Brit Linux distro CrunchBang calls it quits

Still Around Till Now?

It's surprising that he kept it going as long as he did. It was a pretty specialized distro, and once true netbooks were dead there wasn't a lot of point to it anymore. Originally it was meant to provide an out of the box solution for running on very limited resources. Even the cheapest laptop today though has more than enough RAM and disk space for a mainstream distro.

The original netbooks had very small solid state drives, and very small screens. The default applications had to be picked to fit in that space, and the various menus and configuration screens had to be sized so they would fit small screens without running off the bottom. That's why netbook distros were different from regular desktop/laptop versions.

What were later called "netbooks" had little resemblance to the originals. The former were just small, cheap, laptops. Windows wouldn't fit on the original netbooks. However, Microsoft panicked and offered deep discounts for manufacturers who would sell something that was enough bigger than a real netbook so that it could run Windows XP. The manufacturers at that point had given up on the netbook market, but were happy to be able to sell cheaper laptops.

What actually killed true netbooks was the manufacturers misread the market. They weren't supposed to be laptops. They were supposed to be media consumption appliances. The Apple fanboys were moaning that Apple wouldn't put out a netbook to compete in the market. However, Apple said that netbooks weren't what people really wanted, and hinted that they were working else. They eventually came out with the iPad, which in fact turned out to be what the market really did want. The Linux OS market for tablets of course was then filled by Android.

The reason the original netbook manufacturers failed was because they just wanted to whack an off the shelf bit of software onto some hardware that they manufactured and then push it into the sales channel and forget it. That works fine when selling into an existing commodity market. It doesn't work when trying to develop new markets.

This is the key to Apple's success. They develop the software and hardware together, and so don't face a chicken and egg problem. There's nobody else out there doing the same thing. Samsung are trying to learn how to do this, but they've still got a lot of things they need to learn in the software field. Microsoft has been trying to learn how to do complete product design, but quite frankly they're still just "me too" efforts years after everyone else has established the market.