With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, it’s time to revisit a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook? Linux-based systems may seem well-suited to lightweight devices (the original Asus Eee PC ran Xandros Linux), but there are advantages to the familiar interface and applications of Windows.

Indeed, if you buy a netbook today it will probably come with Windows 7 Starter, while older models are likely to be running Windows XP. Still, it’s easy to move from either to Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and of course it’s free. If you want to upgrade an older netbook to Windows 7 you’ll have to shell out £65 for the Home Premium edition, as Starter isn’t sold separately.

Each of these four operating systems has its attractions, but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware. To find the answer, I’ve spent the past few days installing them all – Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, with all available updates – on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and timing a series of typical netbook tasks to discover which OS makes the most of lightweight hardware.

Test 1: Starting up and suspending

Nobody wants to wait around for their netbook to start up, or to wake from sleep. Happily, suspend and resume worked perfectly on all four operating systems, so I was able to time how many seconds each took to sleep and resume from an idle desktop, along with boot times from cold.

As you can see, I tested Windows 7 Home Premium with both the Basic theme and the standard Aero theme. For this exercise it doesn’t make much difference, but I suspected it might on later tests.

Result: Windows 7 is slower to boot than XP or Ubuntu, and the Home Premium edition, with its full complement of services and features, is the slowest OS. However, most of the time we expect you’ll be resuming a netbook from sleep, and here it’s effectively a three-way tie, with XP only a few seconds slower than the rest.

Test 2: Opening applications

For this test I used the latest version of OpenOffice.Org on all platforms (with the “Quickstarter” disabled) and opened the applications by double-clicking on a .DOC file and a .XLS file that had been copied to the local desktop. I opened each file twice, to get a measure of how quickly the applications were able to launch both from cold and once cached.

Result: Windows XP was clearly the fastest OS at opening and reopening applications, while Windows 7 Home Premium did poorly, especially with Aero screen composition disabled. Interestingly, Windows 7 Starter scored a consistent second place, while Ubuntu failed to distinguish itself.

Test 3: Web performance

For this test I loaded a variety of JavaScript- and CSS-heavy web pages into the latest version of Google Chrome and used the browser’s built-in monitoring tool to time how long each one took to render.

Result: Given the timescales we’re dealing with (that Y axis is in seconds), this is essentially a draw, though enabling Aero seems to have a deleterious effect on Windows 7 Home Premium — strangely, the opposite to the effect observed in the applications test.

Test 4: Flash benchmark

To test Flash performance I used the free Flash Benchmark 2008 by Snails Animation, using the latest version of Flash available within Chrome. None of the platforms was able to get further than the medium-detail test. This graph measures frames per second, so taller bars are better.

Result: Aero seems to knock a few per cent off Flash performance, but it’s clearly Ubuntu that fares worst. Linux users have long grumbled about second-class Flash support, and these scores illustrate their point.

Test 5: Video performance

WMV and MPEG4 video files at resolutions up to 720p played perfectly well “out of the box” under all operating systems. However, none of the operating systems could cope with HD files from either YouTube or BBC iPlayer — in all cases the framerate dropped to only a few frames per second, making videos wholly unwatchable.

Result: Ubuntu’s poor Flash performance seems to drag it down in iPlayer: in windowed mode, video was slightly jerky, and in full screen mode it was too juddery to enjoy. The YouTube player seems to suit Ubuntu, though, while visiting the same site in Windows 7 caused videos to stutter too much for comfort.

Conclusion

There’s no reason not to give Ubuntu’s latest Netbook Edition a try — after all, it’s free, and it’ll run direct from a USB flash drive or coexist with your existing OS. The simple Unity interface is arguably better-suited to a basic netbook role than either the dated XP interface or the feature-rich Windows 7 front end.

For basic web and productivity tasks, Ubuntu’s performance appears no better than Windows, and for online video and games it’s distinctly worse. So while Ubuntu gains marks for openness and simplicity, there are still good reasons to hang on to Windows, at least until Adobe gets Flash up to speed.

