Comparing Windows and Ubuntu On Netbooks 317
Barence writes "With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, PC Pro has revisited a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook?. The magazine has run a series of benchmarks on a Asus Eee PC 1008HA running Windows XP Home, two versions of Windows 7 (with and without Aero switched on) and Ubuntu Netbook Edition. The operating systems are tested for start-up performance, Flash handling and video, among other tests. The results are closer than you might think."
Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:2, Interesting)
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At least here in Asia they're widely available, and if you don't buy some known brand you can get them really cheap too.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have atom based machines that can play 1080p video without a hiccup but try to make a 320p youtube video full screen and watch it stutter and spurt...
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:5, Informative)
I have atom based machines that can play 1080p video without a hiccup but try to make a 320p youtube video full screen and watch it stutter and spurt...
Yes that really cracks me up with my Atom Ion-based HTPC as well. Watch a 1080p movie in XBMC with silk-smooth framerates, then open an SD Youtube Flash video in Firefox and the whole thing grinds to a halt. The best part of it is when you go back to XBMC and open the same video using the Youtube plugin, and all of a sudden everything is silk-smooth again, apparently the YouTube XBMC plugin rips the video out of the flv or uses the HTML5 source and pipes it through its own codec. Which goes to show how much Flash actually sucks for delivering web video.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
I run flash on many a linux desktop and the performance is fine. Full screen and windowed, and in HD. I read the article and they really were just playing games. There was no real analysis done. Launching programs? Boot up? That's not a measure of the full OS. I took it with a grain of salt, as they just want web hits for advertising.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Informative)
A few years ago I stumbled upon a web site that sold ultra-light laptops that specialized in linux on their machines but were still much more expensive than I could afford, I think they were in the realm of $800-1000 so I never purchased and I've forgotten their url, some kind of letter-number combination, like pc2049.com or something. I wish I still had that url so I could see what they are charging for those machine today.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:5, Informative)
The same is true in Canada.
I just bought a new Samsumg NF-210 and it came with Win7 Starter. The manufacturer has a splash screen to start up either normally or with recovery mode, and with Ubuntu installed it still has that screen. It can't be disabled.
Ubuntu Netbook doesn't work right. There are some great features, like taking advantage of virtualization to keep it at four cores all the time. (It's a dual-core N550 processor with hyperthreading).
Out of the box, the Fn keys don't work. If you download an add-on from a different repository and tweak some config files, they can be fixed but it's a deal-breaker for anyone who's a casual computer user. (Which would, of course, be 95% of the netbook market, [citation needed]) That's because the keys don't send a release, they expect a release from the OS. That OS is MS... and it's BS. It is workable but it's not very easy to do.
Networking Manager does not recover from sleep or hibernate. There are two ways to get it to work afterwards: reboot or ctrl-alt-t; sudo rmmod ath9k [pw]; sudo modprobe ath9k. Don't answer "just edit acpi-support" because that's deprecated and power is handled now by a daemon that doesn't read the acpi configuration.
Multitouch is also not supported in ubuntu nor is the edge scrolling. That's another thing that works great in Win7 but doesn't work at all in U:NR 10.10. Yes, I've read the link on how to create a new file and hal restart and enjoy mutlitouch BUT there's no HAL in U:NR or if there is it's not in a documented location.
If it doesn't work for me, good luck getting the rest of netbook users to even bother trying it.
One interesting thing to note is that the performance in U:NR is about the same even though there's 500 MB more RAM free. (Win7 had 750MB used sitting at the desktop; U:NR has about 256 used.)
I'm still keeping U:NR because it's a nicer looking OS with a better interface and works better with the way I want to use my computer. I also cut a lot of slack because there's a good chance there's a dozen or less of these books with U:NR.
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That's not really a helpful answer. First, I already OWN the netbook. I was waiting for a power upgrade, so I got a dual-core netbook when it was first available. It's also got the anti-glare screen, not the crappy glossy garbage you see everywhere.
