Me too. OpenBSD worked flawlessly (built-in WiFi, and suspend) on the Eee PC MK90H. (Changing the CMOS battery requires a pretty deep tear down, though)
Nah. I have an HP Spectre x360 that fills the niche in terms of thickness. Small and light enough to stick it in a bag and go, and actually not all that underpowered.
I have one. Best kitchen computer ever. About 8 yrs worth of use for 99 bux. Battery is bad now but it's too expensive to replace. It might be time to replace.
This, and as the other comment says: Couch computing.
They weren't great computers as such, but for quickly looking up things or surfing the web they where fine. My father in-law kept one on the coffee table until it the battery just died after ten years or so. It was just a quick way to look up stuff or check emails.
There aren't really any good replacement. Personally I want a keyboard, so out goes the iPad and phone, Neither are device I truly enjoy using anyway. Even the modern ultra books are to big and devices like the GPD are too expensive.
Technically it seems like it would be way more feasible to build some like the EEE form factor today, but the market might be to small.
Dual core atom with 2GB memory, became my BYOD dev machine at work (with external keyboard and monitor, of course). Handled dev tasks in Ubuntu like a charm, weighted almost nothing.
I still have my EEE Pc 701 from 2007. Still works well with 2GB of RAM, Void Linux+DWM and an extended filesystem in the SD Card. Good for experimenting and for note taking with Emacs+org roam or Zim. Still good for reading wikipedia or stack overflow articles with netsurf or seamonkey(sites with JavaScript). Remember searching open or crackable wifi networks with the little fellow in the palm of my hand. I have another with NetBSD, works well too.
In some ways that era of netbooks felt like the glory days of creative computing devices and OSes. Intel created this really lovely UI on top of Linux called Moblin. My mom ran Jolicloud, which was built around webapps. A bunch of netbooks were coming out with their own Linux flavors to the mass market and webOS was right around the corner.
I'm going to say this with a straight face: if only more people would have had better taste I think we might have inherited a beautiful future of free and open computing.
The Eee PC 701 was cheap and came with Linux OOTB. Now we have to spend thousands of dollars for underpowered garage projects like the MNT Reform or else pay about what we did for the 701 for underpowered laptops that will never get their bugs fixed like the Pinebook.
I think the most accessible small form factor Linux box right now is the Steam Deck. You're paying a bit more for game controller hardware if you just want to use it as a workstation, but it is just Linux under the hood and looks to be a pretty neat cyberdeck-like device.
I recently learned however that the SteamOS desktop is built on a read-only image, with the expectation software will be installed via flatpak.
It is apparently possible to turn the read-only protection off to use pacman or your own thing, but anything you do may be wiped out on the next OS update.
Other immutable state distros such as Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE MicroOS Desktop offer a “toolbox” environment that runs as a Flatpak with relaxed restrictions for development tasks. Is something like that an option on SteamOS 3?
Valve even supplies (sorta buggy) Windows drivers for the Steam Deck: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3131696... - a major selling point of the Deck is that it's just a handheld PC that happens to come pre-installed with a Linux distro designed for handheld PCs. And AFAIK all of its hardware is supported upstream, so other distros should just work by plugging in a flash drive and booting into them.
I have a slow-ass Eee PC rusting in a closet somewhere. What can I do with it? I already have a much-less-slow Surface Go as the family/kitchen computer.
I still have my MSI Wind. Great little machine. It runs Emacs and a compiler comfortably, so it's still useful. I prototyped a game on it over a series of subway trips to/from work.
One time a pretty girl at a bar saw it with its little retro Window Maker desktop, and told me I should buy Apple products because they're "more digital".
I guess netbooks are considered "retro" computing devices now, huh. Damn, I'm old.
I recently recycled an MSI Wind U100. Battery was shot, hinges gave up years ago, keyboard was in pretty rough shape. Still booted though off a budget (at the time) 40GB Intel SSD that made it feel fast.
Still chuckle that they offered the overclocking option as if it mattered on that Atom N270 CPU.
Dragged it everywhere for a bit. It was the first laptop shaped device I could afford new as a teenager. I refuse to believe it's retro.
Ten years ago I had a conversation with an 18 year old who's father ran a phone shop. Of course she always had the latest and greatest phone. And she mentioned her phone was "elegant".
I asked for a definition of "elegant" and without skipping a beat she returned: "Shiny. Electronic. Made in the last 6 months."
