Microsoft’s operating systems keep needing more and more resources, but consumers keep wanting cheaper and more portable hardware, hardware for which Vista is not well suited. This creates an opening for Linux, because it does not demand as many resources and is costs nothing.

Windows Vista has evolved from a less than perfect foundation dating back to MS-DOS. Now, it comes in four (or eleven) versions. The high end versions are capable, but expensive and very resource demanding. At the low end, Vista Home Basic is not particularly resource-demanding, but if you ask any tech reporter about it, they will tell you that there is no point in buying it, because it includes almost none of the new features of Vista. Although Linux has been around as least as long as Windows, it has managed to avoid the bloat and code confusion that plagues Windows. (It would be interesting to get someone involved in the kernel project to comment on how this happened.)

If you have been following the technology news for the past year or so, you may have noticed two hardware trends. Consumers want cheap hardware and they want portable hardware. We have seen this trend with the $200 gPC sold at Wal-Mart and Asus’s $400 Eee PC, both of which run Linux. The gPC is a very cheap desktop computer. Even if the hardware in it could run Windows Vista, adding a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium would more than double its cost at retail prices. The Eee PC, in addition to being very cheap, is also very portable and ideal for users who want to go everywhere with their PCs. In a laptop this small, it is simply not possible to fit the hardware required to run even the most basic versions of Vista.

Vista faces problems here. Cheap hardware becomes impossible if the operating system itself costs hundreds of dollars, and you just can’t fit much hardware into a highly mobile device. Linux solves both these problems. Linux has low requirements. Linux is free.