Next, it's not even cheaper. System76 is $385 US before shipping and it looks like roughly the same book as what I have. Mine was $320 CDN in town -- and when the prices HERE are cheaper, it's a lot cheaper elsewhere. I will pick up some of the Ubuntu stick
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I saw some for sale in Europe, but its usually a brand-made operating system based on Linux .
You could always install your own if you really want it.
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You'll need to re-partition the drive. I believe there is a small vendor partition needed, in addition to the others.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not being ignorant is not the same thing as being smart. There are many ignorant smart people, and many well educated idiots..
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Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
When netbooks were new, they all had linux - largely because they were low-spec enough that even XP wouldn't run, back in the pre-atom days.
Windows XP runs fine on a PII 866 with 384 MB of RAM, made in 2000. My Eee PC 900 (on which I ran Ubuntu) had a Celeron 900 with 512 MB of RAM. Add a competent SSD to that, and in my experience, it isn't too much slower than the early Atom CPUs.
Many (including me) suspect that Microsoft is making OEM licences for netbooks available at a next-to-free discount in order to prevent linux becoming established
This is in fact the explicit purpose of Windows XP for ULCPCs and Windows 7 Starter.
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Do any of these modern laptops come with modems for those of us stuck on dialup (mainly in hotels)?
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I dont think hardware was an issue. Its surprising how well XP runs on old hardware. Well, not too surprising when you remember its release date was 9 years ago.
I think the issue was that these manufacturers needed to hit a very low price point and that $40-60 bulk OEM license raised the price too much. With linux you could sell a machine for $249. With XP you're now at $299.
On top of that, there's real consumer demand for Windows. When I bought my gf a Lenovo netbook with Win7, her coworkers were really im
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Consumers like what they know and demand massive amounts of backwards compatibility. A decent linux distro can handle 80% of their needs, but not getting that 20% is unacceptable
Yet many people bought these Linux netbooks and are happy with them, and many people are happy with their iPads etc. These things are all in a really similar price range with overlapping functions, and different intended uses.
How long does it take to start up Windows 7 on a netbook? Part of the reason I originally moved away from Windows was so that when I got home I could boot quickly into an OS for basic media playing and web browsing functionality. My laptop at the time had pretty poor battery life so le
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
A genuine Netbook shouldn't be running Windows, it should use a specialty OS that's more appropriate for the form factor. And not just a neutered version either.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Funny)
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That is not a netbook and you know it.
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One data point: The asus 1215T can be bought without an OS (through newegg.com) - but it's ATI graphics. Yuck.
I just purchased the 1215N even though I don't want windows. . . the nvidia ION chipset + dual core atom has seduced me. I plan to get debian sid running on it. I have been happy - nay, ECSTATIC - with my eeepc 1000, so a larger screen and dual cores should be pretty sweet.
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In fact, unless there is some kind of ARM port of Windows, I doubt that you could get that model with Windows installed.
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http://www.system76.com/index.php?cPath=28 [system76.com]
http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/ [zareason.com]
Among many others, I'm sure.
I recognize the mathematician's answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you even buy a netbook without windows?
Yes. Next question?
Ahh, the mathematician's answer [tvtropes.org]. The next question is as follows: Which make and model and which seller do you recommend?
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I'd still recommend my eeePC 901 as the smallest netbook you could get
http://www.google.com/search?q=eeepc+901&hl=en&tbs=shop%3A1&aq=f [google.com]
Replace the RAM with a 2GB module if you like. I didn't bother and it still runs fine.
I prefer running eeebuntu [eeebuntu.org] on it. Still waiting for the next generation Aurora to be released. But eeebuntu does a nice job with a compositing desktop. Though to get Google Earth running well, I had to delete some of the shared libraries included with Google Earth and symlink
11.6" isn't really a netbook IMHO (Score:2)
Windows, no doubt. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some distros may be better than Windows, but not Ubuntu. It's a bloated buggy hog of a thing that is overkill on netbooks, and Windows will beat it everytime.
Bye bye karma.
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That'll be why a friend of mine has just uninstalled Windows 7 from his netbook, installed Ubuntu and saw an improvement in performance. Mm-hmm.
