Acer selling a Linux Laptop

I just head that Acer is starting sales on a Linux laptop. This is awesome news.

As far as I can tell they’re only selling it in Thailand so far. You can check out the specs for yourself at the Acer Aspire 3000 webpage. Down at the bottom - second from the end - you can see where it says ‘Linpus Linux BE.’ Linpus is not a GPL distro - it’s in the real of Xandros, Linspire, etc. Still, it appears to be a decent OS for new users doing email, movies, office stuff and other basic productivity things. All of the non-GPL, entry-level Linux distros are going to be short on configurability, but that’s to be expected.

This is a great step forward for those of us who want to see Linux become a standard OS for regular users. It’s finally become good enough that Acer expects people to want to save a few bucks and go with a non-free Linux. Maybe the next step is they’ll realize that Mandriva is even more user-friendly and they’ll go with an entirely free distro. I sure hope it doesn’t take long.

Even though this laptop is not running my ideal (at the moment) Linux distro, at least it’s cheap. Even if I bought it with Windows on it I’d just reformat it - so I’d be happy with a cheaper license no matter what software it has.