Moblin Linux is making some waves at Computex. Yesterday we learned that Xandros and Canonical were working on custom Linux distributions for netbooks based on Moblin. Today, Novell is showing off demos of its upcoming version of SUSE Linux for netbooks based on Moblin.
The netbooks Novell chose for its demo are the Acer Aspire One and MSI Wind. But while I suspect the Wind might eventually come with a Moblin-based version of SUSE (earlier MSI netbooks have shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), it’s likely that Acer will choose a different Moblin-based operating system. The company has been shipping its Linux netbooks with Linpus Linux Lite since it first launched the Acer Aspire One in mid-2008. I suspect any future Linux powered Aspire Ones will run the latest version of Linpus… which is also based on Moblin.
Sometimes Moblin seems to have a certain iphone look, big squarish icons with pretty pictures that fill up the screen in small numbers. If one of the purposes of Moblin is to make netbooks more like phones, by limiting their capabilities, then this may not be a good thing. Of course this depends on which capabilities and how they’re limited.
I would rather see phones be more like computers than vice versa.