Why I Love Asus

The Eee PC is an awesome little laptop, very capable and very portable. On top of that, it's got enough fans to generate its own version of Ubuntu.

That's fine for being mobile, but not so great for home. I've been wishing for years for a nice (sufficient resources to do real desktop computing) small (book-size) low-power (= less noisy) and inexpensive ($300) desktop computer.

It seems that Asus has been working on it: the rumor mills are reporing about Asus' newest non-mobile computer (for example, ASUS Eee Box B202 Details Emerge).

The details are appealing: the base system (1Gb RAM, 80Gb disk) for $270 with Linux;
for another $30 you get XP--or Linux, but with 2Gb RAM, 160Gb disk.

If anything will herald the Year of Desktop Linux, this is it. Because for the past decade, we've been reading articles about how to re-purpose your old, obsolete hardware with Linux, or like this one: Build a $150 Linux PC, from Wired. The problem with old and cheap hardware is that it's old, and cheap. You can have Linux, but you won't have wireless, you will have iffy power supplies, noisy (and old and small) hard drives, and big big big boxes.

These new PCs should do very well. I wonder whether they'll be successful enough to prompt Apple to roll out a Linux version of iTunes, finally.