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Dell Opens Up About Desktop Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell explains his company's Linux desktop strategy in an interview at DesktopLinux.com. He says that it's not practical for Dell (the company) to support numerous distributions due to their incompatibilities, but that he doesn't want alienate large segements of the Linux community by selecting a favorite Linux distro to standardize on (Ubuntu appears to be his favorite, at the moment, by the way.) What he'd really like to see, is for the popular Linux distros to converge on a common core platform, according to the article."
Why do people keep saying this? The reason that there isn't a large price difference in a Dell system loaded with Linux vs. a Dell system loaded with Windows is that Dell uses commercial Red Hat Linux.
You will save money if you order a Dell with no OS (well, FreeDOS is usually shipped with the system) versus one shipped with XP. You just can't order every system that way.
The parent post is on-target. And it is not like Dell is not supporting Linux at all. Plus, they offer a lot of resources for those machines that do not come with Linux installed: http://linux.dell.com/
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems.
That doesn't work if the procedures aren't there for the helpdesk in the first place.
eg. Two weeks ago I found a problem which eventually I solved myself. Now, I could ring my ISP and say "Don't know if you're aware of this, but a computer with a fluxquox network card nailed to 10Mbps will, if connected to the internet directly through the cable modem you supply, be damn slow for no apparent reason - even though the Internet connection is significantly slower than 10Mbps so you wouldn't expect it to matter".
They would say "You're having problems connecting to the Internet? Can you reset your PC for me please?"
I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them. Eventually they'd just agree to get me off the phone, but there's no knowledgebase for them to update because all they do is follow the script.
I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them.
This is usually where I usually try to post to a newsgroup, forum, or blog related to this topic. At least if the information is made available, someone might be able to Google it. If I can't resolve something myself, that's usually the first place I look.
I suspect most slashdotters are in the same boat, where if you've reached the stage of needing someone else's help, you're already beyond the first or second stages of triage that consumer-facing vendor support lines provide.
How does a plethora of distributions affect Dell choosing and supporting one of them? It doesn't. What keeps them from getting inundated with tech support calls regarding fifty different distros right now? Nothing. It's just "Sorry, we don't support that." How would selling and supporting a machine with distro-X on it change that? It wouldn't. Tech support calls for distro-Y just get "Sorry, we don't support that."
Because customers are fucking stupid. I don't mean your average dumbass stupid, I mean belly crawling gutter shit stupid. All the customer is going to know is that they have linux on their computer. As soon as they call in and here "sorry we don't support that distribution" they're going to be pissed because to the customer is Linux. It's not RedHat Linux, it's not Ubuntu Linux, it's not SuSE linux. The customer doesn't give a shit who made the distribution all they know is that it's Linux and dell sells boxes with linux and they want support.
Ask anyone who works in tech support how suprisingly common it is for people to not understand such simple concepts.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984