OSNews

I don't know about your country, but here in Austria "ordinary" people mostly buy their computers from large retail chains and small local computer shops. Every now and then, this ventures feature a "really really cheap" computer, typically 50 - 100€ reduced if compared to the next more expensive offering (which would run some kind of MS Windows OS). Typically, these computers run Linux. And typically, shortly after these offerings are advertised, strange people who I don't even know start to call me and ask for help because their friend/neighbour/chess partner/cousin knows somebody who bought a similar (e.g. equipped with Linux) computer which was broken in a similar way than theirs.

Of course, a lot of people are pissed that "Operating System with MS Office compatible Office suite" turns out to be an ages old version of OpenSuSE with OpenOffice rather than something their kids can play some of their games on (although, truth to be told that if they have a PC gaming kid in the family, chances are that they don't buy the cheapest computer offerings). But a lot of people actually could use computers of this class for their work (the usual list of mail, IM, music, photo management and some video playback, aka "basic home computing") if the vendors and suppliers would have spend the minimum amount of work necessary to provide a good out of the box experience.

Most errors I'm called to fix nowadays result from either the company having some kind of "image" that they apply to all their computers, regardless of slight or not-so-slight variations in configuration or hardware (from the top of my head for the last two years or so: partition scheme does not match configuration files, wrong filesystem in the initrd, build-in webcam not supported by the shipped kernel although a more recent version would work, xorg.conf file for NVIDIA hardware while the computer had an ATI card - my personal favourite, etc.) or because they seem to have absolutly no idea how to do a proper end-user setup with an alternative operating system like a linux distro (again, from the top of my head: no adequat documentation at all, or the documentation prints paths in upper- or mixedcase while the system is all lowercase, refers to nautilus / konqueror as "explorer", outdated or unsupported repository configurations, "etc."). Others, like Dell, still have some miles to go in the department of customer support (at least from my experience, ymmv, of course) and should probably really think about updating their shipped distro.

A surprisingly high number of folks that call me stick with Linux on their computers after the most glaring problems have been fixed (although there certainly is a selection bias, because those who have had enough after their first exposure to "vendor-xy-super-duper-linux os" probably returned the box immediatly).

I had hopes that with the advent of netbooks (known, more or less Linux friendly hardware base, large number of identical machines, predefined useage patterns) it would be possible for dedicated vendors to avoid most of the common pitfalls. Unfortunately, it has turned out that the prospect of selling people a discount Windows XP license is more appealing to vendors like Asus, MSI or Acer than to get their act together (Linpus, I'm looking at you) or turn towards the larger, established distros.

If openPC could provide a source for openly specified desktops/laptops plus preconfigured software images matched to the respective hardware, then this would ease my "work" quite a bit, since I get about 10 - 20 requests for recommodations for such machines a year from people whose computing needs fall into the "basic" category mentioned above, who simply don't care which operating system their box runs and who rely on me being their tech support.

So yeah, depending on the quality of open-PC's offering, there is indeed a "market" for a dedicated open vendor with an targetted price/machine range of 300 - 400€.