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Pre-Installed Linux Tops Dell Customer Requests
dhart writes "Within only a few days of Dell opening a new customer feedback website, they discovered that the feature most requested (by an almost 2-to-1 margin!) is an option on all new Dell PCs: pre-installed Linux. (And the number 3 request is pre-installed Open Office.) I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra 'There's no customer demand for Linux.'"
That's cool. But one thing that has always annoyed me about their server configuration utility is that you can select "no operating system, Linux configuration", but there are some hardware options that don't work with that option and so you have to select the microsoft config. So much for getting some extra counts for
the Linux side
Strangely, the #2 option was pre-installed pictures of Natalie Portman.
I'm all for choice, and I think its pretty stupid of Dell not to have offered this before. However, I wonder how many unique requests there are, and how many people asked for that a 1000 times or so. I use Linux at home, but it sure isn't on a Dell box; I built my own, as I guess a lot of Linux hobbists do. But if this gets Dell to implement that option, then great. More Linux penetration is good. Of course, people have to follow up on it; if they offer it and no one buys it, it just gives them and other retailers a reason not to offer it and will make it harder in the future to get pre-made Linux boxes from the major sellers.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
It's not so much that there isn't customer demand for LINUX, it's that there isn't a whole lot of customer demand for individual Linux flavors A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc. It's too much of a PITA to worry about qualifying all that different hardware with all the different distros and then worrying about dealing with Red Hat, Novell and all the different suppliers of what's basically a free OS.
Now, if they had a service like "I'll send you the Linux distro I want, please preinstall it on the next 500 computers you ship me," that could be big.
Did Dell roll their own?
Also this is unsurprising considering the number of people who are daunted by the task of actually installing Linux rather than talking about it or asking a friend at the LUG to do it for them. Ubuntu's nice... if you can get the disk to work, or so I've been told.
Just reading through those suggestions, ... I can promise you that 95% are not going to ever happen.
e.g. no preinstalled earthlink? You think they do that out of kindness to earthlink, or maybe earthlink pays for it?
On the second page is this comment:
"How a manufacturer can produce an expensive computer, and then have the user acoustic experience of that computer dominated by the noise generated by a cheap fan worth just pennies, for the entire lifetime of that computer, is incomprehensible. Computers are noisy when brand new, but those cheap fans begin to rub and oscillate and make additional annoying noises, frequently within a short period of time of purchase."
I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra 'There's no customer demand for Linux.'"
Assuming, of course, that this wasn't a campaign launched by F/OSS zealots. For some reason, vocal minorities are often confused with silent majorities. I'll put more faith in this alleged consumer demand when Linux boxes start outselling all other systems by a 2-to-1 margin. In fact, I'd be amazed if they even sold at a 1:2 margin. It would be a pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Because the majority of "I want a PC I don't have to think about" buyers post on internet forums.
Right.
Since the story submitter is so sure that the demand for Linux is strong, surely it will still be one of the top requests after a few months...
No thank-you.
I use Linux more or less exclusively, but I'd never buy a machine with it preinstalled. I've seen how badly a computer supplier can botch a Windows install. Just ship the box blank and accept that some people know more about certain things than you do.
. . . and I'll order a Dell with pre-installed Linux too.
What?
Dell: "It looks like Windows.."
Sure, I'll have that one, and I'll save $$$ too. I save $$$. $$$.
...getting back the tech support service I used to know and love them for. They've picked up a lot of bad tricks from Alienware, which has to have THE WORST tech support service I have ever seen. I am hoping this is one of the areas that will improve with Michael Dell returning to the company.
At this point (thought it is a little distant into the future) I seriously believe my next laptop will be a Mac. It's not that I necessarilly dislike Windows all that much, but the PC vendors are all becoming carbon copies of their HORRIBLE selves. It used to be one of the places Dell was better than the rest...
I'll just use Parallels/Boot Camp to dual boot/VM for those pesky Windows Apps/games, if there are still any at that point... And can keep Linux/Solaris VM's around if I want too. Best of all worlds on one machine really...
14,000 votes means only 4666 people voted for it, and I can just imagine how many zelots voted multiple time (this isnt the first pro-linux website that has promoted this link)
I think the person who posted this link got a little excited over nothing. If anyone really believes that having Linux on the desktop is more important/popular to consumers then being able to speak to a 'John Smith' rather then a 'Abdule Ramakaiaky' for their tech support is out of their mind.
I don't thinks this is 100% accruate. Number 2 is "NO EXTRA SOFTWARE OPTION" with 8016 votes and number 4 is "Build computers not loaded with extra software" with 5102 votes which equals 13118. Which is almost the same as number 1 "Pre-Installed Linux | Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSUSE | Multi-Boot" with 14641 votes.
