Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Tuesday 21 October 2008, 10:23 PM
Apricot netbook ditches Linux
A representative told me today that they have decided to dump the Linux version of the device. This was to have been priced at £279, with the XP version costing £329. There is now only an XP option, priced at £299.
This makes sense. As referenced in the above link, SUSE Linux was a massive fail on the Apricot PicoBook Pro. In its natural state, the OS was too unintuitive for the netbook. OK, Apricot is a minor player, but what lessons can we learn from this?
Lesson One: Apricot should have done - although they probably didn't have the resources to do this - what Acer, Asus et al have done with their netbook distros. Which is to tailor them into an idiotproof dashboard. Solved. But what does this tell us about wider Linux distros? That they're not ready for primetime.
Lesson Two: If they're going to take the mantle of XP - every opponent's worst enemy, and you can count Microsoft in that pack - then Linux distros need to work recognisably and straight out the box. On a netbook or a normal PC. Whether this means the wider distros have to become more XP-like, or whether the whole shebang needs to be rethought, I have no idea (although I tend towards the latter).
All I know is, I love Linux and its ethos, and I hope it will displace Windows, but it won't right now. This is its challenge, which is a good thing, right? Shuttleworth & Co. (and I'm not singling out Ubuntu here; rather the man): take it away.
PreviousComments on this post
Having to work every day on Windows systems what I would add to this discussion is that a "XP skin" for Gnome or KDE could take care of most of the "look and feel" issues. Operational items like drive letters, folder structures etc. would be a little harder but not impossible.
Years back Microsoft almost totally hijacked the word processing market away from Word Perfect by offering within Word a mode that emulated the look and feel of WordPerfect. This emulation was expanded to the extent that most of the emulated "dot" codes for text and print formatting in the Word emulation worked just like WordPerfect's. (WordPerfect BTW somewhat did the same to the previous leader WordStar.) If anybody in the Linux world wanted to build an NT Explorer emulator as an Open Source project, it would probably take care of 90% of the UI that most Windows users need to feel comfortable by avoiding the obvious differences with Linux desktops.
From a "marketing" viewpoint, now would be a perfect time to do it. Make it at least work like Windows XP's version of Explorer and you'd have a lot of happy new Linux users in corporate installations. If the CEO or the bean counters don't want to buy Vista, slip some Linux installs onto the non-power desktop users with a "XP skin" on them. Some of them might not even notice the OS difference if you pitched it as an "upgrade". When management says "we can't do Linux here" show them that they already are "doing" Linux.
My daughter uses OpenOffice and doesn't give a flip that its not Microsoft Office. She turns in her projects as ppts, doc and xls files and the teachers also don't seem to care or even notice.
I think the Apricot netbook just proves you can't buy in a shipment of anonymous gear, slap a sticker on it, bung any old software on top and have a good product. Or even an acceptable product. Didn't work in the 80s, didn't work in the 90s, won't work now.
I think the difference between linux and windows would become apparent when you lift up the bonnet and look under the hood, with something like sysinternals tools perhaps. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, sometimes the best way to learn is to have the problem on one side and the internet on the other....
As for the re-badging, if your gonna do it then make sure what you are mimicking is top notch for goodness sake!
This has been my only complaint with Linux. You try to start a program and it tells you some dependencies are missing. In my case it has been the program Rosegarden. I have only found one distro that makes it work "out of the box". You should not have to look for all dependencies yourself, they should be included, and all programs should work on a desktop, laptop, netbook, or mobile device. Until that happens new users are not going to accept Linux. Instead, they will put with windows security problems, BSOD's, slow speed, and all the other problems windows brings.
Ator you're on to something. When you compile a program in VB or any of the MS languages, you as the programmer have the option to include ALL dependencies required into the install package. That even includes a dotNet runtime if necessary. Earlier versions, pre-dotNet (VB 6 for instance) required that you specify the OS version you were compiling for so that wasn't as clean a build.
Delphi and some of the Borland languages got around the dependency problem by only using published and supported Win32 API calls. Their programs came completely compiled with no external libraries required. The installer basically just registered the program and setup whatever folders necessary.
Java likewise uses Win32 API calls and has a runtime interface package optimized for the OS. (The biggest problem with Java is that the runtime and object programs get huge fast and require a freaking ton of memory!)
