[kwlug-disc] things to look for in a netbook

[Charles M]

My experience with people who've brought their netbooks into the shop is
that many are trying to treat the netbook as a complete laptop replacement.
Someone sold them on the idea of a netbook, they went out and bought a Linux
netbook and then expected to connect scanner X, or find application X that
they have on a Windows system on the netbook. To this point the ones we've
had in the shop have had Xandros on them. Adding .deb repos doesn't work
wonderfully because quite a few apps seem to have issues with the netbook
(display issues, etc). It's not so much a Linux thing as an expectation
thing. You can imagine my smile when one client asked me if they could do
video editing on their 7" netbook (yes we probably could have loaded Kino
and it may have worked... but it's not really the purpose).

Maybe it's because I don't own a netbook, but I see it more closely aligned
with something like a Palm TX than a notebook. To me a netbook seems better
suited for Twitter than composing the next great novel... and any larger
than 10 inches you're starting to defeat the portability purpose of the
netbook.
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