I didn’t like the Xandros distro either. I chalked it up to the fact that not everyone is going to dig strawberry ice cream. My mom seems to like Xandros on her eee but I think it might be because she is coming from Windows.

Did you try UNR?
http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

Take Xandros, an also-ran Linux vendor that specializes in selling a sort of commercial OEM style distribution. In the case of the EeePC, they provided a simplistic and non-standard desktop that resembles a Fisher-Price “Busy Box” – plenty of big shiny icons but virtually no way to customize it or even replace it with a standard window manager or desktop environment.

Their software ‘repository’ was a joke. Like the iTunes store, Xandros wanted to set themselves up as a software gatekeeper, allowing people to sell software in a closed environment. No matter that virtually every other Linux distribution maintains a large repository of free software that is more mature, featureful, and popular than their commercial offerings. No matter that almost nothing useful was in their app store. Just looking at what was available made the EeePC platform look completely dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are still developing for the Commodore 64 or Apple ][ than for the Xandros distribution.

Wait, strike that. Xandros may well have a development community outside the actual company. The real problem was that Asus bought the Xandros distribution as an OEM product and hence was responsible for providing and maintaining its own ports and repository. Asus is a hardware company – it’s apparent and completely unsurprising they had no aptitude or interest in duplicating the OS support provided by (say) Canonical or the Debian project. So by the very nature of the OEM status of Xandros, there essentially could be no development for what amounted to Asus’ own fork of Debian.

And speaking of development, if a package isn’t available on a Linux distribution, users have the option of building from source or from scratch. This is not an option on the EeePC. The sheer amount of hacking you have to do to get a C compiler and libraries installed on the EeePC is prohibitive, even for someone moderately experienced with Linux. Again, it’s just not worth it.

After a few months of being frustrated by the lack of my favorite tools, having the command shell hidden away, and wanting to use more than the web, IM, and mail with this great little laptop, I bit the bullet, wiped the drive and installed Eeebuntu and never looked back. The biggest problem now is that inbound Skype video no longer works, but otherwise the EeePC works just as well as every other Linux machine I use but with a 5 hour battery life. Eclipse runs acceptably well on the machine, if slowly at times (surprise – it’s a low-power laptop) and I have Perl, Python, and gFortran working flawlessly on it (don’t laugh – it’s for work…)

The upshot is that I’ve been working with UNIX since the mid-80′s and Linux since the mid-90′s. I prefer UNIX-based operating systems; hell, I had a Solaris desktop for five years. Despite all that, I would’ve traded Xandros for XP in a heartbeat for how insultingly functionless it was. The problem was not with Linux, the problem was with the abandonware Asus fork of the half-assed Xandros fork of Debian. And I can see how users of any experience level or preference would want more than the dozen apps the EeePC ships with.

The overall user experience was execrable, more like using a kiosk than a computer. But somehow this will be spun as a Linux failure, not a horrible business decision by Asus, underestimating their users and clinging to the dead business model of closed-garden software development and distribution. We’re seeing the same cracks appearing in the iTunes store regarding random app censorship and the whole Google Voice/AT&T fiasco.

I wasn’t impressed with Asus’ EeePC. The custom interface was bad, and the Windows ones had better hardware. No wonder they were returned. Ugh! However, Chris Kenyon of Canonical says that with well-engineered hardware, the return rates on Linux v. Windows are the same. Oh, and Asus consistently puts out the netbooks with the most annoying keyboards. HP and Dell have much more usable keyboards (full size keycaps, not beveled til they’re 1/4 the size they should be).

In the case of boxed Ubuntu, the +1 to the consumer is the included tech support. Who needs tech support for a music CD? People do regularly need support on the computer, though, so having “get up & running” support is useful.

And yeah, you’re right that the average user doesn’t know about Linux yet. That’s what I’m talking about though. If the Linux machines are available and they can play with them, they can learn about it. In the absence of ones in the store for them to play with, we need to show them (see the bit about guerilla marketing) that an alternative exists. I mentioned how our Local Community team shows off Free Software at the folk festival. We always have demo machines to play with.

On the topic of ASUS eeePC with Linux…Best Buy did sell a lot. The only reason they sold a good number was because of the price tag. A look at sales versus returns indicates that buyers of the Linux based eeePC returned over 60% of those sold. With those numbers it is not hard to see why ASUS pulled that line.

Store managers have no say as to what products to carry. Even if they did, one big thing that would still hold them back is the relativly long shelf life of a boxed copy of Linux. There is very little margin in product that is freely availble for download. This is evident in the media departments with more and more people downloading their music instead of buying the cd.

The only way I see Linux gaining retail support is by external influences from the Linux community. The demand for Linux is high among the technology savvy, but not amount the Joe and Jane shopper.