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Dell Offering "Open" PC
Sans writes "Dell began offering a new desktop Dimension E510n PC this week with no operating system installed. The machine is designed for people who want to run open-source software such as Linux instead of Windows. The PC comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system, which can be installed by customers."
This is the kind of thing that leads to misleading statistics...News headline: "Dell offers PCs without Windows but demand remains close to zero." Microsoft spokesman "It's obvious to us that most PC buyers want Windows running on their machines yadda yadda yadda..."
Who would buy this machine? A inexperienced home user? They wouldn't be interested in a computer that wouldn't even start up out of the box. Business? Business would buy the equivalent Windows machine for $70 less and replace Windows with Linux (assuming that was the intended use for the FreeDOS machine). Geeks? They'd recycle an old machine or build their own.
If Dell was serious about providing another OS on their hardware, they'd partner with a Linux company (Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, etc.) and let the Linux company provide the software support.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Dell has been selling machines with FreeDOS for some time. We've bought several (including the machine I'm typing this on) for work. Let me know when they start to ship with AMD chips. That will be news.
Trolling is a art,
Have you considered that it probably does cost $30 to Dell? I remember hearing that dell pays $15 per license for plain XP, so this isn't an unreasonable price.
Microsoft offer tremendous volume discounts to OEMs to ensure they ship their computers with Windows.
this is a good start, too bad they're including FreeDOS disks and not free Ubuntu disks though. But I'd guess that the people who would buy this sort of machine already have access to some distributions.
...quite apart from being "old news", that is.
The number of times I've seen people post on here adamant that they don't want to pay the Microsoft Tax on a new PC, only to see the response so far to this, makes me smile. Complaining that the difference in cost is too small, or that Dell hasn't chosen their favourite Linux distro to put on there, doesn't have an AMD processor, blah blah blah.
It's a PC without a preinstalled forcibly-paid-for copy of Windows. So Dell gets Windows for cheap, you don't see a huge price difference, but all those people who wanted an MS-free PC can now buy one. You can't possibly be upset by that, can you???
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In the past, PC makers that offered non-MS variants were allegedly punished by MS with higher prices, delayed access to info on future MS OSes, etc. That both Dell and HP are offering machines with Linux suggests that the power has shifted, that MS needs HP and Dell more than those big PC makers need MS.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Clearly AMD can't support the load of having customers therefore we regret to inform you that we will not offer AMD products ... um...
Self-fulfilling prophecy if you ask me.
If you want real choice just find your local vendors and get them to order what you want. You support local business, you get what you want and often you don't pay more [or much more] than the monopoly controlled "wonder box" you get from Dell [et al.]
Tom
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if they put in a Nvidia card for the linux users.
How can you tell? Well, for starters, you can buy the same system with a hard disk twice the size with a 17" LCD monitor and Windows Media Center Edition for the same price.
More importantly, the 510n comes with an ATI card that will be difficult to get to work properly with X.org (dunno if Xi Graphics is still in business), whereas the 510 uses an Intel chipset that, while not great, will probably work better.
And why not simply install a popular Linux distribution on it from the get go? They could "brand" it simply by adding a package with Dell-logo wallpapers, themes, and icon sets.
Dell's just grubbing for some positive press.
When you think about it, we all know that the typical Linux installation is far less resource intensive than Windows, so why don't they sell it on their lesser hardware? I really think it's just pandering to a particular crowd that said, "hey, I want this." Now they say, "look, we have it and you're not buying." Well, of course not, I don't want to pay $1k for a workstation, I wanted a $500 desktop with Linux on it.
I also want to see the price drop if I get a machine without Windows. Microsoft thinks Windows XP is worth $100. Why is it that if I buy an OS free machine the price changes $0?
What eats resources is the X11 windowing system. {Though object-oriented, interpreted languages -- such as the JavaScript embedded into web browsers -- probably don't help much either.} It used to be that KDE was horribly bloated, but GNOME is no longer a lightweight alternative. Of course there are less resource-intensive desktops {my favourite, which I will be using in my own distro, is WindowMaker} but most people are expecting a Windows XP clone. Hence, KDE or a heavily-customised GNOME.
I'm sure that you could create a display server optimised for applications running locally on a desktop machine with a single monitor {most people's configuration} and it probably would be less resource-intensive. But would it really be worth it? Who is the intended market? The people that are running older hardware generally know what they are doing. There are still a few '486 and first-generation Pentium boxes in every co-lo; and they churn out web pages and e-mails that are viewed on machines with ten times the RAM and twenty times the processor speed.
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