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Our friends over at Ostatic have posed a good question, one I’ve thought about in the past. They are looking at the feasibility of Android-based netbooks, something we’ve covered here, and give a good case for open source netbooks. The problem they point out is that such netbooks, often running some flavor of Linux, usually have lesser hardware components than Windows-based netbooks.
At this year's CES show, there was no shortage of netbooks, which have become a surprisingly strong challenge to the whole traditional notebook market. I remain surprised that more people in the open source community don't herald this trend as extremely positive for Linux, because Linux is making its way onto millions of netbooks and pre-loaded open source applications arrive with them.
Wading through the numerous netbooks available today can be challenging, so you might want to at least start with this list of the first three netbooks to consider. There are selected because they have all been fairly well received and, more importantly, all have some feature that distinguishes them from the crowd.
Vodafone has dismissed the preinstallation of Linux onto its netbooks, citing consumers' perception that netbooks are equivalent to laptops in their functionality.
Since people saw the big impact of Netbooks in the market, different Linux distributions came out that were customized for Netbooks. They were designed a little differently to optimize viewable area on small 10-inch screen sizes
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently gave a presentation in which he said that GNU/Linux has more market share and poses a greater threat to Microsoft's profitability than does Apple.
AT&T is putting its weight behind netbooks using ARM processors, calling them the "next big step." The carrier has also begun selling four different subsidized netbooks in Atlanta and Philadelphia, with plans to roll them out nationwide.
Recently, fellow Computerworld blogger, Preston Gralla wrote about a Lenovo analyst who felt that Windows 7 will dominate netbooks, and Linux will fade away. Of course, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols responded that Linux does have a future on netbooks