Cinnamon 1.4 released

Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 12:43 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Cinnamon 1.4 released by khim
Parent article: Cinnamon 1.4 released

Sorry, but this sorry tale was disproved few years ago quite convincingly. For about a year most netbooks were sold with Linux preinstalled. People rejected them en masse and either returned them or installed [pirated] Windows XP.

That may have had less to do with the fact that Linux in general sucks and more with the fact that the machines in question usually came with weird and unusual Linux distributions that not even hardened Linux fans had ever heard of let alone willingly used, so it was difficult to obtain updates on an ongoing basis or additional software. If the manufacturers had bothered to use a reasonable main-stream Linux distribution that would have made a significant difference.

I have an original Asus Eee PC 701, the machine that basically defined the »netbook« genre. When these first came out they literally sold like hotcakes. Also they're way too small to support XP. The default OS was Xandros Linux (a Debian derivative), which incidentally runs quite well as delivered – its main problem, as mentioned above, was haphazard support and a limited range of applications, both of which might easily have been avoided if the machine had come with Debian instead of Xandros to begin with. Even so, the Eee PC 701 is a nice and useful computer within its limits. Personally, I know a bunch of people who had one and have never heard of one being returned because people were dissatisfied with the OS – most people eventually graduated to netbooks with better specs once those became available, or presumably iPads and such. I still use mine, mainly as a glorified MP3 player for dance classes, because it works just fine and I haven't seen the need to replace it.

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