Someone needs to clean up the voting an remove dups. There are some good ideas hopefully Dell will listen.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
From ZDNet:
"the 'IdeaStorm' Terms of Service makes it clear that Dell has the right to use any of the ideas "royalty-free" and without compensation. This is obviously a legal necessity, but effectively means that the company isn't just accepting feedback on its own ideas but is in fact crowdsourcing innovation -- for little or no cost."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=95
Just because a bunch of people on a web board request something, doesn't mean that it's a reflection of what people who are actually going to pay cash money want. It reflects that there's a strong desire for dell to preload linux and OpenOffice.org; but it's not necessarily a given that the people who are making that request are willing to shell out the bucks to buy a dell (especially considering the fact that most people who buy linux computers buy servers, and any desktop user who is competent enough to use Linux isn't going to settle for a prefab box, they're going to build theirs themselves).
i'mm happily tapping away on my System76 Ubuntu system (http://www.system76.com).
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
as linux becomes more and more popular and comes pre-configured on PCs people will start writing viruses and
spamware for linux, just like it happened for Windows.
Maybe but as a business owner I can tell you that what people say they want and what they are actually willing to fork over money for are often very different things. Dell does $60 billion in revenue annually which means Dell needs a huge number of people to buy linux equipped machines for it to be worth the investment. To keep Wall Street happy they'll need to grow around 14% next year. (very rough growth estimate based on year over year quarterly revenue growth) That means Dell needs to find about $8.4 BILLION in new sales next year or their stock goes in the crapper. Is there enough demand for linux to be a substantial part of that growth? Maybe, but it seems unlikely. Dell offering linux is really just them buying an option in case linux really takes off in the market. Probably worth doing but I wouldn't expect Dell to really push the issue.
Please don't get me wrong. I hope Dell hits a home run by pre-installing linux. I think it would be great for consumers. I'm just pointing out that what people say they want and what they actually buy are very often not at all the same. I'm sure Dell would be thrilled to not have to fork over giga-bucks to Microsoft but I doubt they are counting on it happening.
Penguin Computing has offered pre-installed Red Hat Linux for years. Forget Dell they are in the pocket of Microsoft. Buy from Linux-friendly vendors.
I asked those idiots at Dell about Linux in 2001 and they gave me the rudest reaction imagineable. I still wouldn't buy their garbage. Forget Linux for a moment... ever try to run anything on a Dell (well, a laptop in my case) that they did not ship with it? Like say a different version of Windows? Good luck there. I bought my Dell in 2001 and was forced to swallow XP Home. I wanted to run Win2K and Linux as I was developing server apps and needed 2K server. Guess what... my laptop did not "support" Win2K, whatever that means. ATI's driver's never worked on it. Dell's answer? "Tough luck". I should use XP... that's what they said. Freaking idiots. Yeah. Me too. For buying one.
Dude, dell missed something pretty obvious I mean Hello! If I'm on the internet I clearly have a computer so I don't need to buy one do I, so anyone who can get to the poll is excluded from their target market, god guys, think about it!
[dont flame me, i'm just kidding]
It's ridiculous. While "Linux" may be a large market, each individual Linux is going to appeal only to a subset, and furthermore, users may not know which one they want. How do you know whether you want Linux Home Basic, Linux Home Premium, or Linux Ultimate? Or, if you run a home business, maybe you need Linux Enterprise or Linux Business. If you're not sure, maybe you should try Linux Starter, but I'm not sure you can upgrade.
No one would ever expect a commercial product to succeed with that kind of internal market fragmentation, I don't see why they think it'll work for Linux.
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I think preinstalled OpenOffice would do more to promote Open Source and MS Alternatives than anything else. Linux is still unsuitable for casual users with other casual users as friends. For an average user wanting to run business apps or games, Linux/Wine/QEMU just isn't as friendly nor has the "ask your neighbor" tech support that you'd get running Windows.
With a default OO install, there will be an instant install base of ODF. It'll do wonders for adoption of the format. Other manufacturers might even follow Dell, seeing how Dell can add functional software with minimal cost, leading to even more adoption. Business users might purchase MS Office anyway, but the home users and small businesses needing basic office needs would benefit in a real way without spending more money.
So please, vote for OO.o. Having Dell install linux by default might be really cool, but voting for OO.o would help both Open Source awareness and adoption.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Many of Dell's customers may very well want Linux. But you can't generalize from this survey to all of Dell's market is foolhardy.
I think the #2 request is "no more Indians on the phone".
They already offer that, it's just phrased as "Gold Technical Support", and costs you an extra $80 or so.
I don't think I would want Dell, or anyone else, doing the install for me, since I want to handle partitioning and package selection myself. It would be nice if each model said something like "certified that all hardware works with Linux Distros X, Y, and Z out of the box" so that I wouldn't have to hunt that info down myself.
The problem is lots of linuxes go too far...
ever tried sabayon, I downloaded and installed it cos it was "feature rich" - I soon found out this meant it shipped with 27 media players, 200 internet clients, 500 word editors and a quake4 demo- now I wanted an operating system and basically got what looked like a computer that had been used by a 3 year old for a few months before being packed up and shipped to me.
Basically the point of this story is that I bet if dell does install linux, it will pile it full with a load of this software in the vain attempt of adding new features purely cos its all free, using the free stuff will just end in overusign it.
