[cousinlucky]

If the " Gateway " store at the Staten Island Mall had not closed down I probably would have bought one of their computers simply because I liked the positive attitude of their clerks. I do not know if Gateway computers are reliable machines or not. I have also never used an Acer product. However I am very curious about about Acer purchasing Gateway and what that might lead to; and so is a friend of mine. I suspect that Gateway made an error in opening up so many retail stores with just their computers and dealing with all of that overhead.

Do any LinuxForum members have Gateway or Acer products?

[ozar]

No, it's doubtful that I'd ever purchase either of them.

[cousinlucky]

Are their products that Bad, Ozar?

[ozar]

lol... rather than bad-mouth either of them, I'd rather just say that nothing about either of them appeals to me.

[MikeTbob]

I have never used either one, but I thought you might be interested in reading this link.
Acer shares tumble following Gateway bid - Breaking - Technology - smh.com.au
A quote

Wary investors on Tuesday snubbed plans by Taiwanese computer vendor Acer to boost its global presence through a friendly takeover of US-based Gateway, sending the company's stock tumbling 7.0 percent.

And further reading at the bottom:

Earlier China state media reported the bid by Lenovo to buy Packard Bell will probably fail due to the acquisition by Acer of Gateway, while the company said it was considering all options.

So this is a pretty significant business deal. I hear the feds are getting involved too but I can't find a working link at the moment.

[cousinlucky]

Thanks for the link, MikeTbob I printed one for my friend to read.

Ozar please send me a private message if you do not want to publically bad mouth these companies. I am really interested in your thoughts about them! Thanks!

[danbuter]

I have 2 Acer computers. My desktop has Vista, and works perfectly. My laptop has Ubuntu, and the CD drive doesn't work. It apparently is not Linux friendly. But other than that, no problems. I really like both of these computers. Of course, I had Compaqs before, so I guess anything is a step up :P.

[bidi]

We got my mom a Gateway a few years ago, simple because it was at a very decent price, and before that I had a Gateway desktop. I can gladly say that neither ever gave me any issues (unlike the Dell desktop I had before the Gateway). They were both very good computers, and did exactly what we wanted them to. The desktop had a variety of distros installed at any given time and always responded well.

Anyway, I have nothing bad to say about it! I've never owned an Acer though.

[rcgreen]

I bought an old acer K6 for about fifty dollars five years ago.
I still use it from time to time. I used to run redhat 7.2 on it
as a mail and DNS server in my home. Now it has solaris.

I bought a gateway PII at a church yard sale a couple of years back.
A little ram and a bigger hard drive, and I installed debian etch.

I really didn't know who acer was. I thought they were a small
player, but apparently not. The rising star is emachines, a lot
of value in a cheap box. I would guess that most linux fans
don't care about brand name, in fact sometimes proprietary
brands screw you with non-compatible hardware. Gimme a beige box,
I'll do the rest.

[techieMoe]

I've had problems with Acers and Gateways in the past. I see this merger much like I did Hewlett-Packard and Compaq: two poor quality companies merging into one humongous poor quality company.

In all fairness, though, I haven't played with or purchased either company's hardware in a long time. They may have improved.