"closer than you might think" (Score:2)
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Not very fair testing... (Score:5, Informative)
For a start, its not always the underlying operating system which makes the difference.
They compared -
1. Bootup (which is mostly fair)
2. Opening using OpenOffice. I'm pretty sure that the Windows version of this program is not the exact same one as the Ubuntu version. So you're comparing two different programs on two different operating systems.
3. Web performance - again, he used Google Chrome for one, and Chromium for the other. See above - the windows version is not the exact same one as the linux version.
4. Flash performance - this part was very funny. Anyone who's used flash on linux knows how crap it is. When adobe start supporting it properly...
So the testing wasn't very fair. It does not answer "but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware". If they wanted to answer that, they could have written a pair of programs in C to benchmark it - exact same code, exact same program.
Re:Not very fair testing... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, the testing wasn't fair at all. It was on usability. These things are not equal.
It wasn't supposed to be fair. It was supposed to see how close general equivalents perform, in a real world scenario, for the casual user. It's not perfect comparison because, as you indicated, that'd be impossible, and as I'm indicating, that's not the point.
Re:Not very fair testing... (Score:5, Funny)
BOINC (Score:2)
I heard that ubuntu lost horribly in the botnet performance test. They couldn't get it to join
Since when? In my experience, the Distributed.net client works equally well on Fedora and Windows XP, and the BOINC client works equally well on Ubuntu and Windows XP.
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Pure C benchmarks are meaningless. If you spend a significant amount of time on browsing, including Flash games, and typical office tasks, these real-world matter a low more than C performance.
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Opening using OpenOffice. I'm pretty sure that the Windows version of this program is not the exact same one as the Ubuntu version. So you're comparing two different programs on two different operating systems.
Had the tester used OpenOffice.org for Windows on Wine on Ubuntu, people would be whining about using software that runs on a non-native toolkit. (The popular conception is that GTK+ is non-native on Windows, and Wine is non-native on GNU/Linux.) If OOo makes up a large portion of why one would use GNU/Linux, and Oracle has done a poor job at making OOo efficient on GNU/Linux, it drags down the value proposition for GNU/Linux.
Re:Not very fair testing... (Score:5, Informative)
Windows and Linux bootup tests are rarely fair. They typically test the time to display the desktop from the time you press power. In Windows they display the desktop well before the computer is done booting, where as in Linux, displaying the desktop is all but the final task.
If you're using a netbook with limited memory (most ship with 1GB or less) I'd like to see how much memory is consumed by the base OS.
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That's about as reasonable a claim as saying that a Mac is an excilent gaming platform because it's not apple's fault that no one writes games for Mac.
Or, to extend your analogy, that a media center PC is an excellent gaming platform because it's not Microsoft's fault that no one writes games for media center PC.
Last Week (Score:2)
Last week I tried installing Netbook Remix 10.10 on my mom's IdeaPad S10. No particular reason, WinXP worked ok on it, but I had previously installed Netbook Remix on a friend's Acer One & she loved it & said it seemed to start up & run much faster than XP used to. Mom isn't particularly attached to her netbook, so she said sure, you can have it for a week to do whatever you need to. So, I put Netbook Remix on a thumbdrive go to town. It installs just fine, all the hardware but the wifi is d
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Poorly configured DHCP server that doesn't relay DNS servers?
Ping is your friend, usually the following three step process will tell you:
1. Can I ping the internal network by IP? If not, there's something wrong with hardware/cable.
2. Can I ping an Internet server by IP? If not, there's something wrong with the router setup.
3. Can I ping an Internet server by name? If not, there is a DNS problem.
Never had a problem with this myself. By the way, regarding wireless you may want to try installing a newer kernel
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The Internet connection seemed to work fine. Ping worked fine. I was able to ping the software repository just fine. I was able to update another Ubuntu PC on the same network. It was something localized to the Netbook that I just couldn't figure out.
There were Broadcom drivers available for the wifi via the Hardware Update applet that were also refusing to update.
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I assume with your comment 'Ethernet works fine' that you can browse the net with no problems. What does it say when you try to update?