If you’re currently running XP, though, it’s probably not worth paying for an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium: that OS isn’t designed for low-power devices, and it gave wayward performance in several of our tests. XP proved a stronger performer overall, and was the only OS to give a good experience across the iPlayer and YouTube tests. The interface is showing its age, but if that bothers you you can dual-boot Ubuntu and get the best of both worlds.

If, on the other hand, you’re shopping for a new netbook, Windows 7 Starter isn’t a bad deal. It’s not very customisable (for example, you can’t change the desktop wallpaper) and it doesn’t include any goodies such as Media Center or encryption tools; but its comparatively light weight lets it boot and open applications more quickly than Home Premium. Nor is Windows 7 as nippy as XP, but from an overall performance perspective the Starter edition’s as good as Ubuntu, and better with Flash content. By all means test-drive Ubuntu, but the truth is that no OS will magically turbo-charge your netbook.

The change of design also means Dell can use a prismatic lithium-ion battery that squeezes in six cells rather than the three cells of the ordinary battery – all without adding any bulk to the chassis. The end result should be nine-and-a-half hours of life rather than the four or so hours of the three-cell battery.

This isn’t quite the wondrous engineering feat it may seem, as some compromises have clearly been made in terms of the shape of the Dell Mini 10’s rear – and its size as a whole. To get a guide, take a look at the two photos below: the new Dell Mini 10 is on the left in each photo, and the old design on the right.

Not only is the new Mini 10 chunkier at its rear, it’s also a little wider.

But it’s not all bad news, because the new Mini 10 is a good deal more versatile than the old. You’ll be able to buy some options of the Mini 10 complete with a GPS chip and turn-by-turn satnav software (according to the Dell spokespeople, this will probably be CoPilot, but they couldn’t confirm this), or choose a TV tuner to turn it into much more of an entertainment machine.

In the latter case, it will also include a Broadcom Crystal HD chip. Despite the fact the new Dell Mini 10 is based on Intel’s Pine Trail platform, which includes improved graphics to help play back video along with the faster, Hyper-Threaded 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, Dell claims the Broadcom chip is needed to ensure smooth HD playback. In this case, HD means 720p: the entertainment bundle will include a 1,366 x 768 screen rather than the usual 1,024 x 600.

You might want to add the optional USB sound bar that clips onto the lid above the webcam. It certainly improves the sound compared to the tinny speakers included with the Dell Mini 10, but naturally they still lack any notable bass.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the trackpad – and I saw the shoulders of the Dell rep sag when I asked why it hadn’t used separate buttons. “It’s coming, it’s coming,” she said, “it’s not a drop-in replacement.” See our review of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10v to see exactly why she was so keen; clearly Dell has received a lot of negative feedback about the bizarre decision to integrate the mouse button keys into the trackpad.

Unofficially, it sounds like we’ll have to wait until spring-time before the new trackpad design appears, complete with separate mouse buttons, which is a real shame as otherwise it’s a very usable laptop: the keyboard is a pleasure to type on. And, so long as you don’t accidentally stray into the bottom left and bottom right of the trackpad, this is also pretty responsive.

You can already buy the new Dell Mini 10 for £249 inc VAT if you want Windows XP, and £279 for Windows 7 Starter (incidentally, the latter choice doesn’t appear to come with 2GB of RAM, despite the claims of Dell’s marketing).

While those prices are competitive, to stand out the Mini 10 will need the extra bundles, and those aren’t currently available on the website. In the meantime, we’ll be badgering Dell UK to send us the entertainment and/or satnav bundles to see how well they work in practice.

The most obvious is the tweaked design. Put the NB305 next to the NB200 – as we have done in the above photo – and you can see that the NB305 is a little more shapely, with a tapered front edge.

Toshiba has made a tiny change to the battery design too, with the slight bump found on the NB200’s battery casing smoothed over. Far more importantly, the NB305 should provide excellent battery life just like its predecessor: Toshiba claims 11 hours, and its claims usually prove true in our tests.

