One Third of Netbooks Ship with Linux

[anyweb]

We've seen a lot of reports going back and forth about whether or not Linux is doing well in the netbook space. As it turns out, research firm ABI Research as well as Dell say about one third of their machines ship with Linux pre-installed - which is pretty darn impressive.

 

According to ABI Research, out of the 35 million netbooks that will ship this year (I'm assuming that's worldwide), 11 million will ship with Linux pre-installed. This figure does not include dual-boot netbooks or those that have Windows removed and replaced with Linux - but nor does it include those where Linux is removed in favour of Windows.

 

This conclusion mirrors the words of Dell's Todd Finch, who in August stated that nearly one-third of Dell's netbooks ship with Linux pre-installed; Dell added that Linux netbooks' return rates are similar to those running Windows XP. This one third figure is a lot more than Microsoft's official figure, which says that about 93% of netbooks ship with Windows.

 

ABI Research further added that the arrival of ARM netbooks will push Linux in the netbook space to overtake Windows by 2013. Of course, we've been hearing the same heavenly predictions being made about these elusive ARM nebooks for a long time now, and yet here we are, in 2009, with only 4% of netbooks shipping with an ARM processor. ABI Research's Jeffrey Orr now claims 2010 will be the year of the ARM netbook.

 

via http://www.osnews.com/story/22587/One_Th...with_Linux

[Dungeon-Dave]

I find it curious that people view netbooks as laptop, and thus desire a familiar operating system on it so that they're comfortable with hitting the ground running... and yet very few people had difficulty picking up the iPhone interface, despite it being unfamiliar to them.

 

Still.. we ARE getting into times where the actual method of doing it is becoming unimportant - as long as people CAN achieve their objectives.

[anyweb]

ah i think the whole iphone thing is about being 'in with the crowd' rather than anything else, i recently sat in a restaurant with 3 colleagues waiting for lunch, they all pulled out their iphones while waiting for the food....

 

but of course i could be wrong, i don't have one and can hardly justify the price of them, i could buy a car for that...