The Indifferentiable Realm

Over the past 2-3 years, Linux has outstandingly escaped its geeky, technically challenging cocoon to become a fully-fledged and user-friendly operating system. No longer valid is the argument that users can’t get their work done on Linux without being familiar with Linux’s technical side. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE,the list goes on and on of desktop Linux distros that meet daily needs of common users. Vista or Mac OS X might have certain advantages, but when Michael Dell runs Ubuntu Linux on one of his own home systems, it can’t be said that Linux isn’t a real choice for anyone’s desktop.

For the last two decades, we’ve been buying expensive desktop operating systems on business PCs running from $1,000 to $2,000. On those systems, we’ve been putting pricey desktop-centric office suites like Microsoft Office. That is about to change.

Four seemingly minor trends together are causing a profound revolution in the computing world: user-friendly Linux desktops, useful under-$500 laptops and desktops, near-universal broadband, and business-ready Internet office applications (most commonly is Google Apps Premier Edition).

A 100-PC business utilizing products from the above trends can function well for about $57,000 (including a server, Internet and miscellaneous services).

The same type of business but Microsoft-powered (Vista Business equipped PCs, Exchange email server, Office 2007, Windows Server 2003) costs at least $114,923.

On the consumer front, notebooks overtook desktops to become the bigger revenue generator for PC makers in 2007. For Hewlett-Packard, laptops have become the single most important revenue source. PC vendors can make more profit on an under-$1,000 laptop than it would on a PC at the same price. Together with Wi-Fi being available essentially everywhere, more and more customers are turning to laptops.

Sub-$200 laptops equipped with Linux such as One-Laptop-Per-Child or ClassmatePC 2007 from Intel are renown examples of cheap and fully-function PCs.

If you could build a no-frills PCs that ran Linux, why not make sub-$500 computers with a bit more power and sell them to consumers? That’s exactly what Asus did with its Xandros Linux-powered ASUS Eee UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC), which lists for about $400. At about the same time, Everex introduced its gOS TC2502 gPC.

With sub-$500 laptops with 512MB of RAM and embedded Intel graphics, even the already mediocre Home Basic is still going to suck big time. Stick any Linux distribution on it, say Fedora 8, gOS 1.02 or OpenSUSE 10.3, and you’ve got a really useful laptop.

There’s only one little problem with this if your company name is Microsoft. Those under-$1,000 laptops can’t run Vista worth a darn. In addition, Vista has become a bigger and bigger part of a laptop’s cost. So, if you’re a PC vendor, you could either upgrade your hardware—and there goes your sweet price point; put Vista Home Basic on the system—which even Vista lovers admit is trash; or continue to sell Windows XP and give adventurous customers a Linux option.

Microsoft will fight this trend. It will cut prices to the point where it’ll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won’t be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2222308,00.asp

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html

The group project has driven me so crazy that I didn’t have time to look for something cool to post as usual. I have never had so much trouble with programming as I did this time in the group project. It’s certainly much harder to program in corporation – which is an essential requirement in the real world. Tune in for our presentation for further details.

I’m not a programmer yet, not until I learn to work with group