My MSI Wind seemed like the perfect candidate for Alpine Linux. Alas, the GPU is so old that hardly anything but a terminal starts without crashing in Wayland.
I borrowed a friend's Acer Aspire for quite a while when I was unemployed during the Great Recession. My 1st gen MacBook Air had a bad battery, but the Aspire was a lifesaver and not a bad little machine at all.
The eeePC 901 was what got me into Linux, and by extension basically my whole career in IT. Fabulous little device which changed my perception of computers from "gaming plus garbage MS Office software" to a truly general purpose, infinitely customizable tool.
I'm glad my asuss eee is gone now, but in 2011 it was a fabulous travel aid for exploring italy - keeping us out of icky internet cafes and keeping us entertained on the long slow (railpass compliant) rail journeys.
Netbooks became of course the small and underpowered laptop that many rely upon today.
They also perhaps provided some of the foundation for iPad's success - giving Apple a clear starting point from which to market a much nicer portable internet device.
Me too. I bought one for a trip around Europe in 2010 or so. I wanted something:
* small and light
* cheap enough that I wouldn't cry if it was lost or stolen in sketchy hostels
* capable of using the web and checking email
Since there wasn't an iPad back then, and the iPhone was an expensive theft target, the eee was a perfect fit. The fact that it ran Linux was also cool. A year or two later I bought a MacBook Air and used that for the same purpose (more expensive, but I wasn't staying in hostels much at that point).
I'm not sure if the author was a child at the time or what, but these obviously fit a niche.
The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc.
The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook.
After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even Linus Torvalds owned one.
Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well, but they're locked down and all-in on Google compared to the old netbooks which let you run anything, so they're not an ideal replacement.
I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? It's a tough call because the competition for netbooks is actually smartphones. A student writing a paper, all they need is just a bluetooth keyboard and something to lean their 6.7" phone or tablet against.
I'll just throw this out there - GalliumOS works fairly well to convert a Chromebook into a full-fat Linux laptop. I've only installed it on one, but the process wasn't too hard. The end result is kinda hacky, and from what I recall there's not much development being done on Gallium of late, but it's still an option.
GalliumOS works for the x86 chromebooks. For a handful of arm chromebooks archlinuxarm works reasonably well.
I bought a Samsung Chromebook Plus (1st gen) before covid when I was taking the train every day. I find it to be a great carry with me device for note taking, web browsing, coding, and light gaming when combined with a tiling window manager. It certainly feels like the netbook promise of the late 2000s.
I have to caution that for that particular device the stock kernel in archlinuxarm no longer boots because there are limits on the boot partition size. The workaround I'm aware of is to build out your disk on an sd card / usb stick on another computer, cross compiling the kernel with a reduced set of drivers, and installing it using binfmt-qemu-static/chroot.
I wonder what's the purpose of GalliumOS. After the usual unlocking, I've installed Manjaro on several 1st and 2nd generation Chromeboxes with no problems whatsoever; everything supported out of the box, and I would expect Debian or Ubuntu to work as well. Are there any incompatibilities with newer generation models so that a dedicated distro is needed?
Google doesn't upstream chromebook code. Chromebooks run hacked up downstream kernels. GalliumOS incorporates those hacks. Over time, some things make it upstream.
Still pretty hacky on my Acer Chromebook Flip C302, could never get audio working quite right. I'd agree and say GalliumOS on most Chromebooks is like mid-2000s desktop Linux hacky.
Mine almost bricked itself due to the accumulation of driver and Windows updates, so I installed Linux to save it. But by then it was slow, noisy, and full of moving parts compared to alternatives and I never really used it again.
Nah, the 901 was where it was at! Atom chip, more usable screen size, 4GB system drive that was reasonably snappy. I used that thing for years, even ran OSX snow-leopard on it for a while.
I still have one in operating condition. It was the first laptop I owned with SSD's (dual SSD setup, 4GB SLC and 16GB MLC SSD. Also had SD card for expansion. The SSD's were unique in that they slotted into slots that were physically mini-pcie slots, but wired electrically with SATA, PATA, and USB.
Having the SSD setup in 2007 was ahead of its time and really made the laptop feel faster than it was. Also being the size of a paperback book meant it traveled well.
