The good and bad of Asus EEE

Like many other nerds, my wife got an Asus EEE for Christmas. (ok she isn't a nerd but her husband is). (Ok, maybe she is a nerd since I've been forcing her to using Linux for so long that she doesn't mind too much anymore).

The machine is solidly constructed and it just works. Everyone comments on how they first thought it was just a toy. It even came in handy over the holidays as a Balderdash game (we didn't have the actual game but there was an online version played on a mailing list that we used. We just passed the machine around, instead of the cards)

What to say about the keyboard? My daughter in kindergarten loves it. (She also loves playing frozen bubble, tux racer, tux paint and composing notes to her friends in OOo). My sister in law was able to type 70 WPM at 97% accuracy in the first two minutes of using it. (I wouldn't say she has small hands, but she normally goes 90 WPM).

Screen size? A 10 inch screen would be fine, but for an ultraportable machine, I'm not complaining. Plus there's vga out if you are using it for long periods of time.

My biggest gripe? Actually it's the operating system. No, I don't mind Linux. The simplified interface is fine. And everything just works, wireless, suspend, etc. Ok, it's not really the operating system per se, but the repositories behind it. Basically there are none, and because you are running a fork of a fork (Xandros is a fork of Debian, and the EEE distro is a fork of that), compatibility is a crapshot. And because it's not my machine (again this is my wives), I'm not going to go off installing stuff on it. My wife actually likes the gimp! And the EEE repos don't have this very common package...

It'd also be nice to have a more recent version of OOo (it's at 2.3.2 and EEE has 2.0??!!). I'd like to maybe put some of the dumb games I've done, or some of my brother's cooler ones on it, but that would probably breaking something.... It actually comes with python 2.4 and 2.5, so pure python is ok for development, but if you want to wrap anything that isn't included (or need wrappers) you are up a creek.

I'm sad that Ubuntu didn't jump on this. They've got the repositories and the community. And this would be great marketing to others. You could say, "hey, you can run this OS on your normal machine too". I realize there is eeebuntu, but I'm talking about out of the box, not having to worry about installing anything. I think ASUS and Canonical would both be a bit better off with their great products if they had partnered on this disruptive tech.

tags: ubuntu  asus  eee  

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