From: nospam@dfs.com
On 1/7/2026 3:37 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> ... but you repeat yourself.
>
>> Jewell's Answer
>> We received a shipment of a new tiny notebook PC made by Asus - the
>> eeePC. It was pretty low spec, but importantly was dirt cheap. ...
>> Unusually, it shipped with Linux. Asus had their own customised
>> distribution that made it pretty easy to use. Primarily due to the
>> low price point, they sold like hot-cakes…
>>
>> And got returned almost as fast.
>
> I remember these nonsensical rumours being spread around at the time
> -- after all, I bought one myself when they were new!
>
> Asus itself had to come out and deny that it was experiencing higher
> return rates for the Linux-based netbooks. This seemed to be part of
> some rumour campaign by, if not Microsoft itself, certainly parties
> allied with that company.
>
> That would seem to include present company ...
"nonsensical rumors"?
The final refuge of a defeated Linux crazy is ALWAYS " lied" or
"You're a Microsoft shill !"
Fact is:
1) "An interview with MSI's director of US Sales, Andy Tung, contains
this interesting snippet: 'We have done a lot of studies on the return
rates and haven't really talked about it much until now. Our internal
research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular
notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay
$299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box.
They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it's not
what they are used to. They don't want to spend time to learn it so they
bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times
higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.'"
2) "...as a senior sales associate for a larger computer + electronics
retailer, I can state for a fact that we get a substantially higher
return rate of Linux-based Aspire One and EEE PC's compared to that of
the Windows-based ones. The most common complaint when asked the reason
for the return? "I can't install any of my programs on here. Office,
Adobe, MSN, nothing works!" I try to take the time to assist them,
showing them where they can find comparable programs and install them,
such as GAIM/Pidgin and OpenOffice. Some are more than happy with that,
others still want to return them. Lucky for them we have a pretty lax
return policy."
3) "I have not seen MSI's Linux installation, but the ASUS version of
Xandros on my daughter's Eee PC 4G is an unusable piece of crap. The
most basic things don't work properly. A few of the snags I've run into:
it forgets about the wireless network after every restart so it has to
be reconfigured every time;
many dialog windows in programs such as Firefox don't fit on the screen
so that you can't even click on OK or Cancel to get rid of them because
the buttons are hidden (you have to alt-drag and then resize the window
but that's too much to ask for the average user, never mind a newbie);
Flash is crashy as hell (so much for my daughter's Flash games);
the "anti-virus" included plainly doesn't work, it can't even update
itself (not that it would be any use anyway);
Skype crashes at least once in every conversation;
the Software Update control panel doesn't seem to do anything;
the "Messenger" doesn't open any window when you click on it but just
keeps adding more useless icons to the system tray instead;
etc."
Never seen such a mess before. If I were not an experienced Linux user
myself, I'd have returned it. If MSI's is even worse than that, then
wow... just wow.
all comments from
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/10/05/123253/netbook-return-
ates-much-higher-for-linux-than-windows
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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