The emerging market for budget netbook computers is seen as a big opportunity for Linux, which appeals to hardware manufacturers because of its lower licensing costs and better flexibility than Windows. It can also be tailored to work well with unusual form factors and limited specs. Although Linux seems like a perfect fit for these products, consumers have been slow to warm up to the platform and may not yet be ready to leave the world of Windows behind.

Nat Friedman—Novell's chief technology officer for Linux—recently told IDG that netbook devices will significantly boost Linux market share, but statistics recently disclosed by hardware vendor MSI and published by Laptop Magazine indicate that return rates for the company's Linux-based netbooks are roughly four times higher than the return rates for Windows devices. This could be alarming for Linux vendors, as it's an indicator that customers used to Windows aren't getting what they expected.

One of the reasons I find these high return rates so surprising is that the MSI Wind ships with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), which offers one of the best and most polished desktop Linux experiences around. SLED is in a totally different class from the funky Xandros remix that ships with the Eee. It's not a mediocre distribution that has to be hacked in order to be useful; it's a top-notch, consumer-oriented platform.

What's behind the returns?

We did some digging and found a number of issues playing into the high return rate. First and foremost are hardware compatibility problems and serious integration issues. For instance, some users are reporting that the drivers for the built-in webcam and WiFi hardware don't work properly on Wind Linux netbooks.

On the surface, this can be ascribed to a basic failure to perform adequate quality assurance testing, but it also reflects some of the challenges faced by OEMs without extensive experience tailoring the Linux platform to their products. MSI is not unique; as I encountered a few minor configuration issues with my new Ubuntu-based Dell Mini 9. For example, I ordered it with an 8GB drive, but the main partition is only 4GB, and the second half of the drive is empty, unpartitioned space. That seems like a pretty bad configuration failure.

But the issue goes beyond configuration issues. Many users complain about usability. There are a lot of misconceptions about Linux usability, and many critics fail to recognize the real source of the problems and limitations.

The standard desktop environments and the default applications for common tasks are all generally pretty good. People like to nitpick, but usually concede that these are usually just as easy to use as the equivalent software on other platforms, if not better. The real usability problems that new users experience with Linux mostly relate to hardware configuration and system management tasks that are on the periphery and aren't supported very well by mainstream distributions. Many of these issues are easy for experienced Linux users to work around or overlook, but can create a very bumpy ride for switchers.

The most serious of these real-world usability problems are the result of fundamental infrastructural weaknesses in core components of the desktop stack. One example of an area that is particularly painful on mobile devices is Xorg's traditionally poor support for display hotplugging. This problem is finally being addressed with XRandR, but there are still some kinks to be worked out before the problem is solved. There is real progress on this front, and the work is starting to pay off. Within the next year or so, getting external displays and projectors to work with Linux-based netbooks will become a lot easier. Right now, it's an impediment.

Software installation

Software installation is cited as another problem area, but this particular issue is widely misunderstood by critics. The package management systems in modern Linux distributions provide an impressively high level of usability for software installation. In many cases, it's as simple as launching an "Add Software" tool, selecting the desired program from a searchable list, and then clicking an Apply button. The program and all of its dependencies will be installed automatically.

It boils down to a discoverability issue—users don't realize that it even exists because the paradigm is so alien to them. When a completely new Linux user attempts to install a new piece of software, they usually go to the program's web site and get confused when they discover that the web site doesn't provide a universal point-and-click installer.

There are several ways in which the Linux community is working to solve this problem. The desktop distributions are all beginning to converge on PackageKit, a uniform wrapper layer for package management systems that could help abstract away a lot of the distribution-specific aspects of package management that are exposed to the end user. Providing a more consistent package management experience across distributions would really help simplify things and might make the concept easier for users to understand. Package management systems also need to be made more visible and easily accessible to end users.

This is something that Ubuntu does better than others. The one-click install feature in SUSE has the potential to be a great solution for this problem, too, but many users don't know to look for it, and many open source project web sites don't support it.

It doesn't do Windows

The biggest obstacle is the most glaring: Linux netbooks don't run Windows software. Although there aren't any numbers to back this up, I suspect that is one of the most significant factors leading to returns. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is any way for Linux distributions to solve this problem. Some readers will inevitably insist that I'm wrong and point to Wine as a viable solution, but it just doesn't work consistently enough with nontrivial applications outside of the core selection of apps that receive widespread testing. The only real solution in this case is for hardware makers to do a better job of educating consumers.

I contacted Friedman and asked him to share his perspective about the high return rates of MSI Wind computers. He isn't surprised and doesn't view the setbacks as evidence of failure. Instead, he contends that the minor problems are the inevitable symptoms of widespread mainstream adoption.

"I don't know what the exact return rate is, in either case, but the fact is that thousands of netbooks with Linux preloaded are shipping every month, and most of those to new Linux users," Friedman told Ars. "That there are some hiccups on what is essentially the first large-scale consumer rollout of Linux desktops to new Linux users is not a big surprise.

"In a lot of cases I think people don't understand that they are buying something different from what they're used to. They buy a tiny $400 netbook and expect the full functionality of a laptop or desktop. If they have Windows on the machine, it's more familiar. So maybe they're less likely to return in that case."

Although some of these early Linux-based netbooks are off to a rocky start, the quality of the products is increasing incrementally, and the latest models offer better platform integration and more reliability than their predecessors. Some vendors haven't encountered problems at all, and their Linux models aren't returned at a higher rate. Asus, for instance, recently told The Guardian's Jack Schofield that 40 percent of Eee units are shipped with Linux, and they don't have higher return rates for Linux-based products.

Opportunities for Linux in the mobile Internet device arena are huge and could redefine the platform's role in the consumer market. The problems faced by hardware makers that are currently attempting to sell Linux-based netbook devices show that it will not be easy for Linux to flourish in this crucial space, but some hard work by Linux vendors could help turn the opportunity into a victory.