After the great success of EEEbuntu and other custom linux distros for netbooks, KDE has announced that they will also produce a distro for netbooks. Netbooks, no doubt are one of the hottest selling tech-products in the market. However, KDE is not going to make a custom distro just by re-skinning the interface of the original distro.
We aren’t making an interface for a “smaller laptop” or a “larger handheld”; the interface is for a netbook, which has a unique set of use cases and should have a unique, if familiar, user interface. To our knowledge, nobody is really doing this yet. We feel that just as Apple made popular an interface style on handhelds that is for handhelds with their iPhone/iPod touch interface, netbooks deserve a similar treatment.
It is definitely nice to see a company like KDE understanding the strengths and limitations of a netbook. I personally cannot wait to try the special KDE version for netbooks. Clearly, such efforts would make linux even more popular as compared to virus-prone Windows.
[via osattack]