3 ms·

The linux distro that came with my Asus EEE PC was very bad and was worse than Win XP in many ways - especially for a general user. I think that might have som

• etal 17y ago
  The design of OLPC's XO laptop might have been the root cause. That had Sugar, a custom icon-based desktop environment. Asus is a hardware company; it made sense to take whatever software design choices were made by the OLPC team as a good set of defaults. Even Ubuntu Netbook Remix took some time to bake properly. There was also the initial confusion over what consumers really wanted out of a netbook -- a minimal laptop, or an internet communication device. The XO and original eeePC interfaces fit the latter, but feel a little strange in the former case. (UNR hits a nice middle ground, I think.)
• Create 17y ago
  I still can't decide, if it is in a genuine good-will to make it "look" familiar, but in any case, in practice it created an illusion of a cheap XP knock-off, which certainly didn't work like, and wasn't Windows. What is certain, is that they have signed a patent deal with MS, so I guess it was very much in consideration. This is why I went Acer instead of Asus. Could it have been just Intel behind the scene, to force MS into accepting reality, that most people don't need Microsoft Windows Vista Home Ultra Basic Premium on their P5 class Atom, which it wouldn't run decently anyway? Creating a world-wide desktop distribution is tough: RedHat gave up, SuSe is an MS proxy ["Keeping up appearances" series comes to mind], and Ubuntu is still the only desktop that has some traces of passion to drive it (its wallpaper always makes this point readily apparent).