Journalists, like other folks, deserve their lazy time at Christmas, and there’s nothing like my review of the year / my predictions for next year to fill up a few easy column inches. For journalists covering open-source matters, this can degrade even further to give another rehash of the venerable is Linux ready for the desktop piece (like Shrek’s donkey: are we there yet?).

Well, I’m sitting typing this on a PC which arrived with Linux installed, which was incredibly cheap, looks as cool as anything Apple has produced, and was damn near impossible to get hold of because of demand from consumers.

Yes, I am now the proud owner of an ASUS eee PC. If you have been on another planet and missed the buzz, then read a review or two. I am tired of carrying a normal size laptop around, and I had been seriously trying to justify spending well over UKP 1,000 for an X series ThinkPad. Instead, I now have something smaller, infinitely cooler, a perfect match to my needs, and Linux based, for UKP 200.

Congratulations to the product designers at ASUS. They have dared to be different: they and Xandros have put some serious effort into tailoring their product precisely to their target market, and they have delivered a cracking easy-to-use PC for work, education, and fun. Let’s be quite clear - this little gem has required serious work by both hardware and software engineers - it isn’t a vanilla Linux distro.

My eee PC is now my every day PC. If you’re an open-source enthusiast - go out an buy one. In fact, buy a few, and hand them out to all those children, men, and women you would never have trusted with Linux before.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.