After the 901, Asus was sorta forced to kill the line as Windows sold more units than Linux and was a pig on drive usage (Microsoft stopped licensing XP as it was long in the tooth by this point). Rather than throw the dual SSD setup in, they moved to slow 250GB HDD's and sized up the keyboard/screeen to 10". Basically became a cheap and slow and not that much smaller laptop.
Oh, another random thing the 901 had was lots of easy to access internal USB headers to wire devices to internally like additional drives and touch panel. This was something else removed in later models cost cutting.
I replaced one of the internal ssds with a 64GB third-party add-on in mine, doubled up the RAM, replaced the webcam (Linux models for some reason came with a different camera module to windows one, and only the windows one was hackintosh compatible, so I had to ebay-it) and did all manner of other things to mine. Including replace the keyboard when I accidentally sliced through the ribbon cable :/
Really good, rugged, tiny little laptop. When I got bored of OS X I went back to debian, I think I only got rid of it a couple of years ago during a clearout. The addon drive was dead, as was one of the originals. Its last-ditch configuration was / on the original 4GB, /home on an SD card and lxde for a lightweight DE. After a while it struggled with youtube and stuff and I drifted away from it.
I had both of those. I think I got the most use out of the 701. I took that thing everywhere and used it as my primary laptop. You can probably find pictures of me using it to give conference talks, sitting around at hackathons coding (with a HHKB attached), etc. I used Debian, and even had working WiFi.
The 901 I bought later since it seemed like more specs would be better, it was big and cheap feeling. I do remember getting a WiMax stick for it and reading RSS feeds in Google Reader on my commute. That was so novel at the time!
It definitely felt pretty cheap - but that was part of the appeal, it was a sort of fisher-price laptop, chunky plastic and big hinges. Definitely a chuckable device :)
I've just dug through my email to be sure - I also had a 901! The 20GB version version, running Linux.
I was just about not a student at this point but still doing a lot of Theatre touring. The EEE PC was great for what I needed which was to be portable enough to carry around all the time in Edinburgh, check my email in bars, and even be solid enough to run the sound effects for a show!
As for why manufacturers don’t make netbooks… it’s a fair point if you’re only looking at the major PC makers I guess, but overall they actually do! Think GPD Pocket series, One Mix series, (soon) MNT Pocket Reform. It’s a niche, but the hardware exists!
Microsoft makes two netbook adjacent devices! The Surface Go is a netbook with a tablet form factor. And the Surface Laptop SE is an (admittedly slightly large) netbook.
I wonder if this indicates that refurbished netbooks actually would have some aftermarket value, for "niche people" or more capable Linux users at least. Maybe they would run into driver issues, though.
As a student the 701 was great. It fit in my (large) coat pocket, supported up to 2gb of ram, ran Xubuntu fine, was sturdier than my main laptop, had amazing battery life, and a real keyboard. It fit in that annoying niche between my tiny consumption-oriented phone and big work-oriented laptop, when I needed a full Linux environment for something but didn't mind if the command took a little while longer to type or run.
Later netbooks were all missing something. They were either expensive, had exclusively soldered parts, were thinner and less sturdy (but not smaller), had driver problems on Linux, or had terrible battery life.
wow. So many memories. I had one that I used as spare laptop, and compared to laptops at that time, the battery life was amazing. The weight made it very discreet (important for me living in a crap place in which somebody could kill you to take your laptop) and portable.
Used to run Ubuntu on it - a little struggle to get wifi working, but apart from that it was great.
Yeah, soldered parts; but most manufacturers sell a windows pc with emmc storage that is pretty cheap. I have an older HP version with 2GB of Ram and 16GB eeMC storage. It fits in the tablet pocket of my backpack, is super light, long battery life, and runs opensuse like a champ, even with KDE.
EDIT: emmc, not eemc.
The only problem I have with soldered parts is soldered RAM. Everything else can be worked around with patience or external parts, but once you don't have enough RAM to run a web browser with a single tab open to a common website, you're constantly page faulting.
I'm not sure whether this is planned obsolescence, or just the consequence of consumers who don't know or care about upgrading their device to keep it current.
I bought a Pinebook Pro because I wanted to support the project. However, it has turned into my primary personal laptop. It works great for all my personal development projects (emacs + elixir/javascript/react/python), running my side business (Shopify store), along with book keeping (plain text accounting), and general web surfing.
Suspend works well. Battery life is good enough (not as good as my m1 macbook). Wifi and everything else works fine. The only annoyance is the sound card doesn't get reset correctly after suspend. This required setting up a script to reload the module + a systemd unit to run it when coming back from suspend.