Now, I want Dell to sell (and not just sell, but promote) Linux as much as the next Slashdotter, but I don't think this alone will necessarily convince them to do it. There was an insightful comment posted by compugeek on the suggestion in question:
Head of nail, meet hammer. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that Dell made quite a tidy bit of cash from those preinstalled trials. Symantec (or is it McAfee now>) especially - a lot of people just let their 6 month subscription expire*, but many will pay for more. Often you see comments about how Dell etcetera could knock $150 off the price by offering a Window-less solution where this patently isn't the case. Anyone care to point out how roughly much the OEM copy of Windows actually costs Dell per PC? (I say roughly as there is likely to be a special deal in effect for someone of Dell's magnitude).
Again true, but less of an issue I think. Training for tech support will be needed, of course; but after an initial cost, it shouldn't cost any more than supporting Windows, and one could make the argument that a Linux box is less likely to become infested with malware and hence less support requests. There are other considerations of course, but I don't see why there would be significantly more requests.
The comment about the user not being able to tell which OS will generally have is a tad cynical. I know users are stupid yadda yadda, but I would presume the OS's in question have obvious splash screens (Ubuntu does, can't vouch for OpenSuse, and I think Fedora does). A trivial matter in any case.
Dell have it in them to create an install of Linux that does indeed make it easy - if they did the legwork to make sure sound, video etc all worked properly (eg my laptop doesn't multiplex sound correctly in all cases, though this might be due to certain apps misbehaving; I don't have the inclination to investigate) and out of the box, it would be a damn good system for the email-and-browse-the-interweb crowd.
Of course, those 13 968 (at time of writing) won't all translate into direct sales, so it still may not make financial sense for Dell to do this. If they did though, the repercussions would be interesting. If it started gaining traction, it would start alarm bells ringing (not to mention chairs flying) in Redmond. You'd probably see more competitive licensing from Microsoft, heavier promotion of Windows Vista (or just the Windows brand in general), and possibly the strong-arm tactics we've all come to know and (not) love. It would also send a message to other OEMs that there was a viable market for Linux, so we would probably see similar offers from other system builders. If it really got going, it would also send an unmistakable message to the hardware manufacturers. Interesting indeed.
All that said, sadly it probably won't happen.
----------
*A friend of mine (a smart guy) bought a Dell laptop. Included was a 6 month trial of Norton. I told him to remove it and install a better AV because of performance issues, and it would end up nagging him. He says it wouldn't bother him. Flash forward to 6 months later and he is complaining about it slowing the likes of Battlefield 2, it tabbing him out at inopportune times, and just being a pest in general. Still he keeps it. Why don't folk listen or learn?
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
On the flipside, I have the comfort of knowing that there are open source drivers for every piece of hardware in my box. My other laptop took hours to get my graphics card and wireless card configured - and the wireless card still can't make use of 802.11 g.
While I wouldn't mind getting a box blank, I want to be damn sure it has well supported hardware. I would prefer to have something that just works (and is supported) out of the box, but is customizable for those with more experience.
The best way for Dell (or any OEM) to support Linux would be to start their own distro pre-installed, configured and optimized for the hardware they sell.
With PCs starting from $360 to $650, can you really expect to shave "hundreds" off the price of a new PC? The $650 machine doesn't come with Office, and Dell probably only pays $60 or so per Windows license (anybody got firmer numbers?)
The savings may be modest at best, but at least there would be an option (and I didn't see anyplace that said Dell IS GOING TO offer Linux, just that it is wanted by the respondents).
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Not to feed the trolls, but here goes anyways... Have you actually called their support? Or, a better question - are these actual servers (PowerEdge) or desktops standing in as servers? I've called them many times, for servers that only cost $1k to ones over $6k. Every time I've gotten an American English speaking rep from Texas. Yes, even on Christmas morning and the machine's technically out of warranty. Cheap desktops get you cheap support. Real servers get you real support. You get what you pay for.
Unless there is a real option for more than very select versions then there won't be anywhere near the sales of those systems.
Dell offers Linux or no OS on select models because of Windows Licensing reasons. They've got special BIOS tags in the HP/Dell/etc. machines that make for "easier" installation of XP and Vista- and they have to have different BIOSes for the Linux/No OS boxes. Since the bulk of their line is Windows-Only, they've only made up and verified select models for the other option, which is why they don't seem to offer the configurations like they ought to.
The REAL reason Dell doesn't have as much of a demand for Linux systems is they don't offer as good a models in many cases- people just don't give them a second thought for server machines or desktops in many cases. Since they don't have a "demand", they don't realize that there's a real market so they don't offer machines to buy that're worth a damn, which stifles demand, and round and round we go...
It's a vicious circle that they and many other companies have gotten themselves into with keeping to mostly Windows.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Do you ever want mainstream driver support? Stop whining like a child whenever someone offers a service that includes Linux that isn't perfect for your needs. You need to a mature a little bit, and that involves coming to the conclusion that what's best for you may not be what's best for someone else. One thing I'm sure of is that it wouldn't hurt the Linux community to have highly visible desktop Dell support. I suspect you'd rather feel superior about your operating system than help the community that develops it.
So I offer you all hamburgers, and open up a request forum. Moron says... give me chicken! Um... does it take a genius here? 10000 people request linux. A million people buy Vista and never go to the nerd board? So genius says the world wants Linux... nope. Linux wanna be Unix is dead for the consumer PC.
