XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy   
   From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   ... but you repeat yourself.   
      
   On Wed, 7 Jan 2026 20:00:58 -0500, DFS wrote:   
      
   > The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks   
   > than Windows XP netbooks.'"   
      
   I don’t recall that sort of claim being made credibly at the time. Not   
   surprising, since there are a few problems with it.   
      
   Remember that those Linux-based netbooks didn’t have hard drives, they   
   had SSDs -- the first mass-market machines to come with in-built SSDs.   
   That was great for lowering power consumption and making the overall   
   product quieter, smaller and lighter.   
      
   Microsoft couldn’t fight back with the bloated monstrosity that was   
   Windows Vista. So they hastily brought Windows XP back from the edge   
   of extinction, so it could be offered as a Linux alternative.   
      
   Besides being a second-rate, obsolescent OS, XP was a poor fit for   
   SSD-based machines. It couldn’t run without a swap file, like Linux   
   could. So all that continual disk I/O, which users of Windows laptops   
   had to put up with, ended up shortening the life of the SSDs.   
      
   So the XP-based “netbooks” had to give up the SSD idea and go back to   
   conventional hard drives. This increased the noise level, the size,   
   and also the weight of the products.   
      
   And *that* was where the higher return rate came from: it was   
   effectively the death knell of the “netbook” as a separate product   
   category. Microsoft couldn’t offer a product to compete fairly with   
   Linux in that category, so it used its still-massive marketing might   
   to kill the product category.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)