(Up­date: in ret­ro­spect, I have re­al­ized that this ar­ti­cle is per­haps not so well writ­ten. Ex­pect some­thing more use­ful and co­her­ent soon!)

Lin­ux seems like the per­fect so­lu­tion for the new brand of portable PCs, net­books. It’s ef­fi­cient, re­quires few re­sources, and can run most if not all of the pro­grams one usu­al­ly runs on such small com­put­ers - word pro­cess­ing, email, web brows­ing, and so on. Large, com­plex soft­ware pack­ages that re­quire Win­dows to run per­form abysmal­ly on low-pow­er com­put­ers like net­books, so ef­fec­tive­ly the need to run Win­dows is nul­li­fied.

Why, then, do con­sumers (and re­view­ers!) choose Win­dows over Lin­ux for net­books? Read more…