consumer should ever, ever expect to need to go into a Terminal to do general maintenance, properly complete an install / uninstall or worse, actually physically tweak the OS for it to work as expected. While all of this sort of thing is the stuff that computer hobbyists, IT specialists and geeks get moist over, its not a consumer OS.

That said, Microsoft, after the technical and media debacle of Vista, should have learned its lesson: bite the bullet and do ‘An Apple’. That is, scrap entirely their legacy OS – so bloated with lines of patch code after decades of programmers have had their go – and start afresh based on a stable core OS. Apple did that with OSX (using UNIX) and so should Microsoft. There’s plenty of excellent virtualization software out there (including MS’s own) to handle the legacy programs if absolutely required, so that can’t be the argument..

And, for all the gushing about Win7, it is still, as confirmed by Microsoft, a patched and re-worked Vista – which is a patched and reworked Windows 2000, which is a …well, you get the idea. Win7 is the SP Vista will never get. But you can’t – as they’ve shown time and time again – make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Especially if its Frankenpatch OS.

Win7′s GUI might look pretty, but its the same grim WinOS under all that. XP is currently popular on netbooks because a) it’s an OS many are familiar with – including its many ‘challenges’, and b) its had some 8 years for Microsoft to issue enough patches to make it stable (‘ish). But those are hardly good reasons to find it acceptable. Remember, XP was once roundly reviled – now its a retro improvement over Vista.

But that still doesn’t Linux the better alternative for most computer users.

I think if MS is to make a go of it, it’ll have to offer some sort of cut-price licencing agreement on Home Prem for netbook manufacturers, with spec restrictions like we see with XP Home ULCPC.

I wouldn’t rush to make some of the conclusions you have made as to choice of OS for a device as you never know what boardroom dealings go on between the hardware vendor and the OS vendor. Case in point the OLPC issue. It reminds me of a case in Nigeria where the government had decided to adopt Mandriva, but some rather interesting discussions with Microsoft led them to ditch this plan.

However, this doesn’t excuse the Linux Distro vendors from the responsibility for their current state of affairs. To actively compete with an OS that has been used worldwide for years, One needs to fully focus on developing their product to flow at par with that competition. Many users today are loading Linux Distros on their laptops only to have problems with various device drivers(WIFI), file formats etc. I assisted one user set up their OpenOffice to always save doc’s in Office97 format (.doc, .xls, etc). Something this simple had the user ready to fully forget about the Distro.

As and when the vendors take charge of making sure applications are available to give the user an experience that isn’t any different from whatever they have, then we shall see less and less of these blogs that spell doom for an otherwise good product.

HP provides Mini MI – Gnu/Linux without terminal available. Unfortunately some OEM’s have sold machines with a Linux version that sucks.

Linux is a nightmare for Microsoft and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. That means that every single Microsoft customer should praise whoever they praise for Linux being there. Linux is the only driving force making Microsoft improve products and lowering insane licencing costs.

Apple is no threat to Microsoft whatsoever. I’m convinced that OSX would grasp more than 50% of the market if separated from the hard merchandise, but that will be a spectacular harakiri.

By the way, I think that Linux is more stable than Vista, and there is no need to update virus def. everyday. and even compete with Apple Mac OS X in many aspects, like the facility to customize the interface in many ways or the ability to use great effects in the desktop.

it is worth the try