As popular as they have been in the past, I still have some mixed feelings when it comes to the PR health of really low cost Linux PCs. On one hand, they are fantastic as they allow people access to modern computing that may have otherwise been prevented from switching from an older system or finding access to one, for that matter.
But the fact remains that selling so many of these low-end machines may not be good for the cause.
Full story »Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
jastiv
4 years 50 weeks 4 days 8 hours ago
I think it would be hard to justify
I think it would be hard to justify a high end pc for GNU/Linux. Most of the consumer machines that are high end were bought for 3D gaming, something GNU/Linux lacks in, partly due to the whole 3d card driver issue, the only one that is %100 free software right now is the intel integrated graphics card, probably not something a gamer would be after.
GNU/Linux makes sense for low end, email/web browsing/office machines, and mid range pcs (like the low end but with slightly better hardware.) GNU/Linux also makes sense for workstation machines(unfortunatly most likely running proprietary speacialized applications on top of an enterprise distro such as Red Hat), but thosse arn't something a consumer is likely to purchase.
If GNU/Linux wants to take the high end of the market, it needs to have applications that use alot of computing power, but also that a lot of people want, else that extra computing power is just wasted. Things like music editing or video editing might work.