The NB305’s chassis is officially just 3mm wider than the NB200, but we’ll look to verify this when we get a model in for proper testing – if that figure does turn out to be correct, then it’s something of a miracle that Toshiba appears to have made the keys wider and easier to hit. And we already felt that the NB200’s isolated keyboard was the best of its type to be found on netbooks.

Toshiba has also added multitouch to the touchpad, and made it larger in the process. While multitouch implemented this way is unlikely to change your way of working – the main use for now is zooming in and out of documents by “pinching” – it’s still a useful feature that could come into its own as more apps add multitouch support.

One very, very minor irritation of the NB200 was the location of the SD card reader on the front of the machine – not the easiest place to access if a laptop is sitting on your lap on the train, say – so Toshiba has moved it to the left-hand side of the chassis here, along with the Ethernet, D-SUB and one of the three USB ports.

The other two sit on the right-hand side, along with the headphone and microphone jacks, the power input and indeed the Kensington lock – seen in action above.

But arguably the most interesting innovation is the extra software Toshiba has installed. This is the Bulletin Board, which Toshiba describes as a ramped-up version of the sticky notes you plaster on the fridge.

Then there’s Reeltime: what looks to be a simple way to find that document you were working on last week but you can’t quite remember where it was stored. Launch Reeltime and it shows this timeline view of documents: a screenshot of what they looked like (or the program’s icon if, as shown, the original document has been deleted) that you can easily scroll through horizontally.

But the final benefit of the NB305 over the NB200 is its speed. With a better graphics engine courtesy of Intel’s new Pine Trail chipset for netbooks, video will now be much smoother: the key figure above is 3.1 for Graphics, which compares to 2.1 for the NB200.

The rest of the specs are as standard for a newly released netbook: a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard disk, 1,024 x 768 10.1in screen, Window 7 Starter. It’s a fine combination for a netbook, and with Toshiba UK announcing that the NB305 will be available for sale from the end of January we look forward to getting a sample into our Labs for a full review very soon.

In the meantime, take a look at our first-look video guide to the Toshiba Mini NB305.

But recently the NPD group, a market research company based in the States, published a study that showed only 58% of consumers who “bought a netbook instead of a notebook” (my italics) were happy with their purchase. That compares to 70% of buyers being happy if they intended to buy netbooks from the start.

The study then went on to say that 60% of buyers “never even took their netbooks out of their house”, which kind of suggests they shouldn’t have bought netbooks in the first place.

Which is all very interesting, and to a certain extent predictable, but I’m yet to see any studies showing how businesses and educational establishments have taken to netbooks. We hear plenty of anecdotal evidence, much from netbook manufacturers, that says they’ve proved incredibly popular.

But is that just gloss being applied by people with a vested interest?

To me, netbooks have three key advantages:

1. They’re cheap
2. They’re light
3. They have (mostly) excellent battery life

But fully featured laptops still have some big advantages of their own:

1. They’re significantly faster
2. They have more features (most notably, the optical drive)
3. You can actually use them for hours at a time thanks to the larger keyboard and screen

What I’d really like to hear is some real-world experiences. If you’ve bought netbooks for your business, school or college, what’s the reaction been? Are you happy? Likewise, if you’ve bought a netbook for your own use, it would be great to hear what you think too.

The company has teamed up with Microsoft to create the rather prosaic It’s Better With Windows website.

“Windows helps you quickly and easily get online and connect to your devices and services – without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues,” the site proclaims. It then shows a series of videos, with Eee PC-wielding people going about their lives in blissful harmony.

For the vast majority of netbook tasks there is, of course, nothing better about Windows at all. Web browsing, email and basic word processing are just as easy with Asus’s Linux-based Eee PCs as they are with the Windows XP models.

The issues crop up when you start using netbooks more like full-blown laptops. One of the Microsoft/Asus videos show people uploading photos from their smartphone on to the Eee PC, and then editing them on the spot.

As Jack Schofield noted in yesterday’s Guardian this isn’t “a failure of Linux, it is the failure of the netbook idea”.

“You were supposed not to need a big hard drive and a powerful processor running Windows because all your applications would be on the net, and you’d access them via a browser,” Schofield writes. “But it seems most people preferred the system they already knew.”