As well, have you tried the Ubuntu Forums [ubuntuforums.org]? They are simply awesome when trouble shooting.
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I no longer have the Netbook but if I remember correctly the error message was along the lines of can't connect to the software repository. However, I could ping it just fine.
I searched the Ubuntu forums, but didn't actually log in an ask any questions. By the time I had reached that point I was fed up & ready to give the thing back.
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Were you going for the main Canonical (Ubuntu) repositories? I know sometimes the secondary repositories are hit & miss.
I won't lie - that's a bizarre case. Too bad it didn't work for you though. I've used different flavors of Ubuntu for 4 years and I can't imagine returning to Windows.
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Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I read the graphs is: XP and Ubuntu win on almost everything (Ubuntu loses once on Flash on iPlayer but that's hardly surprising), maybe only by a small margin by they do, and Windows 7 takes twice as long to boot as they do. The article doesn't recommend bothering to upgrade to Windows 7 if you already have XP on it, and suggests that Ubuntu would be just as good.
Now, let's look at *value*: Assuming you can get them all for the same price, they all provide roughly equal value (it could be argued that 7 is worse value but only by a small way). However, if you have to pay *any* extra for XP or 7, then you're just as well off with Ubuntu. So, it's all back to the old question: who wants to sell me a netbook with an operating system that's just as good as the others but which is FREE for life? In the early days, that's how netbooks became so cheap and so popular - I know, I worked with the original EEEPC's because a school could afford them but MS wanted about £50 a license to "upgrade" them to XP. Now it seems either Microsoft are giving people Windows for free, or Microsoft are stopping manufacturers from supplying netbooks with only Linux on them. I vote for the latter given previous history.
All this article confirms is that, basically, all the OS's are roughly the same now. A bar chart here or there but on average there is no winner. Thus, the free ones should represent infinitely better value. Strange how the manufacturers don't reflect that in their pricing / OS availability any more.
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Re:Eh? Gnash? (Score:2)
The Gnash free replacment for Flash will hopefully catch up and be useful, which will solve this problem. Open source codecs or implementations of codecs can be just as good as the closed source ones, as Flac and Ogg have proved.
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I'll "Eh?" because it looks to me like XP was the clear winner. It had the best startup time from cold by a lot (resume times = tie), best application open times also by a clear margin, and the only consistently good video performance. Other metrics were basically a tie, but that's advantage XP in 3 of 5 tests.
"Closer than you might think" seems to be code for "Not the result we wanted".
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Strange how the manufacturers don't reflect that in their pricing / OS availability any more.
What a surprise, there is no open market in the operation systems anymore. It all locked down with MS dictating the prices and the hardware [engadget.com].
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're right to say they're basically all the same. These margins are pretty darn close.
But on the issue of relative speeds, it would also be accurate to say that Ubuntu lost on nearly every test. Was not fastest in Boot, slow on suspend and wake up, much slower opening office docs, average on web performance, very poor on flash performance and poor on other video performance.
As you mentioned, that's not a good indication of overall value, but useful for keeping everyones feet on the ground when it comes to espousing their favorite OS's. Ubuntu (my personal fav) is not always best at everything, and it's worth pointing out when it's not.
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which is FREE for life?
free would mean something if the manufacturers were giving discounts for an OS-less system. they don't of course. you pay for it whether you use it or not. even when you can find a linux-based new laptop, the discount is either negligible or non-existent.
moreover, for most people, free doesn't mean anything. their time is more valuable then the $100 the might spend on an operating system that works for them.
i try linux every couple of years. i want to run linux, i really do. the reality for me is that there
In Other News (Score:2)
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Which is indeed possible. Not only possible, it turns out they have some similar properties [theamericanview.com].
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One thing is clear... (Score:2)
Others (Score:2)
Six months down the line... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the real test should be done after six months of regular use and service packs and updates installed. At this point the windows machine will have its registry so bloated that it will take twice the time for most operations. After one year to one year and a half, the best way to go is to reboot the machine.