It is cheap enough that I'm not worried about throwing it in my bag or taking it overseas. It also seems to get a lot of attention in public as it has no markings on it at all!
I've thought about expanding the hard drive (as 64G isn't much), but it forces me to push everything to my home server/NAS which is a good thing.
I know it will never happen but I'd love for Apple to bring back 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip and the newer keyboard. It would be perfect for light note taking/ productivity on the go.
If they think it was rejected because of the screen size and not the incredibly shallow travel of the keyboard, they need to poll better. They have been bad for years with laptop keyboards.
I ran MacOS X on my Dell Mini 9, it was a close to flawless as you could get back then in such a tiny portable. From memory, sleep was the only thing that didn't work 100% correctly - I always just shut it down.
+1 for the Dell Mini 9. In fact, I use it daily for most things, as I got one in mint condition for only a few euros. Tiny Core Linux, framebuffer mode, text-only browsing, Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools [1]. I also added a matte screen protector, which is fine against eye strain.
I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience.
The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing.
There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great.
So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks.
You got me thinking...I still run my MSI Wind netbook (RIP Zareason!), and it's worked great with both Haiku and Q4OS recently.
The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable.
I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out.
The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO.
Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.
Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs.
Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article).
That's interesting, yeah mine has a fan but it is normally impossible to notice if the noise level in the room is even just a little bit above "quiet". Same with the original HDD, which on mine was spinny. I don't recall ever hearing it in operation. I replaced that with an SSD (be sure to clean the fan venting area while you're in there if you do that) but the before/after change didn't exactly blow my mind.
For a hacker it could be great. You could do a LOT with it. Most development and scripting tasks are easy. However I would strongly recommend a separate pointing device, as it's a pretty substantial upgrade to the user experience.
For web browsing, Falkon and 3-4 tabs max can work pretty well but modern JS SPAs probably wouldn't be very fun (if they'd even work in Falkon). I use Dillo a lot myself.
I remember hearing about the Samsung, that's too bad about the white screen problem. I think the biggest problem I've had with the Wind was that the power button's blue LED failed, but all the other LEDs work and the button itself is fine.
> I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask?
Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started and then they very quickly switched to Windows.
I don't know if it was consumer pressure or pressure from MS that caused this, but I do think it was Microsoft that pressured producers to switch.
I used to work at a computer store at the time; mostly doing tech stuff but also sales sometimes when it was busy. We sold a lot of Netbooks, both running Windows and Linux.
"This model runs Windows" was a real selling point for many customers. You have to realize that many people just don't give a flying hoot about their computers, they just want something to access a few websites and such, and Windows is what they were familiar with.
We sold a lot more Windows EEE machines than Linux ones, in spite of being quite a bit more expensive.
Was there also pressure from Microsoft? I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised. But there certainly was a real consumer demand as well.
The specific linux on the eeepcs was pretty bad too, IIRC. I couldn't use it. So you really had to be someone interested in messing around with them to get the best out of them.
I wouldn't call it "pressure" - MS just started to give away Windows for free if the device was under certain specs[1]. At that point it became a nobrainer for OEMs to just use Windows if it costs them the same anyway.
Now I'm feeling nostalgic. My main laptop in high school was a tiny Eee netbook (don't remember the model) running CrunchBang. I ended up using it as a headless server for a makeshift home lab during my freshman year in college.
I had one as well and loved it. One day someone broke into the flat and it got stolen. I still think about it sometime. It was really a great form factor.
I had a Dell Mini 10 (actually 1012), and it was a bit larger, so keyboard was actually useable. Plus it had a useful screen resolution (1300s vs 1024 for width).
I've got one. I use it only for writing. It's been great for that because it's terrible at everything else. It is essentially a modern-day word processor for me. I can work for hours and hours unplugged and if I need to do a bit of research, I can without having to pull out my distraction machine (phone).
Windows updates on older Eee PCs got/gets brutal a few years in. Mostly due to them needing to take up more and more hard drive space.
I remember there was a significant security update a few years back that would just constantly retry on Eee PCs because it needed like 20Gb of storage it would basically never get. Made it essentially unusable.
The EEEPC 701 was not great in terms of maximizing usability for the form factor. The screen bezels were huge as were the speakers beside it. The vertical resolution wasn't even enough to show some control panel dialogs in Windows XP. I had one myself but there were just too many corners cut to take make it work out.
