A website and blog by Peter Lewis
PostsDell and Ubuntu
I wrote a few months ago about my difficulty trying to obtain a decent laptop without Microsoft Windows bundled in with it. After all, it seems ridiculous to have to pay for something that costs as much as £250 in the shops, when I'm never going to use it, right? Samsung (from whom I eventually bought the machine) reacted quite strangely when I asked them about the possibility of getting one without an operating system bundled in. In the end, I just swallowed the bitter pill and bought one anyway. I payed my Microsoft tax, and then wiped the software as I was required to do by the licence agreement (given that I didn't agree with its terms). It's not nice to have nothing to show for your money.
A few months later, and the idea of computers being sold bundled with GNU/Linux seems to be taking off a little. Dell announced a while back that they would be offering their computers with Ubuntu, the sister of my distribution of choice, Kubuntu. Despite the fact that currently the offer is only available in the United States, this is real progress.
Thanks to Bryce Harrington, a few photos of one the new Ubuntu-bundled Dell laptops is available here. I imagine many people will be keeping an eye out to see how this develops.
In the meantime, Dell have a website called IdeaStorm, on which members of the public can vote for ideas which they would like to see become reality. There are three separate calls (I know, in the open source world why do something only once, eh?) to extend the offer to Europe. Click on the tick here, here and here!
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Well I needed a laptop last year so bought a Mac. If I have to have a bundled OS then I might as well have a usable one.
(I did not know about John's Linux shop thing then, I do actually like Thinkpads, and I hate laptops with poor quality components.)
On the Dell news, I think it is a really good sign too. The important thing is not that Dell has started to try to meet the demand but the fact that the demand for Linux only machines now exists, shows how far the Linux-based operating system as a whole has come.
In the past, people had dual-boots with Windows, just in case Linux could not do something, which to be honest was quite often.
That is starting to fade out as Linux has got a lot better with real improvements that have narrowed the gap, while Windows has just stayed more or less the same.
The difference is not so much the operating system itself, with its' Posix heritage, Linux was always solid and secure, and Windows was always awful; but rather in the userspace programs.
For people that are not hardcore gamers, there is now little reason to fire up that Windows partition and it seems more and more like a waste of disk space, which is still at a premium on a laptop.
It used to be that key programs used to be proprietary Windows-only programs. Now all the major third-party applications either exist on Linux or have good replacements, most of which are free; while proprietary Windows-only programs are more expensive than ever before.
I'm surprised that you found it hard to buy a laptop without windows - there were plenty of people moaning about this years ago and I'm sure both IBM and Dell started selling machines with Linux installed (or blank). Maybe that's only to corporate customers or something.
It really is harder than you think. The Linux Emporium is a local company which sell certain laptops with Linux pre-installed, but the point was that I didn't really want any laptop, I wanted to choose the machine I wanted as well as the OS. It's also virtually impossible to buy a PC without any OS at all.
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