This doesn't happen to Ubuntu installations.
Also, when your applications are fighting for CPU cycles with virus and malware, your machine feels much slower... and we know a hight percentage of wind
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Ubuntu typically fails at the next distribution upgrade, though. That's a pretty big problem.
I just did a dist upgrade on my EEE from 10.4 to 10.10 to check out the new interface; it was pretty painless. Took a while, because it's running from a 4GB SDHC card, but it upgraded cleanly and runs quite well. I still use XP on it most of the time, just because for web browsing it doesn't really matter what you're running.
HP Quickweb, Android / ChromeOS/ WebOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Use Lubuntu (ligthweight ubuntu) instead (Score:2)
It is about 1/3rd in size and runs faster overall, since it's optimized for sub-500 MHz processors and 0.2 gig RAM instead of Win7 or OS X's full-gig requirement.
Also comes with Chromium, a nice compact browser that is very responsive to web surfing.
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OSX (Score:2)
Speed benchmarks are all very well and good... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, On Ubuntu, ccsm, doesn't fit on the screen (Image [imgbin.org]). Little like things like that crop up often with Ubuntu and it's really annoying.
I've no idea of Windows has similar issues because I don't have it installed, so perhaps somebody else will comment.
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Dunno about 7 but XP is probably worse. An awful lot of Windows apps have a minimum window size and refuse to allow themselves to be shrunk. So you're into third party apps (strangley usually supplied with the touchpad drivers) to zoom apps (and thus have them unreadable), or perform ALT+click on the window makes it moves no matter where you click, which lets you move windows around even if they are mostly off-screen but steals a hotkey.
In my opinion, Ubuntu etc. have always done a better job at this. At
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I've no idea of Windows has similar issues because I don't have it installed, so perhaps somebody else will comment.
From what I remember, when I booted XP on my netbook and ran Windows Update there were about two lines of useful text visible in the window between the huge expanse of IE crud at top and bottom and then the huge expanse of Microsoft crud on the web page it was displaying.
I don't think either OS is really designed for small screens, and far too many application designers don't even think about how it's going to look on a screen that's at most 600 pixels high. For example, I seem to remember that using the Nv
Odd testing (Score:2)
How can this be a fair test, if it doesn' t follow industry standards?
Had to reinstall Ubuntu yesterday... (Score:2)
This anecdote isn't about netbooks, but rather a triple booted MacBook Pro. Nevertheless it is about the difference between Windows and Ubuntu. Performance is not all that matters.
I managed to kill my laptop's ubuntu operating system yesterday and had to reinstall.
Why it died: I did a "sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-dev" so I could build some 3rd party app, and then my OpenGL apps wouldn't run (some version disagreement on the nvidia driver). So I rebooted, expecting the versions to match upon resta
Antivirus inclusive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they have included an anti-virtus application that needs to be installed and constantly running in the background for Windows XP and Windows 7?
Do they have included in the benchmark that in Windows 7 Starter edition the user can't even change the desktop background and the Visual Styles? Furthermore, if you are a small business user you have to buy the more expensive Windows 7 Professional edition so you can use your Windows in your network.
Not only you don't need the constant performance drain anti-virus but all Ubuntu versions are Enterprise versions.
But they did.... (Score:2, Funny)
A stupid test, doesn't look at the UI (Score:2)
Ubuntu uses Unity for its current (10.10) Netbook version of the main distro. This has a modified interface. It has a dockbar BUT has shifted it to the left. Since most if not all laptops and netbooks are widescreen, this means it saves space in the horizontal. More reading room.
Netbook edition also maximized the fast majority of windows and the 10.10 introduces a new trick where the top bar (similar to OSX top/menu bar) integrates with the window top bar. So the Icon Program name and close buttons don't
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Just a thought...
Re:why would one use a netbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I can only answer this for myself. I have a desktop at home, which for all sorts of reasons (CPU, GPU, memory, dual monitors, full size keyboard+++) is where I like to do anything serious. When I want to go mobile, I want something small, light and cheap I can bring almost everywhere. I'm not a road warrior, so I don't need a powerful laptop. I'm not hauling it from site to site so I don't need a desktop replacement - I did have one of those as a consultant though. I just need a real computer to go and the 10" screen, cramped keyboard and anemic performance are acceptable tradeoffs.
