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Dell will use Ubuntu
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 2nd May 2007
"Fawns, badgers, and bears, oh my!" - Dell will carry the menagerie that is Ubuntu.
And the winner is....Ubuntu. Officially.
According to Dell's "Ideas in Action" site, the world's largest PC manufacturer has chosen Ubuntu's latest 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" distribution. The option will officially be provided on "some consumer products," but rumours assume one of Dell's budget "Essential" line (also known as e-series) of desktops, an Inspiron-e laptop, and an XPS model desktop. The systems will begin to be sold at the end of May.
Ubuntu isn't that surprising of a choice, given that it did win Dell's distro survey conducted over the last couple months. Michael Dell has also recently acknowledged using the build on his home laptop instead of Windows, which is a pretty ringing endorsement to the average person. Users of the Ubuntu are also usually the first to admit that it has a striking similarity to Windows in several respects, allowing an easy learning curve.
Whether the Feisty Fawn build was actually assisted with by Dell to ensure compatibility remains to be seen. Also missing in the acknowledgment on Tuesday afternoon is pricing information, though guesses have been offered for a couple of the systems. Of course, these are entirely dependent on which systems Dell chooses out of its line-up.
Other flavours of Linux will still be for sale in the other business areas, including RedHat for Precision workstations and SUSE for servers. Ubuntu will only be used in the consumer sector of the company's product line. If you were Dell, which flavour of Linux would you have chosen? Is offering Linux the right move for Dell? Let us know your thoughts in our forums.
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Comments (16)
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It will be interesting, though I really fear neither Dell nor Linux nor Ubuntu will get a positive feedback out of this ...
*crosses fingers for Ubuntu* :)
br,
-btb-
The average Windows user will cope just fine with Ubuntu. After a week they would have forgotten Windows :)
That remains to be seen. Insofar this is an interesting experiment by Dell :)
1- Buy a Dell pc with Ubuntu installed
2- Have no idea what to do, post some useless post on the Ubuntu forums
3- Find out that their new game/software won't run (Yes I know wine rules, but its not easy enough for your average user)
4- Get seriously pissed of at Ubuntu, Dell, and Linux, and buy a copy of windows, and pay for it to be reinstalled. This will badly damage the reputation of linux among scared new users.
TBH, anyone who cannot install ubuntu on their own will never be able to use it.
Perhaps a 30 day Windows trial and an included Ubuntu Live and Install CD included in the bundle? That gives the consumer a chance to weigh their options at least.
I installed Ubuntu the other day - the simple linux. 2 days and much pain and misery later the graphics work!
Linux isn't the right move for dell - people who use linux really want to work for their computer to do stuff, people who buy dell really hope AOL and the internet comes pre-installed, in my personal experiance. You can't give people a system that isn't going to run the games they want, that isn't going to be able to run the program off your NTL disk to install the internet and isn't going to be fixable if it breaks.
edit: And I can honestly see no reason to use linux over windows except for cost - security is only a matter of not visiting dodgy sites (which people probalbly would tbh) and as for stability, my linux crashed all the time - not good at all. Back to windows now though, ah sweet bliss :)