XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy   
   From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   On Tue, 11 Nov 2025 07:45:03 GMT, Jan Panteltje wrote:   
      
   > I have an eepc 701 I bought many years ago, it came with Linux   
   > pre-installd   
      
   I have one of those, too.   
      
   > The next models came with MS I think.   
      
   Microsoft had just introduced Vista, which was massively resource-heavy,   
   as everyone knows. I remember a Microsoft guy coming round to talk to our   
   Linux User’s Group, who claimed that the hardware had reached the point   
   where Vista’s requirements were entirely reasonable.   
      
   This was also the time of a lot of buzz around Nicholas Negroponte’s “One   
   Laptop Per Child” project. He planned to offer the OLPC machine to   
   schoolchildren in the third world, but there was quite a high level of   
   interest among more middle-class first-world customers.   
      
   Hence the inspiration for the “netbook” concept. Vista was out of the   
   question, so vendors like Asus put Linux on their petite product   
   introductions.   
      
   Suddently it looked like a new market segment was being born, and it was   
   going to be dominated by Linux. So Microsoft suddenly changed course, and   
   brought XP back from the dead pretty much and offered it at low cost,   
   though it was confined to only being available on this new device   
   category, as a stopgap.   
      
   And so, Linux was forced out of the market, and “netbook” became   
   synonymous with “low-end XP laptop”.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)