Later models solved these issues and more and were much more bang for the buck. And maximized the usability for the size and price point.
For a while I did web backend development on my Eee PC, I used it as a hackintosh and modded a minipci 3g module on it. I actually got used to it for a while until I used o normal laptop again and noticed just how incredibly slow those Atom CPUs were.
The 8" Vaio was a great little machine. I wish I knew when and why the hacker aesthetic switched from devices that fit in your hand to devices that only barely fit in your car and double as diving boards. I hate this trend. When you think of "a hacker" you think of a person who whips out an Atari Portfolio to commit some kind of mischief on the spot, not some clown with a 16" macbook.
"The OLPC project was the subject of much discussion. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks"
I had one of these, it was great, although the micro-keyboard took some getting used to because I have big hands. My first Gen MacBook Air replaced it eventually. RIP
Loved my EeePC 1000HE back in the day, ran FreeBSD on it along with many other committers and we were all carefully tweaking the milli-amperage (power drain) to maximize battery life. I used to remember how many mA some kernel modules and daemons consumed.
At some point I donated it to my startup to serve as a datacenter recovery console complete with a 3G USB modem.
On a trip to SF, I saw an Asus Eee Pad at BestBuy (and Android tablet) and couldn’t resist the power of the Eee marquee. It didn’t serve as well or as long as an iPad would, but had a great life and is still alive 11 years later.
I used one of these for uni for a while. The small screen is really not a barrier for just taking notes in class and the portability is so much better than a regular sized laptop (and the size makes it practically indestructible too).
It also makes for a surprisingly adequate dev environment if you get used to switching between virtual desktops for extra screen space.
Using an iPad instead of one of these would have been a total non starter[1]. If I was back at uni nowadays I'd probably just get the smallest laptop I could find with half decent battery life - funnily enough the new M1/M2 macbooks are pretty appealing, but I would love something in an even smaller form factor if possible.
[1] proper hinged lid is much nicer than a keyboard case with a kickstand, I need to be able to compile code and run arbitrary executables.
I had an eee that I absolutely loved. It could barely run multiple tabs in chrome but it was small enough I could fit it in a satchel. Did my undergrad begining to end with it.
My takeaway from the article: Microsoft gave ASUS a deal they couldn't refuse. ASUS took the bait and sold the Eee PC with Windows preinstalled but the version of Windows was a little too crappy. Ultimately this sealed their fate as people upgraded to a "real computer," resigning the Eee PC's position to that of a toy. Is this right?
The one I bought came with Linux, but some weird distro I never heard of and I doubt anybody would really want to use. So I install a mainstream distro on it, no big deal, but then the limitations of the very small screen size become apparent when KDE/GNOME fail to fit basic things like settings GUIs onto the screen.
With a tiling window manager it became perfect for me. But I think most general computer users would be utterly alienated with that Linux experience. For the windows experience to also be shitty doubtlessly hurt the product line as well, but I don't think that shitty windows experience was displacing a polished linux experience. I think ASUS was basically between a rock and a hard place.
I have two EEEPC 700 machines here, one I bought with a Linux on it new, the other I picked up at the tip shop for $5 that had windows XP on it.
Waiting for windows to boot on that thing is a real exercise in patience. The supplied Linux was OK but I'm pretty sure Debian boots on it without issue.
The real reason they became a toy was that people realised the keyboard is just too cramped for regular use. The 11" laptops that followed were a lot more sensible and not a lot more money.
I'm surprised that no one seems to have mentioned Unity so far - Ubuntu originally developed it for its "Netbook Edition", then adopted it for the main Ubuntu distro. However it didn't stop the decline of netbooks or lead to the breakthrough of "Linux on the desktop" unfortunately...
I recall some site called olpcnews or similar that was run by a pretty brazen shill that posted nothing but fud regarding the project and news of deals and projects from Intel and Microsoft around the Windows offering. Where or not there were fatal flaws in the OLPC model there was NO WAY the incumbents were going to let edu fall to it.
The eee PC was also the original netbook used for the "booting Linux in five seconds" presentation at the first Linux Plumbers Conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point.
Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase.
> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase.
What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep.
I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I feel like people simply restart their computers less often than they did 15 years ago, so boot time isn’t the most compelling metric when selling machines these days.
