Last week, B. Lebanc at Microsoft made a post about “Windows on Netbook PCs: A Year in Review” (link), where he mentioned how the netbook scene has changed from the past couple of years. He mentions,
Not only are people overwhelmingly buying Windows, but those that try Linux are often returning it. Both MSI – a leading netbook PC OEM – and Canonical – the vendor supporting the commercial distribution of Ubuntu Linux – stated publicly they saw Linux return rates 4 times higher than Windows. Why such a disparity? Because users simply expect the Windows experience.
Ouch! Linux fans are not going to like this. Folks at Canonical disagree with the Microsoft and say that the return rate is actually similar to that of Windows based netbooks. According to them, it is the quality and out-of-box experience matters the most and is responsible for the returns.
Whatever Microsoft says, they have to admit one thing that the future is very bright for Linux. Ubuntu can run on ARM processors which consume nearly 1/10th (in some cases) of what the Atom consumes. Microsoft currently has not plans to make its ‘desktop OS’ to run on ARM platform. The reason is obvious: They have Windows Mobile for that. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile is not in a situation to battle with the mighty Ubuntu.
Right now, I’m typing this post on EEEbuntu (custom UBUNTU variant) and I’m very happy with the fact that I do not have to deal with the viruses, trojans blah blah. True, the popularity of the Linux platform is not as great as the Windows platform, but it now growing at a pretty nice rate, thanks to the netbook vendors who are now supplying the certain models with some linux-distro.