Windows 7 Vs. Linux: The Battle For Your Desktop

"To be scrupulously precise, though, the best definition of a netbook edition of any OS would mean something that's not only been tuned to run well on minimal hardware, but also has its interface and visual styles set up to support a smaller display (and perhaps also a smaller keyboard and less accurate pointing device).

"As of Beta 1, Windows 7 doesn't really have an out-of-the-box theme for a smaller display -- if anything, most of the effort in recent releases of Windows has been on making larger displays more useful. Desktop gadgets also do not appear to be freely resizable, which makes them somewhat less useful on a smaller display. But there's nothing to say that a netbook-friendly theme won't be available with Windows 7 eventually, and it's not all that difficult to create one from scratch.

"Linux, on the other hand, has both entire distributions and desktop environments designed for modest hardware including lower-resolution displays. Work in this field is ongoing, such as this post which instructs how to make Android run on an Asus Eee netbook -- since, as it turns out, the way Android handles displays is a pretty good match for the smaller display habitually found on netbooks.

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