I’m not quite sure who you blame for the current dearth of Linux-based netbooks in Australia but I’m pretty certain about one thing – the wheels have just about fallen off the Linux netbook bus. And what’s more, I don’t think you’re going to get them back on again either.

Since late 2007 when the first Eee PC arrived onto the Australian market, there has been steady pressure applied to get Windows XP Home Edition on all subsequent models. As of today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any netbook sold with a Linux distro on-board.

The question here is who’s at fault?

Is it Microsoft for pushing vendors to take cheap Windows XP licenses? Certainly Microsoft has made it clear in the past that it thinks Linux is somewhat of a Microsoft bastard-child, containing some Microsoft code. Of course, Microsoft hasn’t been forth-coming about what it is inside Linux it thinks it has intellectual rights over so what that code is is anyone’s guess.

Is it the fault of the netbook vendors? Have they been suckered into slapping on Windows XP? Certainly Asus seemed happy early on with its version of Xandros, going so far as to create its own frond-end user interface. But even it seems to have danced to the beat of Microsoft for most of 2008.

But is it ultimately the fault of consumers themselves? Have consumers in general been too wary of Linux and simply gone for the models with Windows XP, an OS they’re more familiar with?

Whoever is at fault, it’s going to be virtually impossible to prise vendors away from their Windows XP Home Edition cloning tools and back towards Linux.

Certainly, Linux had an opening to get into the mainstream when netbooks first arrived. They were seen as a new class of computer that didn’t necessarily have to be tied with Windows. But now that just about every man+dog is selling a Windows XP Home Edition netbook, you’ve got somewhere between “Buckley’s and none” of getting the average consumer to consider Linux.

However, what’s worse is the fact that you cannot buy a netbook it seems without having to pay for the Microsoft Windows XP license. One commenter on this website said he tried to purchase a big-brand netbook without the Windows XP OS and was told sorry, the vendor cannot ship netbooks without the OS installed and that OS had to be a Microsoft OS to satisfy licensing demands.

That’s among the more bizarre responses I’ve heard of but it seriously makes you wonder just how Linux is ever going to succeed in a market when you’ve got this sort of thing going on.

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