While doing my normal 2 hours worth of news reading this morning (I’m a Journalist - I can get away with it…), I found a few interesting pieces - one of which struck a chord because I had been talking about the issue recently. Gizmodo has a piece suggesting the return rate of MSI Netbooks is 4x greater that of XP equivalents. To quite the article, which in turn quotes “Laptop”:

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.

Asus has been making it an incentive to use its Linux OS over Windows, by offering greater storage capacity for less money. Dell on the other hand is doing the exact opposite - and even MSI cripplied its Linux Wind by removing Bluetooth.

In MSI’s particular case, they have used a full blown Suse installation, which even I found a little tricky to get my head around - maybe because I’m used to where things are in Ubuntu/Fedora - but it just didn’t feel intuitive. But what is interesting is if you try and the draw the same parallel with mobile phones (something I’m going to be covering more in the near future) - people aren’t as fussy. They are used to changing phones every year or so and learning a new interface. So why is there this stigma when it comes to changing OS on your computer?

Quite a few Linux distros (the EeePC included) come with a Windows-esque skin. I can see the argument that you want to make things familiar - but I feel in many respects it’s also quite damaging. It lulls people into the idea that things are the same as they are on their Windows machine - when that isn’t the case, it is different. It also doesn’t do Linux’s reputation any good, as it tries to suggest that Linux is nothing more than a free alternative clone of Windows (as this article also tries to suggest) which is far from the truth. I use Ubuntu because I consider it to be a better operating system for my needs, not because it’s free. When people visit my house and see my dual display, flashy compiz setup they say “what is this? - it’s not Mac, it’s not Windows - but I want it!”

Sandisk was nice enough to send down some high capacity SD cards for me, so I can have an experiment with some different Linux distros on my EeePC - to see if anything beats that standard Xandros based setup. Confusingly, there is EeeBuntu, an unofficial project and also Ubuntu EEE which appears to be official. I shall be giving them both a shot as I’ve been wanting to have a play with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix for a while. I imagine the developers will need to give this article a read.