Jack’s right. The ever-increasing spec (and price) of netbook hardware means there’s little discernible difference between a “netbook” and a low-budget laptop. The original concept of a £150 machine that does little more than web browsing has all but disappeared.

Windows hasn’t made netbooks “better”. It’s just made them laptops.

As is usual with Terribly Senior People, they were quite resistant to actually giving away any information that might be considered useful, but one thing came out loud and clear: initially Samsung did seriously consider a Linux netbook, but after speaking to retailers it won’t be dabbling with Linux any time soon.

I asked why, especially when Acer had such success with its Linux-based Aspire One. Over to Terribly Senior Person Patrick Povel, senior product manager of Samsung’s European computer operations: “When the mini-notebook launched it was 100% Linux-based and that was the reason why a certain community was very happy, but… the normal user is used to this XP thing and how to install a printer and so on.”

Did Samsung every consider Linux? “[Before we released our first netbook] we even started to develop in some Linux platforms, but once we had the product almost ready it turned out there was no demand from the customer.”

Just to be clear, in this context Samsung was talking about retailers like PC World being the customer, and the reason why they weren’t demanding Linux was very simple: the likes of Dixons were hit with return rates of something close to 40% when people found they couldn’t easily hook up their camera or install a printer onto their lovely, shiny new netbook.

But, as Mr Povel pointed out, if people on the street were demanding Linux-based netbooks “the retailers would be knocking on our door. [But] it’s a niche market and the big mass consumer doesn’t ask for Linux at the moment.”

Which brings me to the main question of this post: has Linux missed its chance of ever hitting the mainstream? I think it will struggle to ever break out of the enthusiast niche, and to a large extent because that niche is so comfortable.

If the prime target of your operating system is tech enthusiasts, you’ll tend not to go that final painful mile to make it a totally hassle-free experience. Even the most consumer-friendly Linux distribution of them all, Ubuntu, has occasional hiccups when trying to connect to external devices, and if you do hit problems your only support is via forums – fine for techies, not so great for the “big mass consumer” Samsung refers to.

So where does Linux go next? Is there anywhere else for it to go on the desktop? I can’t see it – if it was going to dominate anywhere, it would be cheap devices that had little expectation from buyers, but both retailers’ and consumers’ fingers have been burnt.

To a certain extent I guess that Red Hat’s chief exec feels the same, but he inevitably puts a more positive spin on it – that he really didn’t want to be there anyway. “The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiulous in this day and age,” he said. “I’d rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.”

He might be proved right, but wherever that puck ends up the end-user experience needs to be a pleasant one not just for the buyer of the product (and I’m not going to argue with anyone who suggests that Ubuntu has largely done this), but for the manufacturer and the retailer. And unfortunately both are too often forgotten when extolling the undoubted virtues of Linux.

MSI
On the MSI stand, the Wind U100 series has blossomed into the U110, U115 and U123 series. The U110 Eco promises to bring the Wind’s Achilles Heel – its battery life – up to snuff, with a claimed 12 hours on the standard battery. MSI says this is possible with the use of the new Intel Menlow mobile platform, originally intended for Intel’s pet MID (mobile internet device) product category but now half-inched for netbooks.

The U115 is, MSI claims, the first hybrid netbook with both SSD and hard disk storage, but aside from that looks the same as the U110, and both share the same styling as the original Wind U100:

The Wind U123 is slightly higher-end, with a posher, more angular look and aimed at business users, and it brings an integrated 3G broadband adapter to the Wind range:

Gigabyte
Over on the Gigabyte display, the big news is the Thin Note M1024, and it certainly is thin:

A 10in screen and Atom N270 processor put it squarely in the netbook camp, but the MSI reps on the stand are pitching the price around the $600 mark, which may well put it over £400 when it hits the UK in a few months. The M1024 weighs just 890g with a six-cell battery, but the pedestrian black-and-grey design doesn’t do it too many favours in our eyes.

