Reading Thoughtfix’ post titled EEE PC and Xandros: No Thank You on his own blog UltraMobilegeek, you can easily spot the double-faced approach of Asus’ EEEPC subnotebook.
Actually, there seem to be two distinct and antithetical approaches to the EEE PC interface and software: an out-of-the-box plain, self-contained everyday use, and a geek-oriented nerdish and hack-prone (ab)use of the machine.
The first is typically preferred by the majority of users, who see the EEEPC’s Xandros O.S. with AsusLauncher graphical interface (probably inherited from PDAs, see image on the left) and preinstalled software as sufficient for their needs, and probably appreciate the fast response and stable behaviour of the software as a whole. This large part of EEE PC’s users, will eventually search for, discover and make use of some ’smart tricks’ in order to hack into the system and expand it in some way, for example using some Terminal commands to unlock the full Xandros Desktop (thus bypassing the AsusLauncher interface) or tweaking the EEE PC icon interface and adding new repositories to download additional applications.
At the antipode are those smart users who prefer the hacking approach, usually starting with a radical change in the EEE PC’s system, for example installing another Linux distribution like eeeXubuntu or eeeDora, and in some cases installing an optimized version of Windows XP whose code has been ‘cleaned’ from the unnecessary stuff wih the use of great utilities like nLite, GameXP or XPLite.
So, as you can see, the Asus EEE PC manages to keep both unexperienced computer user AND smart PC users like techies, geeks, nerds or even hackers (-wannabees) and Linux gurus satisfied, offering them the best of both worlds according to everyone’s computing needs. EEE PC competitors will have to address this aspect too, of course, in order to reach the same level of popularity and success. Are they going to have what it takes to succeed against such a great machine in the same price tag?