We get the dell offer booklets, they are automatically binned in the recycle box.
I might be a zealot in Linux department but i've heard too many other bad stories about Dell.
Sure i could buy Dell - and hope that i can get standard drivers for say fc'x' that work but then i'd have to borrow a digital camera and document that i never ever pressed "i want to have s e x with Steve Balmer now" and then spend 5 hours plus talking to an array of indians at dell in order to get back the $30 windows tax back per dell pc.
Look I didnt know about the dell ideas site and don't care about Dell. So Dell don't get our hardware orders - do we care no.
Windows works for some folks. Linux works too, conclusion Dell does not want our money - thats fine by us.
Stop and think for a moment people. Do you really want Linux pre-installed from a company that you may not trust 100%? What if they start putting in spyware or something? What if they start packing it with advertisements for "our business partners"??
I'm all for Linux proliferation, but I would rather have the system "Ubuntu Certified" or "Suse Certified". Then we could go out and put distributions we absolutely trust on the systems. Maybe it would even come with a common install disk like Ubuntu or something when you buy the system.
My point is simply that I don't necessarily want pre-installed Linux from a major distributor, unless I *know* no on has tampered with it.
I bought my Fujitsu laptop years ago because it was "Suse Certified". That alone made it a simple, no-brainer choice for me.
Fresh horses and more whiskey for my men.
It's a Digg-style ranking site. And items one and three were submitted by the same user (dhart). And now he submits a link to Slashdot to boost the ratings farther.
He calls this an honest representation of customer demand?! When I got linked to by Slashdot, I got 28,000 hits. And that was a Sunday morning. Say bye-bye to any sort of reasonable cross-section of Dell users.
I love Linux, and haven't run anything But Linux on my personal systems since 2001, but this is very nearly astroturfing. At the very least, it'll strongly bias the demographic on ideastorm.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Society! More specifically, the part of society that used to enjoy the challenge of a one-liner but has turned its back, choosing "maintainable" code instead. In the days of Perl, Dell would have seen "Linux pre-installed" as the number one requested feature by a margin of 100:1, or even 1000:1 over all other requests. I guarantee it.
Will they start also catering some of there hardware on their computer for linux? I've never owned a dell, but I know one of the main problems with the linux up-rise is that there always seems to be one or two hardware pieces that does not work with linux. I also wonder what Distro they will choose. The natural contenders are Fedora and Ubuntu(FTW). I think it's good though that they would all linux to come preinstalled, will save the newbies a lot of trouble with problem installations, etc.
You would've seen that it says they would "Offer the 3 top free Linux versions for free pre-installation on all Dell PCs." How they would determine what distro is "most popular", I don't know.
Exactly, my girlfriends laptop is through her dads business and when things break they send a person from a repair shop to fix it at her place free of charge. Doesn't matter where she is, they get it fixed within 24 hours of calling.
So 100 motivated geeks spammed their website and made it look as if there's huge customer demand. Duh. That's like those CNN or MoveOn.org polls - only the motivated even go there.
A better metric would be to have an OS choice list on their config page, with a "sorry we don't support Linux option" displayed once people click it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Also, this demand for Linux should -- hopefully -- encourage RedHat to resume releasing a Linux distribution. I would not oppose paying the sum of (1) cost of distribution on CD and (2) an additional $5 (or even $10) in profit.
Dell somehow read this as #1 preinstalled Vista and #2 Preinstalled Microsoft Office. There still seems to be a language barrier between Corporate and English.
No, I think this was Linux flavors A, S, T, R, O, T, U, R, F. I would guess this is a push by some pro-Linux webpage for publicity.
That comment cuts both ways. Microsoft has a long history of astroturf, so you would expect the requests to be M$ BS if people were doing that. All of it is dwarfed by actual customer demand where it exists. Give it some time and M$ will have a few M$ powered botnets target it, but the cat is out of the bag now - people really do want free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now, the bloody thing will be skewed way out of proportion by people who just want so see Linux up there, but don't have an intention to buy from Dell.
If you're going to comment, please be careful to state your true intentions and not just be evangelical about Linux.
NOTE: For my part, I have been asking Dell for 10 years for the option to purchase their products O/S-free (let alone w/ Linux). Having the option to pre-install a working distro would be great - even if it is only a choice of one or two of the majors.
*** Don't be dull.***
No not at all. Why?
I did couple of linux deployments using installed images, and it's pretty easy.
I will say of the orinoco/prism stuff, they are decent, only with hostap drivers, but for the life of me I cannot get it+wpa_supplicant to work on a LEAP network even though it works fine in a WPA2-PSK network...
The chipset to get in my experience is an ipw2100/ipw2200/etc... I've had those work effortlessly on numerous networks, WPA, LEAP, whatever.
I've had problems out of Atheros, but the sheer volume of those cards I think has caused support for them to improve lately, but I haven't tried in over a year...
Avoid broadcom... It's so damn weird you have to do so, their ethernet NICs have good first-party driver efforts, and yet you have to ndiswrapper to attempt their wireless parts... guess they accept they must do open-source drivers to be a serious linux market competitor, but don't think wireless linux is important... Also weird the linksys wireless boxes use broadcom chips with native, closed source broadcom drivers.
