My friends, the Day has Come- Ubuntu on Dell!

I think in the grand scheme of things this may be good but I really think that so few people will bother buying these that it's almost moot and it may just dissapear quietly. I also pity the poor Indians that have to try to offer support On the good side will be that theoretically we'll get some better driver offerings!

-Trouble

I'm curious if it'll slowly fail as well. I hope that the people who claim Linux needs to be sold by big companies will put their money where their mouth is, something I don't think is as likely as they always claim it is.

I'm curious to see how competitively their machines are priced relative to their hardware, and how they compare to system76.

The issue is, the big computer manuf. companies pay next to nill for the home versions of windows they install.. and aren't about to drop the "retail" price from the machines.. they may drop the $20 or whatever they pay wholesale. I'd guess aren't about to give up the markup they get on OS installs.

yeah, OEM copies of windoze don't cost too much, especially for someone like Dell.

I do, however, think this is big news. For one, with Dell's endorsement of Ubuntu, third party hardware and driver support for it could be strengthened. Also, this is the second major announcement by Dell that directly relates to the Microsoft Vista debacle. First, Dell said it would resume shipping computers with XP if the user so desired:

here

Now, they are endorsing the leading open source OS. After trying to get Vista to work well for a couple days, I can honestly say Microsoft deserves all of the bad press they are getting for Vista. I really hope the market can overcome their strong-arm practices and allow some much-needed competition in the OS realm.

I agree. The price of a Ubuntu system should be slightly less than that of a Vista based one on the same hardware. One problem though is that sometimes a manufacturer can get away with selling cheaper hardware with a Windows machine because of things like winmodems, though this type of hardware seems to be more rare today.

The price of a PC is also offset by any advertisement deals that can be struck. The cheaper the PC the more BS you'll find on the desktop which is a shame because the cheap computers are already crippled. At any rate, I hope we don't start to see more adware riddled Linux machines because of this sort of deal.

I almost always do reload the OS because of the junk that gets installed with it. One of my deciding factors for the laptop I picked out was whether or not it had a real Windows CD and then a drivers CD rather than a system image. System images will just load the garbage back on, but a Windows+drivers disk will let me skip that.

Now on the topic of DVD playback, I do hope that this deal will bring about good DVD playback software for Linux and does so in a way that isn't on the thin ice legally. The whole HD-DVD key issue reminds me of just how silly it all is though.

While Dell has offered Linux solutions in the past and then stopped offering them as well as offering units with no OS Footprints, it's good to see that they're giving the consumers more choice. Hopefully it'll stick this time and not go the way of the old Redhat offerings.

Also remember that you have to factor in support costs for Dell. When they package Linux on a machine, that means they have to either train up additional support personel or add additional support personel to be able to support it for the "Joe Schmoe" end user. I wouldn't expect to see that much drop in price over Vista due to that allowable justifitication.

That's great, It'll be interesting to see how they handle the QOSMIO line with a Linux configuration. (I have linux on my G35)

I'd buy one, but I'd miss the five-inch-long system tray that comes with commercial PCs these days =D

Seriously, though, I'll bet this made MS twitch a little bit.