Netbook Buyers Have No Love For Linux?

Author: Rees | Date: October 4, 2008

The MSI Wind may be the dog's, the according the consumers, the bundled SUSE Linux certainly isn't

In an interesting interview with Laptop Magazine, MSI’s Director of U.S. Sales Andy Tung reveals some interesting little facts and figures about the company’s Wind Netbook. Perhaps most interesting for us Linux fans, however, is that the company has seen 4x the number of returns for its Linux version as it has for the XP-powered version. Straight from the horse’s mouth:

We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven’t really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.

As we can see, it’s pretty much entirely down to the users themselves. I imagine that it’s the usual story: They use Linux for 5 minutes, realise that it has no Start Menu and that they can’t play Solitaire on it, and end up taking it back for a refund. It probably also doesn’t help that the version of SUSE bundled with the Wind is notoriously buggy, with wireless networking flaky and the webcam not working at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of SuSE, but I’m also a huge fan of things that work properly. Perhaps they should’ve actually tested the distro’s hardware support on the platform before selling the system to the public, or at least hired some Linux device driver developers.

Of course, people wanting a polished Unix-based user experience could just install OS X on the thing, but I guess that’s not entirely legal…

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