Would you call "booting" what Windows does with Fast Startup enabled, then? It is half resume from a hibernation image (kernel and system services), half going through the regular booting process (rest of userland).
Anytime Windows does big "reboot-required" updates, the fast boot thing doesn't apply anymore and it can take considerably longer due to the forced cold boot.
Windows has me waiting for un-sleep and wifi reconnect, even if just a few seconds. On my M1 I see it’s open and connected while I open the lid, it’s quite a bit faster. Doesn’t matter all that much but I never dare to sleep my win laptops in my bag - sometimes they wake up and overheat while in the bag. Having stable sleep is more important to me
I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates).
My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help).
Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.
Hibernating is one of the things I wish worked better on Linux.
I am one of those few that dont like leaving my PC in sleep mode , but prefer a complete off state with full hibernation.
The times when I've tried to setup hibernation in Linux, it is clumsy (add swap file, config textfile mangling, etc) and theres always something that doesn't work when coming from hibernation.
I would even pay for some super fast/small non-volatile storage dedicated for Hibernation file. Maybe some internal small (64gb) hyperfast name raid0 setup.
if you boot linux directly from efi (no bootloader), remove plymouth, and tweak your cmdline and mkinitcpio a bit, you'll shave a massive bulk off a mainline distro's boot time. boot to a lighter-weight login manager (or just getty) to save the rest. i bet you could get sub-second cold-boot time on that desktop, not counting the firmware stage.
My Windows PC, with a cheap low range samsung SSD boots from dead to Firefox playing a youtube video again in less than ten seconds. It's the main reason I haven't put much effort into fixing a dumb BSOD that is probably caused by the same SSD.
> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second ...
Unless you work for a large enterprise and your laptop is managed by IT. Not sure what goes on but getting from power on to the point where you can start using your laptop seems to take ages.
“One neat thing about Suns is that they really boot fast. You ought to see one boot, if you haven’t already. It’s inspiring to those of us whose LispMs take all morning to boot.”
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They weren't great computers as such, but for quickly looking up things or surfing the web they where fine. My father in-law kept one on the coffee table until it the battery just died after ten years or so. It was just a quick way to look up stuff or check emails.
There aren't really any good replacement. Personally I want a keyboard, so out goes the iPad and phone, Neither are device I truly enjoy using anyway. Even the modern ultra books are to big and devices like the GPD are too expensive.
Technically it seems like it would be way more feasible to build some like the EEE form factor today, but the market might be to small.
Dual core atom with 2GB memory, became my BYOD dev machine at work (with external keyboard and monitor, of course). Handled dev tasks in Ubuntu like a charm, weighted almost nothing.
I'm going to say this with a straight face: if only more people would have had better taste I think we might have inherited a beautiful future of free and open computing.
The Eee PC 701 was cheap and came with Linux OOTB. Now we have to spend thousands of dollars for underpowered garage projects like the MNT Reform or else pay about what we did for the 701 for underpowered laptops that will never get their bugs fixed like the Pinebook.
It is apparently possible to turn the read-only protection off to use pacman or your own thing, but anything you do may be wiped out on the next OS update.
See: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/671A-4453-E8D2-32...
I believe it was mentioned in a previous story that it would at least not void the warranty to replace SteamOS entirely though.
They seem to be nailing it for now. Could see them experimenting with other form factors.
Also if they succeed other people will try to copy them.
The top comments are much more insightful.
One time a pretty girl at a bar saw it with its little retro Window Maker desktop, and told me I should buy Apple products because they're "more digital".
I guess netbooks are considered "retro" computing devices now, huh. Damn, I'm old.
Still chuckle that they offered the overclocking option as if it mattered on that Atom N270 CPU.
Dragged it everywhere for a bit. It was the first laptop shaped device I could afford new as a teenager. I refuse to believe it's retro.
Ten years ago I had a conversation with an 18 year old who's father ran a phone shop. Of course she always had the latest and greatest phone. And she mentioned her phone was "elegant".
I asked for a definition of "elegant" and without skipping a beat she returned: "Shiny. Electronic. Made in the last 6 months."
And so I learned elegance had a timespan.
Netbooks became of course the small and underpowered laptop that many rely upon today. They also perhaps provided some of the foundation for iPad's success - giving Apple a clear starting point from which to market a much nicer portable internet device.