Asus
On the huge Asus stand, Eee PCs are out in force, although there are fewer new netbook models than we’d expected. On its very own stand is the new convertible-tablet model, the Eee PC T91:

Nearby was the svelte range of S models, with the S101 we’ve already seen along with new S101H high-capacity version. There are also some updates to the 1000H in the form of the 1002HA, with 120GB hard-disk storage and 10GB SSD (which somewhat contradicts MSI’s claims to have the world’s first hybrid), as well as the 1008HA, which adds an Atom N280 processor:

The first hint of the abandonment of Windows XP as the default OS for netbooks can also be seen on the stand. One of the S101s I saw is running Windows 7, and there were little cards scattered about the Eee stand proclaiming Windows 7’s brilliance. This no doubt makes Microsoft very happy.

All of these models should be on the streets of the UK in between one and three months’ time, and obviously we’ll be reviewing them in full just as soon as we can get them into our labs.

This week, for example, I was talking to Thomas Teckentrup, the general manager of Toshiba Europe Computer Systems, and his take on netbooks was decidedly downbeat: “We have to find out the usage of these products”, he said, explaining his company’s late arrival into the market and the fact it hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene – the Satellite NB100 is only available with one specification, and there are no options. “We [still] have to see for ourselves how consumers are going to leverage the features of a netbook,” he later added.

And to be fair, this is a view very much shared by Dell. When I interviewed Michael Dell himself in late September, he was virtually dismissive. “Certainly we have already entered a product there [the netbooks sector], and there will be additional products coming, and it will be what it will be. [But] I don’t think it’s going be the massive factor in the growth of the industry.”

Contrast that with Acer. At this year’s Global Press Conference in Budapest, the CEO and president of Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, spoke for a good five minutes about the netbook, and made it clear the Aspire One was just the start of its aspirations.

“Internet is becoming part of our life, but people need it to be mobile,” Lanci said. “People in most cases prefer a full internet experience [when on the move] to a limited internet experience on a mobile device. On a netbook you can have a full experience.”

Then you’ve got Asus being similarly bullish. Indeed, an IDC press release that just fell into my inbox declares: “Asus stepped further up [the notebook vendor rankings] to 4th place shipping over 2 million units this quarter, leveraging from the unabated success of the Eee PC product range.”

Of the rest, HP has been decidedly half-hearted with its one netbook offering, the Mini-Note, Sony has actively dismissed netbooks as a “race to the bottom”, although indications are that it will release a netbook some time soon, while the ever-aggressive Samsung has produced one of the sexiest netbooks we’ve seen in the form of the NC10.

It’s obvious that this is a sector that’s having a huge effect on vendors’ sales figures. Here’s a not very beautiful table, courtesy again of IDC, that shows the number of PC shipments (both desktop and notebook) in 1,000s of units in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, in which it compares the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008:

Toshiba has good reason to be cheerful as it beat the market’s growth, but both HP and Dell who either entered the netbook market late or half-heartedly, have less reason to shout. On the other hand, the two companies that really excelled – Acer and Asus – are the ones that embraced netbooks wholeheartedly. Even if you remove the boost Acer received due to its acquisition of Packard Bell and Gateway, its sales are still up 63.5%.

Sales, of course, aren’t everything. We hear reports about a high volume of Linux-based netbooks being returned because consumers who bought them on a whim then find the OS too difficult to use, and it’s impossible to know for sure just how much profit Acer and Asus are actually making from each netbook sale. Or even if they’re making a loss.

Nevertheless, it’s obvious that netbooks are here to stay, and the big vendors who’ve traditionally made their money through more expensive notebooks will have to embrace the new form factor if they’re going to make any impression on the market.

And in the end, they’ve nothing to lose. All the signs are that consumers are buying netbooks as a secondary PC in the west, so it’s an additional not a replacement purchase. They also open up the traditionally closed market of education. There’s the opportunity for shared revenue when the netbooks are sold with a 3G contract. And finally, there are promising signs for netbooks in the developing worlds too.

The end result? By this time next year, I’m 93% certain all the major vendors will have some serious netbook offerings, not just their current token efforts, and they’ll all be casting accusing looks in the boardroom as to why they allowed Acer and Asus to pull out such a big lead.