Eee PC, gPC, and Dell in Terms of Spreading Linux
This year Asus, Everex, and Dell have all introduced Linux-powered computers which received a lot of attention in the Linux community as well as in the mainstream media, but so far there is no evidence of any of these products bringing Linux to everyone. Both the gPC and the Dell Ubuntu computers were marketed, to the extent they were marketed at all, as running Linux and/or being inexpensive, neither of which is anything new to the PC market. As a result, neither has shown signs of success. That leaves the Eee PC as the only one to have had significant success so far, yet it has not shown any signs of spreading Linux. It may, and almost certainly is, too soon to really know if the Eee PC will bring Linux to the desktop, but it seems unlikely since the version of Linux the Eee runs is very minimal and the common uses of the Eee and other ultra mobile PCs are quite different from the common uses of standard desktop PCs. On the other hand, any exposure to the term Linux in a non-geeky way may help people to be more open-minded to Linux.
However well the Eee PC does, Linux is not going to suddenly be the most used OS for the desktop. I believe that a logical next step to ease people into Linux would be a set-top box that could browse the internet, edit office files, play media, and do almost anything a normal computer could. As media moves online, the market for an internet-connected set-top box will expand. Additionally, because technology is so much a part of everyone’s life, the ability to browse the web or work on a word document is very useful. Since Linux is free and requires minimal hardware, the box can be cheap enough so that more than just geeks will use it. Although most people would buy a box like this for the media playback capabilities, as long as the box also has the capabilities of a computer, users of the box will become familiar with the full Linux OS, even though they did not buy the box to be a computer.
