The need for a special OS for netbooks was raised at the time of formation of this class of mobile PCs. The reason was the low productivity of the first members of this family – a series of ASUS Eee PC 701 – and practically impossible "fine-tuning Windows-systems under their capabilities. Initial netbooks, we recall, were equipped with solid state drives (SSD) with capacity of 2 or 4 GB and have been constructed on the basis of processor Intel Celeron-M 630 MHz with frequency (and later – 900 MHz). These limitations have forced vendors to look for a new software platform for their devices. Such was the Xandros Linux OS based on Debian, at first netbooks preinstalled in all of the company. In fact, it was a compact distribution with a minimum of pre-installed applications and a special envelope, which is optimized for small screen size (in Eee PC 701 – 7 '), which was designed to facilitate the user in an unfamiliar environment. In a similar way and went to another Taiwanese giant – Acer.

The first models of this vendor – Aspire One A110L with SSD 8GB – were equipped with pre-installed Linpus Linux Lite, based on the distribution Fedora. The interface was also aimed at ensuring comfortable working with a small screen resolution. Two other manufacturers of netbooks – MSI, and HP – have released versions of its OS-based devices on openSUSE, also belonging to the family of Linux. All of these "alternative" operating systems had one thing in common – at the start of volume shipments of the netbooks, they were very moist and did not provide some basic functions "of the box," ie, without requiring additional installation software modules and applications.