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 sens

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.)