I haven't tried in years, but at last check, atmel chip driver sucked verily. By now that could've been fixed, but who cares with Intel chips...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
this is great, but I can not create an account using my iMAC. I tried both Safari, and FF2.0 and no way to create an account to vote. Still very good news to see a 2 - 1 ratio for pre-installed Linux.
worlds worst speller
Hey, it would be nice if we could get one of the BSDs as an option. But, it probably won't happen. PC-BSD would be a great candidate. It is very easy to use and has software installers called PBIs which behave very similarly to the Windows installer interface. The only thing I am not so crazy about is that it is KDE based. I am more of a fan of Gnome. Have a look at the website. Methinks you'll like it. http://www.pcbsd.org
You think? I'm not sure anymore. Just a few weeks ago Michael Dell stood up with Vint Cerf and admitted 1 in 4 M$ computers is part of a botnet. Now his company is publicizing customer demand for Linux. If he was interested in toeing the M$ party line, he would have suppressed the results. The odds are Dell is moving away from being a M$ vassal.
2007 is the year of Linux. Vista sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Im all for having choice of OS ok... but there is way too many issues with which one and what version... What Id rather see from dell is a "kernel 2.6 compatible" moniker on their products. Or "Just Works" stamps on their wifi card selector when configuring my next machine
Let's say and old grandma sees that she can save money by buying a PC with Linux on it. So she does. When she gets it she boots it up, puts in here info and stats looking at pictures of her grandkids through her e-mail.
Wait, there's no problem here. The only problem is above commenter's that think only power-users can use Linux.
really man, how many dollar signs do you have to use in your posts before you start looking decidedly ridiculous??
They wrote Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE in a huge font, which happens to be the top 3 on distrowatch.com .
I would rather NOT see Dell get involved with Linux. Dell's influence would ruin any Linux distro associated with it. Open source needs to be unattached to the grimey fingers of corporate america.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Someone merely needs to start a custom "DELL distro" for dell computers. Screw letting Dell have control over that... it would be disaster for a distro to allow their grimey fingers into things.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Which distro? Linux From Scratch of course. It forces everyone (including your grandma) to become a uber-geek.
On a late night public radio call-in show (put out by American Public Media), they had a story about the overseas call centers. It was a great story. They played clips of the training classes where they teach these indians to lie about what they did on the 4th of july or what they ate for Thanksgiving. It was sickening.
But then they interview this "industry representitive" who basically said what we all have been: The American people are not satisfied with the level of service they get from Indian call centers, and that many companies are closing them.
I momentarily though "wow, thank god, that's a trend that can't be over too soon."
Then he pulls out the punchline: Many of the closed Indian operations are being moved to the Phillipines, because people have less of a negative impression when the phillipino accent is played back to them.
I swear to god it's like the RIAA is running the call center industry.
I was SCREAMING at the radio that the only reason Filipino accents don't score as badly as Indian accents are that Americans haven't called tech support yet and had to deal with under-trained Filipinos nearly as much as they've had to deal with under-trained Indians.
So yes, that's their bright idea. So if Dell does accept the "Close your indian call centers" suggest, don't expect much of an improvement. Maybe we should be a little more specific and suggest that they move their call centers only to NATO countries, and preferably the US, Canada or the UK.
...that it took fourty years from Macmillan's "Winds Of Change" speech for events to actually transpire as he had predicted. (Whilst I am not a fan of many of the older politicos, I was actually very impressed by that speech when the BBC make it available via UnrealAudio. Personally, I think it's one of the very few speeches that would deserve to be more widely known.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
How many requests were there for things that were already available? How many votes did pre-installed linux actually recieve? Unfortunately, the statistic that pre-installed linux was the biggest request by a margin of two says little, if anything. There is no data relating this survey to all the user studies, customer feedback reports, and sales history reports collected over the years. The post's author implies that this statistic indicates there is a large market for pre-installed linux, which is not a valid inference.
On another note, the people that would tend to want to install linux are also likely the people that know how, and indeed want, to customize its installation. With widely varying installations, a support nightmare would insue. This would cost Dell a fortune, and would lead to very low customer satisfaction. Neither of these provide much motivation for Dell to introduce pre-installed linux.
I can't believe it took this long for Dell to ask their users what they actually want. I mean, this is the internet. ITs where you get instant results, thus why you can respond so quickly to your market. I'm glad to hear they are at least feeling the Linux pressures... Now what would be great is if they decided to give support to those desktops or laptops they sell with Linux on them.
Dell also has to face the distribution conundrum...
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
I'm in the UK. Maybe that's why I don't get the American-based tech support when I call. And yes, the systems are servers. The newer ones are PowerEdge 1900 systems.
I really don't care where the people are who are offering me tech support. At the very least I expect them to speak understandable English.
So what you're saying is that there is an insufficient # of weaknesses and problems in Linux to warrant mounting endless gobs of third party software to workaround those problems.
