NEWS / WINDOWS

Linux Too Bloated for $100 Laptop?

| by Aalaap Ghag | Windows

Venture capitalist and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the $100 laptop, thinks Linux is bloated and needs to slim down. He has “criticized the software industry, including those building Linux, for churning out bloatware that slows down even the fastest PCs.” He thinks Linux is not a viable option to choose when selecting an operating system for his $100 laptop to run on. He did have a valid point when he said that software is getting more and more bloated day by day with unnecessary features and additions that makes the latest version run slow on the latest hardware. That I agree with, but when he goes to say that Linux is as bloated as Windows, I beg to differ. It's true that most popular distributions like Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSe and Debian are full of all the software packages that the users will probably never use, but that's not because of Linux itself - it's the distribution developers who add that bloat. The core Linux kernel, when compiled, doesn't go beyond a few MB in size. The $100 laptop will not run a full featured desktop version like Fedora, but a customised, trimmed and slimmed down version of Linux which will be perfect for a device of that caliber. If Linux can be customized and made to work for cellphones and other portable devices, why would it not work for laptops, however underpowered they may be?

Tags: Linux

 


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