* small and light
* cheap enough that I wouldn't cry if it was lost or stolen in sketchy hostels
* capable of using the web and checking email
Since there wasn't an iPad back then, and the iPhone was an expensive theft target, the eee was a perfect fit. The fact that it ran Linux was also cool. A year or two later I bought a MacBook Air and used that for the same purpose (more expensive, but I wasn't staying in hostels much at that point).
I'm not sure if the author was a child at the time or what, but these obviously fit a niche.
The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook.
After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even Linus Torvalds owned one.
Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well, but they're locked down and all-in on Google compared to the old netbooks which let you run anything, so they're not an ideal replacement.
I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? It's a tough call because the competition for netbooks is actually smartphones. A student writing a paper, all they need is just a bluetooth keyboard and something to lean their 6.7" phone or tablet against.
I bought a Samsung Chromebook Plus (1st gen) before covid when I was taking the train every day. I find it to be a great carry with me device for note taking, web browsing, coding, and light gaming when combined with a tiling window manager. It certainly feels like the netbook promise of the late 2000s.
I have to caution that for that particular device the stock kernel in archlinuxarm no longer boots because there are limits on the boot partition size. The workaround I'm aware of is to build out your disk on an sd card / usb stick on another computer, cross compiling the kernel with a reduced set of drivers, and installing it using binfmt-qemu-static/chroot.
Maybe, maybe not. ICYMI, Google "pre-announced" an Android tablet for 2023 [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664
Having the SSD setup in 2007 was ahead of its time and really made the laptop feel faster than it was. Also being the size of a paperback book meant it traveled well.
After the 901, Asus was sorta forced to kill the line as Windows sold more units than Linux and was a pig on drive usage (Microsoft stopped licensing XP as it was long in the tooth by this point). Rather than throw the dual SSD setup in, they moved to slow 250GB HDD's and sized up the keyboard/screeen to 10". Basically became a cheap and slow and not that much smaller laptop.
Oh, another random thing the 901 had was lots of easy to access internal USB headers to wire devices to internally like additional drives and touch panel. This was something else removed in later models cost cutting.
I replaced one of the internal ssds with a 64GB third-party add-on in mine, doubled up the RAM, replaced the webcam (Linux models for some reason came with a different camera module to windows one, and only the windows one was hackintosh compatible, so I had to ebay-it) and did all manner of other things to mine. Including replace the keyboard when I accidentally sliced through the ribbon cable :/
Really good, rugged, tiny little laptop. When I got bored of OS X I went back to debian, I think I only got rid of it a couple of years ago during a clearout. The addon drive was dead, as was one of the originals. Its last-ditch configuration was / on the original 4GB, /home on an SD card and lxde for a lightweight DE. After a while it struggled with youtube and stuff and I drifted away from it.
The 901 I bought later since it seemed like more specs would be better, it was big and cheap feeling. I do remember getting a WiMax stick for it and reading RSS feeds in Google Reader on my commute. That was so novel at the time!
I was just about not a student at this point but still doing a lot of Theatre touring. The EEE PC was great for what I needed which was to be portable enough to carry around all the time in Edinburgh, check my email in bars, and even be solid enough to run the sound effects for a show!
Later netbooks were all missing something. They were either expensive, had exclusively soldered parts, were thinner and less sturdy (but not smaller), had driver problems on Linux, or had terrible battery life.
Used to run Ubuntu on it - a little struggle to get wifi working, but apart from that it was great.
I'm not sure whether this is planned obsolescence, or just the consequence of consumers who don't know or care about upgrading their device to keep it current.
Suspend works well. Battery life is good enough (not as good as my m1 macbook). Wifi and everything else works fine. The only annoyance is the sound card doesn't get reset correctly after suspend. This required setting up a script to reload the module + a systemd unit to run it when coming back from suspend.
It is cheap enough that I'm not worried about throwing it in my bag or taking it overseas. It also seems to get a lot of attention in public as it has no markings on it at all!
I've thought about expanding the hard drive (as 64G isn't much), but it forces me to push everything to my home server/NAS which is a good thing.
I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience.
The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing.
There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great.
So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks.
1: http://litcave.rudi.ir
Pretty wild stuff, I miss that bugger. Only downside was the ram soldered to the board preventing upgrade.
The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable.
I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out.
The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO.
Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.
Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs.
Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10
For a hacker it could be great. You could do a LOT with it. Most development and scripting tasks are easy. However I would strongly recommend a separate pointing device, as it's a pretty substantial upgrade to the user experience.