What will happen in 3 years when MS executes on their plan to enter the security space in a major way? There won't be any financial opening for HW vendors to install demoware any longer. IT would appear that both Linux and MS will be on equal financial footing then. MS will all of its 'good' functions built in, and Linux with basic designs that don't require those workarounds.
This is a very, very bad idea. If you buy a Dell with Linux pre-installed you won't have Windows Vista Premium Home edition pre-installed and then Bill Gates wouldn't get any more money!
If I ever considered buying a Smell (sorry Dell) anything, it would be nice that they offer Linux or no OS at all. But since I am not planning on doing that (probably going to buy a Macbook), I don't really care what they do.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
Its just a straw poll. How many of the 20,000+ people are actually dell customers?
I'd rather build a desktop myself, component by component, but you can get a decent Dell system for sub $400, and that includes windows, so if I could get that same system for $100 cheaper, or however much Dell has to pay per system for Windows, that would be sweet.
"I'll see you next time." - LeVar Burton
business accounts get support from tennessee or Tex. call centers. Home users get (other then gold support) get India
...they'd be able to offer OS X as an option. I know it's been said before, but think what that would do for Apple's market share! Through the roof!
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
What I think is funny is that so many people think that English is the second language of the Indians at the Dell call centers. It's generally one of their (like at least four) native tongues. That's the real issue. They speak a different (and legitimate) dialect of English, complete with their own slang and mispronunciations that they think are correct. They are generally speaking as perfect Indian English as we Americans speak American English or Britons speak British English. Why would they want to fuck it up with an American accent? (Think about that from an American point view before answering.)
Someone got spammed.
Let me guess, they all requested Red sHat?
This is a totally bogus result, I guarantee the site was spammed in order to create articles such as this one.
There is no way in hell that any self respecting *nix user is going to buy a Dell. Give me a break.
I'll believe this when hell freezes over. Dell customers want Linux... yeah right, and later monkeys might fly out of my butt. Dell customers don't have the slightest conception of what an operating system even is, let alone what differentiates Linux from BSD or Unix.
I won't tell you how to mod the parent, but I can throw my 2 cent's worth of experience in.
It is 100% true that English isn't a second language in the Philippines, it's a primary language. I work in a 24x7 datacenter, and a year or so ago, a new support center was opened in the Philippines to handle our night shift. I thought they were going to let a bunch of people go, but it turned out, they were expanding our operations, not replacing them. (Thank goodness!)
I was very skeptical that this would work. I had many of the same fears. Would we be able to understand their accent? Would they be undertrained an incompetent? Would there be any culture clashes?
The answers, to my surprise, were: They have no discernible accent—none. They're very smart and easily keep up with our local folks, and have often gone far above and beyond the call of duty to help us out. And yes, they are very familiar with our culture and ways of doing things. In fact, a nice bonus about the Filipino support center is that a lot of our night shift calls were coming from Asia-Pacific countries (since, duh, they were open at that time of night), and a lot of those clients feel much more comfortable dealing with our Filipino support center than our American night shift folks.
By now, you're probably thinking, "Right, you're just a management goober," but I assure you, I'm not. In fact, I was certain that I was going to lose my job due to Filipino outsourcing, but that never happened, since we weren't really outsourcing. And after working with them for a while at our shift turnover and seeing the quality of the work they did for us, I can honestly say that hiring our Filipino friends has turned out to be one of the few times management actually did something right at my company, and it's been a win-win situation for everyone.
I'm not saying that every Filipino person is smart and capable and a perfect joy to work with. Just like dealing with all people, your mileage may vary. But I can say that anyone who thinks that good customer service can't be provided by support centers in the Philippines is either stupid or doesn't know enough Filipino people, if any at all.
There's a dude in India who's probably really pissed because every time he calls Dell for support on his server, he gets someone from Texas!
G'die mite. Wawts wrawng weeth as Ozzies? Cahn't we speak English jast as good as thaose Bladdy Whingen' Pawms? Or ah you discreeminiten' agenst as becawse we cam frawm the Seauth Pacific nawt the Nawth Atlantic?
(I have no idea if that sounds like how an American would hear in Australian accent, but that's what it's meant to be.)
Look out!
How many people are going to ask Dell to pre-install Windows?
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They have no discernible accent--none.
:)
Well that maybe the case for an American listener. All the Filipinos I've met (only a handful to be honest) sounded to me like they had American accents
But just to agree with you, all of them had very good spoken english (if a little quiet).
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....not for USA sales,not if you are talking joe sixpack home desktops, that's just asking for trouble and annoyed customers. And the reason is very simple-no *legal* popular consumer entertainment media playback, which is right up there with what folks want to do with their computers, listen to music, watch some vids. AFAIK, of the major distros, linspire/freespire is the only ones to have or offer legal DVD, MP3, windows media, etc playback, because they have gone ahead and legally licensed, paid the fees, etc. The other ones, including ubuntu, all have the wink wink nudge nudge "do it this way" and send you off to offshore servers for downloads. Mostly right now this is ignored, but if Dell starts shipping linux pre installed and it becomes an issue because of the distro picked, those various entities involved with those things would make a stink about this downloading and installing illegal "features".
