Robin's Report From LWCE

For everyone who can't make it to New York, roblimo has posted impressions of LWCE's first day, in which he takes note of Start buttons, prods Dell about laptops factory loaded with Linux, and watches the Golden Penguin Bowl. I suppose he was also asking vendors some of your questions.

Comments

I think they missed the point...

[c.derby]

His second answer was that Dell's big problem with selling Linux laptops -- and desktops -- was that whichever distribution they chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one; that if they settled on Red Hat, they'd get calls for SuSE, you might say, and if they chose SuSE, they'd get screams about not offering Debian, and so on. All this more or less boiled down to Linux users not being able to make up their minds and all demand one distribution and set of software packages. When that happens, sure, Dell will talk about Linux, okay? If, that is, they see enough demand to make it worth their while.

Ok, how about selling hardware without an OS on it and letting the end users choose what they want to put on it? I think that the desire is more to obtain hardware without providing Microsoft money for an operating system we'll never use. Give me DOS, give me a blank disk. I don't care. Just don't require me to pay for Windows.

I think it's a good idea

[siskbc]

To solve both problems, just put on the most bloated, user friendly, eye-candy-licious version of Redhat or whatever they have. This solves the M$ lawyer issues and the newbie issues. Anyone who's used linux for a while is just going to wipe the damned thing and reinstall anyway.

Basically, linux users want two things when they buy a laptop: First, linux drivers for the hardware. Second, saving some cash by not paying for windows. The rest is irrelevant. Sure, throw in a CD of the latest linux version that the buyer wants to save them the download, whatever.