Acer's first 'Pine Trail' netbook: details emerge

Money

Maybe because there's no consumer Linux? The world isn't free from patents and producing a consumer Linux would cost more then simply license a Windows version for them. Canonicals endeavors have failed and they aren't free for a bit. They license proprietary codecs and dvd-players, Dell also surrenders support too (Win OEM requires them to support the damn thing) to Canoncial. There's no gain in offering them without Windows not for the consumer and not for Acer. Extra cost of having more models would be taken from your wallet. Linux is a poor choice anyway if all they do is surf the web and use it for multimedia. Codecs are lacking, hardware acceleration aren't good outside homebrew codecs and adobe flash sucks even more then on windows. Windows is just fine then. So there's no incentive. Of course it would be fun if a OEM started to support a community distribution and contributed to them to make it work smoothly. But OEMs are just interested to sell hardware. Not systems and software. Intel is heavily invested in Moblin though, but that's MID/Netbook size devices.