Note: I think it's stupid, but you can just about be guaranteed that it would become a serious issue real quick. Right now, as small potatoes niche deals, various distros and media playback have been marginalized and ignored by the powers-that-be, so careful what you wish for or ask for there.
Nope.
If and when MS does enter the security space in a major way, there will still be plenty of opportunity for HW vendors to include demoware. Consider:
1) Given their history, MS is unlikely to get security software right the first time. If they did, security software such as antivirus would be moot as Windows itself would already be secure. Even with MS selling a product, the security companies would still compete, and arguably pay higher fees to the likes of Dell since they would need to promote themselves more.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
2) Even if the product is good, the current security vendors won't disappear overnight. Worthiness alone does not a successful product make. Marketing plays a big role - you can bet your buns the security vendors would up the ante with heavier marketing (ie more trial versions, ads, etc). MS would bundle it (a trial version) with Windows you say? The other companies would cry 'antitrust' as soon as bundling was so much as hinted at. Besides, the security companies could still pay the OEMs to include their trials and disable the MS one.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
3) Let's enter fairyland and say that MS fixes / provides an AV solution for ALL security problems ever. No need for Windows-based antivirus solutions. Right. But that isn't the only kind of software with trial versions. Subscription based web TV services, office products, accounting software - not great examples but they are just off the top of my head. Heck even the useless crap like virtual characters (eBuddies? eSomething anyway) would probably pay a couple bucks to have a trial on there. Of course, Dell still has to balance including this stuff for the revenue with not pissing the users off.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
What I would say is there isn't so much scope for including Linux demoware for anything, which is a good thing - for the end users. As you say, there are insufficient vulnerabilities known about for AV stuff. For other software there is generally a Free/Libre solution included with the distro. The other reason is that in the main the people creating the resource-hogging trials for Windows haven't targeted Linux - yet.
Anyway you seemed to miss the main thrust of that part of my argument (which is fair enough as I made quite a few points in the post), which went: providing GNU/Linux wouldn't save that much over providing Windows .
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Are you retarded?
*** "Within only a few days of Dell opening a new customer feedback website, they discovered that the feature most requested (by an almost 2-to-1 margin!) is an option on all new Dell PCs: pre-installed Linux. (And the number 3 request is pre-installed Open Office.) I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra 'There's no customer demand for Linux.'" ***
2-1 margin of people who took the time to bother posting on their feedback website. Guarantee you that there are untold numbers more with Windows than with Linux....Thus, making the 2-1 margin miniscule in reality. Sheesh.
Surely the readers of this august forum have been responsible for much of those (currently) 22k+ votes.
I've never bought desktops from Dell pre-loaded with Linux, it was always easier just to reinstall than fight them on it, and you generally want the Windows license for VMware use.
We do get some servers preloaded with RHAS but we tend to config our own installs of that too - Dell's config people don't always "get" non-desktop IT (example: order dual channel hardware RAID controller, and they'll create a RAID-1 LUN with both drives on the same SCSI bus), but to be 100% fair I prefer us to reinstall any server system just to (a) get it exactly the way I want it, and (b) to be sure we have the knowledge to do so.
And, I'll tell you why: these numbers are skewed. How often have we read about Linux fan boys complaining about the lack of Linux support? How often do they start "campaigns" to put it out there to the vendors, get them to notice there's a following? How often have we seen these kinds of posts on just this site? So, when something like this comes along, they stampede the site, attempting to drive up the statistics. Conversely, how many average users are going to be going to this site? Norms who don't even know what Linux is? Not many. Naah, I much more easily buy the story we're getting that's based on sales, because companies are NOTORIOUS for not understanding what their customers want. But, they sure do know how to take their money. Now, those numbers aren't perfect, either because a large portion of requests for Linux are buried inside the orders that are shipped "no OS". Some companies, like mine, purchase their servers through HP or Dell with no OS because we have a volume license agreement with Microsoft. And, we're going to wipe away their installs anyway, even if it did come with one. But, we also purchase a couple of boxes that will run Linux here and there, but we buy them also without OS because we use Redhat Enterprise. If you were to ask our Dell rep, they'd tell you "that company has never requested Linux on a box". They'd also say we've never requested one with Windows, either. :)
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I ordered a laptop from Circuit City, a Compaq dealer. I was told it was Linux compatible but shipped with XP pre-installed, but that I was free to install Linux on it if I wanted to.
I installed Linux only to find that the modem and wireless adapters had no driver support for Linux, so I searched the Compaq web site for them, they did not have them for my model. When I called their help desk, I was told something different than the salesperson told me, Linux is not supported for my model and that installing Linux voids my warranty and they do not have Linux drivers.
If Dell offers pre-installed Linux with restore CD/DVDs, and full driver support for the hardware on the laptop, my next laptop could be a Dell. From my experience Linux laptop support is horrible when it comes to driver support, and it has really upset me. Not only does Dell need pre-installed Linux but also Linux drivers we can download from their web site should we choose a different distro than the one Dell supports.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Yes: ponies! Lots and lots of pink ponies!
OMG!!! PONIES!
