Dell began polling customers about their software preferences on Tuesday as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows. Dell posted the survey on a company blog, asking PC users to choose between Linux flavors such as Fedora and Ubuntu, and to pick more general choices such as notebooks versus desktops, high-end models versus value models and telephone-based support versus community-based support.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Hey. Here's a clue.
No need to be so aggressive, man.
Start making FreeBSD usable by regular people on the desktop.
They've started, and they're not too far behind Linux. They're on par with OpenSolaris x86 in desktop usability.
Spend about 15 years doing the PR and marketing work.
They've been around for 15 years. Linux owes a lot of its market exposure to Red Hat. When Red Hat first came around, FreeBSD was arguably better than Debian or Slackware.
And get a journaling filesystem while you're at it.
Did some idiot hijack your account? UFS2 has soft updates, an alternative to journaling that orders and delays metadata writes such that the filesystem always remains consistent. The advantage of this approach is that the filesystem can be mounted immediately after a crash and purged of orphaned data blocks by a garbage collector during idle times. The disadvantage is that it's a more sophisticated and difficult design than journaling. This is the main reason why filesystem research has largely abandoned soft updates in favor of copy-on-write (COW) designs such as ZFS, which is now functional on FreeBSD and slated for the 7.x release series.
So the question is, why doesn't Linux go get a COW filesystem? Well, they're working on it, but it will take a few years.
FreeBSD and OpenSolaris are both very viable base operating systems for the free software desktop. Sure, Linux has more momentum, and it's the most successful distributed development community the world has ever known, but it's too early to count them out. They're all really good, and I'd love to see all of them distributed by the various OEMs. That would be outstanding for the competitive landscape of the free software desktop, ensuring rapid advances in the quality and capability of its foundations.
Edited 2007-03-14 03:24
Member since:2006-07-01
'They've started, and they're not too far behind Linux. They're on par with OpenSolaris x86 in desktop usability.'
-- the distance between BSD and Linux is about as wide as the distance between Linux and Windows. No offence to you and your choice of OS, but until normal people start talking about BSD you won't see it on any dell.
And not just technical differences. I'm a windows user, but I'm aware of Linux and BSD and as far as I'm can see from screenshots they look the same. Why would I care if dell offers bsd or not? Don't mention technical reasons... the normal user couldn't give a sh!t if the code behind BSD is more elegantly written and more efficient or whatever other reason you have for using BSD.
You can hope for it, but don't hold your breath
Member since:2006-11-27
Member since:2005-08-07
Member since:2006-07-01
Member since:
2005-07-24
"""
Personally I'm not interested in Linux and would instead love to see a FreeBSD desktop variant as an option besides 'other'.
"""
Hey. Here's a clue. Start making FreeBSD usable by regular people on the desktop. Spend about 15 years doing the PR and marketing work.
And get a journaling filesystem while you're at it.
FreeBSD is not an option because the FreeBSD community has not done what it takes for FreeBSD to become an option.
Do that and I'd give you my vote in an instant.
There is far more to success in this market than just technical concerns.
Edited 2007-03-14 01:03