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If I get a wild hair and decide to try the netbook form factor again I may get stuck buying a Macbook Air unless somebody else has built in a full-sized keyboard to their netbooks.
Haven't looked at the Mac Air but my netbook is 26 cm wide. Just from left Ctrl to right Ctrl I measure around 29 cm on a full size keyboard, and that is if you don't want arrow keys or insert / delete / home / end / page up / page down. So unless you have a fold-out keyboard it's just not possible to do a full size keyboard in that form factor.
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An option is to get either one of the HP 12.1" tablet PCs (swivel around touch-screen, I seriously love mine, best character sheet ever) or you could go for one of the Pioneer x86 based tablets and use a standard bluetooth keyboard and mouse on them.
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there's no such thing as "an eePC". There have been 30+ models, from 7" to 12. Strangely, keyboard sizes vary accordingly, from maddeningly small to normal size or quasi-normal (98% IIRC)
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really...
Because I can throw it in my bag to carry around without really noticing the space or weight it takes up, and if it gets lost or stolen I won't be as upset as I would be if I'd taken my $1200 laptop with me.
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually a netbook is broadly understood to be a cheap low-performance computer for a limited set of common computing tasks, inaugurated by the Eee PC which was explicitly a commercialised equivalent of the OLPC's "cheap but useful" approach to hardware design.
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Or in some cases a "tablet PC", for those (like mine) with a swivel around 12" screen but with a real processor, 3d graphics, a "normal" chipset that can take any amount of ram as long as it fits in 2 slots and.... a dvd drive :)
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:4, Insightful)
A notebook is a small laptop, a netbook is an inexpensive notebook.
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I think "netbook" has become one of those terms like "Web 2.0" or "the Cloud". It's a term that's pretty vague and unclear; lots of people think that they're well-defined terms, but if you ask 2 people you can get 2 very different answers.
Originally the term "netbook" was used to describe laptops that were designed to be as cheap and small as possible, which was accomplished by making them underpowered and usually lacking internal storage, and they were called netbooks because they couldn't be used for an
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The main difference between netbook and laptop is not in processor, or memory, or hard drive, or build quality. It's in size, and size alone.
Size is the difference between a "laptop" and a "subnotebook", and a MacBook Air is on the large size of that. For example, the 11" MacBook Air likely wouldn't fit in a bag that holds a 10" Inspiron mini. Apple instead appears to want to sell iPads to people who would otherwise buy a netbook as a second computer.
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Only if you define netbooks to include all 12-inch-and-smaller laptops, a broadness which robs the term of its usefulness. People have been making very small laptops for about a decade. The netbook is a distinct subset.
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Netbooks are meant to be cheap, ultra portable and resilient. Ultra portable and resilient are why they typically use an SSD rather than a real disk.
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That is not the netbook segment. It's the ultraportable segment, which has existed for a long, long time but at prices that made you cringe.
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And one of the most important specifications of a netbook was ignored: battery life.
Which, sadly, is where XP wins over Ubuntu; mostly because of the custom software that the manufacturer shipped with my netbook to give best possible life in Windows... that seems to eek out another hour or two over Ubuntu before the battery dies.
However, it still lasts long enough that I had no problem removing XP from the machine recently when I replaced the HD with an SSD.
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#1 is icons-in-executables combined with hideing extensions by default. #2 is HTML email, which they didn't actually invent but did make popular.
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If people are going to write comparison articles and start the Windows vs Linux battle please compare them on fair grounds.
That bloatware is what allows the Windows netbooks to reach the pricepoint they do and push out the Linux netbooks.
They made the bed, they have to lay in it.
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I recently "fixed" a friends netbook. He compressed his windows file directory when he ran out of space
How? Windows Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr) offers to compress files that haven't been accessed in weeks using built-in NTFS compression, and it doesn't mess anything up.
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