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Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

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Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#191
post #55

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…

As a student the 701 was great. It fit in my (large) coat pocket, supported up to 2gb of ram, ran Xubuntu fine, was sturdier than my main laptop, had amazing battery life, and a real keyboard. It fit in that annoying niche between my tiny consumption-oriented phone and big work-oriented laptop, when I needed a full Linux environment for something but didn't mind if the command took a little while longer to type or ru…

Yeah, soldered parts; but most manufacturers sell a windows pc with emmc storage that is pretty cheap. I have an older HP version with 2GB of Ram and 16GB eeMC storage. It fits in the tablet pocket of my backpack, is super light, long battery life, and runs opensuse like a champ, even with KDE. EDIT: emmc, not eemc.

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#192

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…

> I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started…

modern netbook: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-11-6-laptop-intel-celeron-...

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#193
Still using one as a daily driver to write code and read articles on. (1gb ram, 1.6ghz, Win 7)

It's painfully slow at browsing some websites, but runs VSCode and all of the dev tools just fine. There's some weird pleasure in knowing that if your stuff runs on that, it will run anywhere.

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#194
post #68

The eee PC was also the original netbook used for the "booting Linux in five seconds" presentation at the first Linux Plumbers Conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point . Today, you can re…

> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase. What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep…

Fast boot is usually a setting that you can enable in your BIOS.

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#195
post #68

The eee PC was also the original netbook used for the "booting Linux in five seconds" presentation at the first Linux Plumbers Conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point . Today, you can re…

> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase. What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep…

if you boot linux directly from efi (no bootloader), remove plymouth, and tweak your cmdline and mkinitcpio a bit, you'll shave a massive bulk off a mainline distro's boot time. boot to a lighter-weight login manager (or just getty) to save the rest. i bet you could get sub-second cold-boot time on that desktop, not counting the firmware stage.

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#197
I loved my Eee PC from Asus and had a dark blue one (which was the better model). It was back in 2008/09 when I was bagpacking in central and southamerica. It was great to use it at the hostels instead of waiting for getting a free spot on these public PC. People back then either went to cybercaffe/internet caffee or waiting to use the few slow PC at the hostel and had to pay for it.

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#198

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…

> The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size.

Lenovo S10 could run Hackintosh

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#199

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…

As for why manufacturers don’t make netbooks… it’s a fair point if you’re only looking at the major PC makers I guess, but overall they actually do! Think GPD Pocket series, One Mix series, (soon) MNT Pocket Reform. It’s a niche, but the hardware exists!

GPD MicroPC even has a serial port, but nowadays something like a Seeed reTerminal with E10-1 is probably a better buy

Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was about to say this. The netbook (and in extension UMPC) niche never really died. It was a niche a decade ago and it's still a niche today. One thing I will say is that, these tiny devices never fail to seem magical to the general public. I own (and from time to time use) a OneMix 2S Yoga, and even in this day and age with our smartphones and thin-and-light laptops, every time I pop it out on a bus or plane or at a…

It never died, but the durability and modularity of the EEE PCs has no analogue today.

Yeah and the prices/performance compared to smaller laptops doesn't make it a good buy today

edit: there is modularity in some, GPD Pocket 3 can be expanded with a serial port or "HDMI in +usb-c" modules. The trouble is, that is quite expensive for what is a bit luxurious netbook

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