For web browsing, Falkon and 3-4 tabs max can work pretty well but modern JS SPAs probably wouldn't be very fun (if they'd even work in Falkon). I use Dillo a lot myself.
I remember hearing about the Samsung, that's too bad about the white screen problem. I think the biggest problem I've had with the Wind was that the power button's blue LED failed, but all the other LEDs work and the button itself is fine.
Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started and then they very quickly switched to Windows.
I don't know if it was consumer pressure or pressure from MS that caused this, but I do think it was Microsoft that pressured producers to switch.
MS offered a massive discount on windows XP for netbooks as they saw the Linus writing on the wall.
Intel choked of supply for people who wanted to build more fully feature netbooks - thus the constrained specs on things like memory)
"This model runs Windows" was a real selling point for many customers. You have to realize that many people just don't give a flying hoot about their computers, they just want something to access a few websites and such, and Windows is what they were familiar with.
We sold a lot more Windows EEE machines than Linux ones, in spite of being quite a bit more expensive.
Was there also pressure from Microsoft? I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised. But there certainly was a real consumer demand as well.
[1] up to 11" and 4gb RAM IIRC
How is this not a netbook in everything but name?
Lenovo S10 could run Hackintosh
I remember there was a significant security update a few years back that would just constantly retry on Eee PCs because it needed like 20Gb of storage it would basically never get. Made it essentially unusable.
Later models solved these issues and more and were much more bang for the buck. And maximized the usability for the size and price point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child
At some point I donated it to my startup to serve as a datacenter recovery console complete with a 3G USB modem.
On a trip to SF, I saw an Asus Eee Pad at BestBuy (and Android tablet) and couldn’t resist the power of the Eee marquee. It didn’t serve as well or as long as an iPad would, but had a great life and is still alive 11 years later.
It also makes for a surprisingly adequate dev environment if you get used to switching between virtual desktops for extra screen space.
Using an iPad instead of one of these would have been a total non starter[1]. If I was back at uni nowadays I'd probably just get the smallest laptop I could find with half decent battery life - funnily enough the new M1/M2 macbooks are pretty appealing, but I would love something in an even smaller form factor if possible.
[1] proper hinged lid is much nicer than a keyboard case with a kickstand, I need to be able to compile code and run arbitrary executables.
few years old yes but still the only 7" non-Atom non-eMMC laptop. There's no other.
With a tiling window manager it became perfect for me. But I think most general computer users would be utterly alienated with that Linux experience. For the windows experience to also be shitty doubtlessly hurt the product line as well, but I don't think that shitty windows experience was displacing a polished linux experience. I think ASUS was basically between a rock and a hard place.
Yes, hit that problem.
Waiting for windows to boot on that thing is a real exercise in patience. The supplied Linux was OK but I'm pretty sure Debian boots on it without issue.
The real reason they became a toy was that people realised the keyboard is just too cramped for regular use. The 11" laptops that followed were a lot more sensible and not a lot more money.
and afaik others too, to flood the market with more "practical" options than the XO, so the XO wouldn't take off in other parts of the world
can't have computer classes without having microsoft computer classes, after all. Gotta get em' while they are young.
https://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-... https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
Good luck figuring out which Zenbook UX3XX compares to which, with every configuration under the moon available.
That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point.
Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase.
What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep.
I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I feel like people simply restart their computers less often than they did 15 years ago, so boot time isn’t the most compelling metric when selling machines these days.
Anytime Windows does big "reboot-required" updates, the fast boot thing doesn't apply anymore and it can take considerably longer due to the forced cold boot.
I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates).
My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help).
Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.
I am one of those few that dont like leaving my PC in sleep mode , but prefer a complete off state with full hibernation.
The times when I've tried to setup hibernation in Linux, it is clumsy (add swap file, config textfile mangling, etc) and theres always something that doesn't work when coming from hibernation.
I would even pay for some super fast/small non-volatile storage dedicated for Hibernation file. Maybe some internal small (64gb) hyperfast name raid0 setup.
This being 2022...
Unless you work for a large enterprise and your laptop is managed by IT. Not sure what goes on but getting from power on to the point where you can start using your laptop seems to take ages.
— John Rose, Pros and Cons of Suns (1987)
At the time they were fine for email and light web browsing.
Of course, as we know, such things bloat over time...