Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Mar 2007 23:01 UTC, submitted by shykid
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:
2006-06-21
Agreed, just some small objections. First, in some countries there's a law saying you can't offer fully built PC's without the OS. So Dell would have to slap something in there anyway. Sure, they can use FreeDOS, but it would be a nice touch to actually put Linux on them, if they're going for the Linux compatibility and all. They can ask Ubuntu/SuSE/Mandriva to prepare disk images, offer them as a choice, and just paste them on top of the HDD, without support. I bet Ubuntu/SuSE/Mandriva would like the opportunity. Red Hat might too, if Fedora wasn't an already established "test distro", and their main effort directed to the server market.
Second, make no mistake, this is not about Linux. It's about Dell's profits. Which are slipping, and you can search the Roughly Drafted articles for figures that put it behind HP and Apple. And don't think Microsoft is taking this lightly. Dell must be pretty desperate to try to cash in on the Linux crowd. For their sake I hope they get the 100% compatibility right and refrain from bundling any crapware, otherwise they'll lose whatever small favor they build up and lose the Linux crowd forever.