Bonum Certa Men Certa

MSI Considers Dumping Novell's Ballnux in Favour of a Real GNU/Linux Distribution

New model, better distribution?

There is far too much coverage of uninteresting news details from MSI. Just like H-P, which foolishly chose the Microsoft-taxed SLED for its low-end notebooks, it experiences some issues.



Henry Kingman is not so easily deceived by articles that wrongly attribute the issue to some thing called "Linux". Well, Ballnux is not GNU/Linux and there are varieties of Free software distributions, many of which are specially-tailored for sub-notebooks. Here is what he writes.

[T]he quote may say more about MSI's SUSE Linux implementation than the suitability of Linux as a netbook OS.


here is the specific quote which indicates they explore distributions other than Novell's SUSE.

We plan to bring the Linux version to the U.S by the end of the year. But we are working on some of the issues with the SUSE Linux and even continue to explore other flavors of Linux. We have discussed Ubuntu with a Mac OS type of look and feel. We are talking to different suppliers to figure out the best user experience.


Choosing SUSE was not the right strategy. We wrote about this a year ago. Novell sure has a marketing department and staff that presents GNU/Linux as an attractive product, but this is not required for a derivative distribution that can be maintained in-house and developed independently from Microsoft-imposed costs and patent/practical poison like Mono.

MSI's future with GNU/Linux will be much brighter once it departs from the 'Microsoft-approved' distribution of "Linux". Other OEMs are existing proof of this.

Microsoft Linux



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