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hell, most will ask a geek friend or relative to run the recovery media that came with the machine. or even pay the company that made it or someone that work where they got it to do the same.

these locked down mini-laptops are in a way exactly the same as the original iphone. a friendly set of icons on the front, ready to be used.

want somewhere safe to store your work files? get a memory card to stick and put it in there, end of story.

its kinda like one have come full circle with the memory cards acting as the floppy and the mini-laptop taking over for the C64...

but then i have long been voicing the opinion that many would be more happy typewriter with a net connection then a full blown computer. the modern computer just have to many hidden tasks and complexity. and that its connected to a whole world of other, equally complex machines dont help.

This is exactly why I believe sales figures really never tell the story of how many users are using any platform. There's a couple reasons I can think of that people would buy the Linux version:
* For Linux, obviously
* You can sometimes get more bang for the buck buying the Linux models, case in point being the EEE PC 901. The XP version comes with a total of 12gb of SSD, the Linux version is 20gb total. That's 8 more gb for the same price. Many people will simply see that and won't look at the operating system it's running because honestly, consumers for the most part don't care. And, as long as the provided Linux does everything they need, they probably won't feel the need to change it. A lot of people are looking at these not as computers, but as appliances like their cel phones. If you ask an ordinary consumer what operating system their cel phone's running, they wouldn't be able to tell you. I think in a lot of cases the same is beginning to apply to these netbooks.
Still, there's no way of knowing how many users install Windows on their netbook, or pay someone to do it. I think that the netbook market may be one area where Linux may eventually gain a hold, but it won't be desktop linux that gets it, and that's an important distinction. The consumer who's seeing Linux is not seeing SuSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora, even if Linpus (yick, what a name) is based on Fedora. The end users see the desktop, and it's not Fedora's desktop. It's not even Linpus's desktop. It's a manufacturer-customized interface, with each netbook being different. This, in my mind, contributes to the appliance feel for most people rather than the computer feel.
So, is Linux gaining a foothold here? Possibly. But due to the nature of these pre-installed distros, don't expect Desktop usage to skyrocket, even if every netbook bought with Linux keeps running it. These custom distros are optimized to fit the hardware exactly, and to make using the netbook easier. Simple as that. The experience they have with Linux on a netbook is not going to be what they get on the desktop. The same kind of users who need to install XP are the same kind of users who need to install a standard Linux distro--they either have specific needs, or just want a standard environment.

Even if a large group of netbook owners have installed Windows on their device, how many actually paid for a new copy of XP rather than just installing one they already had? So Microsoft would not be getting paid for another license but the Linux distro of choice for that device would be. This is the same effect as buying a computer with Windows installed then wiping it out for Linux but never trying to get your money back for your Windows license. I would also like to point out you can find tons of information on and people asking questions about getting Linux installed on their computers that once had windows. Apparently this only adds up to about 4% of the users, maybe it's the same figure for netbooks.

Ultimately just like in the PC world most systems sold with Windows stay with Windows installed. I'm sure most Linux netbooks sold will always have Linux installed.

thats because people are getting them cheap and installing windows xp on them.. borf.

i didn't want vista so i bought a crapbuntu dell... used it for a while, realized drivers were an afterthought when my sound stopped working and nobody could fix it..... installed xp and it's all good.