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It would have been nice if it was specified what the '1' represented in '2 to 1', whether it was the 2nd option or the rest of the ideas. What the summary means is that the Linux idea has almost twice the votes than that of the second idea, which is to sell computers with no extra software, i.e. the bloatware that Dell is paid to install. However the votes are fragmented as the 4th choice is essentially the same as the 2nd and the 5th and 6th choices both deal with Linux/no OS installed. If you add up these votes it is closer to 36000 votes for Linux/OS free and 18000 for no preloaded software, so still around double the second most popular. Of course this is just from looking at the first page of 15 ideas, of 45 pages, so I'm sure that there would be plenty more ideas rehashing these popular ones.
M-x viper
...hint to the distro of choice if they were to start pre-installing Linux?
I'm confident some people voted only once even if they order a great many desktops every year. It's a Digg style poll; it's not scientific. It still tells Dell everything the site is capable of saying. People want the option to buy their Dells with Linux.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, that's how an American would hear an Australian (or New Zealish, we can't tell the difference) accent.
Le français vous intéresse?
Lest we forget, not so long ago MS signed the equivalent of a nonagression pact with Novell regarding their version of Linux (SuSE). Dell's had a real sweetheart deal with Redmond for a long time, so much the better if they can diversify with their de-facto blessing on a Linux distro. Makes Dell look like they are casting off the shackles of Microsoft when in fact nothing has really changed but the splash screen. Provides good PR for Dell, the shared IP between Microsoft and Novell could provide kickbacks that Redmond might find lucrative, a sale for SuSE means one LESS for the competition, plus an immunity from litigation on this version of Linux....heck, since it "advances" Linux (albeit in a small way) it may even mitigate any antitrust suits Microsoft would have to deal with further down the road. Only my opinion, of course, but it looks like a win for Redmond, a win for Dell, and the appearance of a win for the consumer....IF Dell follows through on this. What the REAL results will be IS subject to interperetation, however.
Gotta wonder what other 2 Linux distros Dell might consider.
you can't use the windows license for VMware use any more unless you buy Vista Ultimate
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
I bought a poweredge with raid 1 configuration 2 20 gig 15k rpm scsi drives hot swap backplane. 1 week into using it one of the drives dies. system goes down and wont boot up at all (I thought raid 1 + hot swap was so you could pull a drive without shutting down the server!) I call support and get an indian who all he was capable of doing was shipping out a new drive, couldnt understand anything else i said.
Personally I would like to see the big vendors, like Dell, certify that certain models have hardware support in the Linux kernel.
:-) I speak of this as someone who has done their share of helpdesk support.
:-)
I think the best way for them to achieve this would be to ship with a live gnu/Linux CD.
Such a move could be positive in supporting Windows systems as well, easy to identify the computer hardware failure, or if it a foobarred Windows install. This would potentially save a lot of customer data
Well, tha my 2c
I have a good idea - how about teaching them how to code and bring THEM over by the boatload on H1-B's instead of Indians? ... damn! I've met easily a few hundred Filipinas over the years and every single one of them has been hot - what does that phrase LBFM mean, anyways?
.. yea, and in this office we have hot and code running women.
I mean
Regardless, if we are going to fill our offices with foreigners, lets fill them with hot women from the Phillippines.
That would be a recruiting slant
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
it makes buying a dell just a little less painful, so if they can provide me with a dell laptop with the GRAPHICS card fully installed in linux then yeah ill buy one straight away cos intalling notebook graphics drivers is a pain in the A**
Since the link site is unaccessible, I'll take a guess here. How do we know that the voting isn't rigged by Dell? Are we so sure that many customers voted? Are all the voters from the same IP block, the same company, the same city, or is it a statistically random representative sample?
/implied use / demand of Linux *and* OpenOffice (dealing blows to MS's bread and butter) not be used to get better pricing on MS software?
Vista reception seems lukewarm. MS must know this. Just like Intel knows that AMD might take more of its business away. Dell has in limited way launched new machines with AMD on it. In this sense, where Dell has carefully used AMD to (probably) get better chip prices from Intel, could the same technique of the threat
What if I want a BSD?
If you want a Blue Screen of Death, then just get one of their Windows options.
Black Screen of Death. They are pretty cheap, just buy a monitor plug it in to the wall (or not, it doesn't really matter). There you go, a nice black monitor and even cheaper without the tower! No administration required! Now that was easy! (with apologies to Staples).
I wouldn't actually use their linux on a bet but if an installed OS is what it takes to force Ballmer, Gates & Co to accept that they're not getting paid, I'll take linux. Nobody in their right mind would take an OEM install of the OS. There's just too much access being sold to that image.
The numbers of individuals may be exaggerated -- it's easy enough to vote up something, but another to dial up the company an put a PC or five on your Visa. One thing I haven't seen people post is that some people here buy thousands of PCs a year. One of those folks' votes probably mean a lot more to Dell, and they're being undercounted.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There's a danger in a company opening a forum like this when chances are small they'll ever implement more than a tiny fraction of these. People will be hopeful for a short time but then believe they're being ignored if there's no reaction.
Any more than the ignoring they have already been getting from Dell tech support?
Dell tech support is an oxymoron!
Yes, I called their support regarding my $1600 (AFTER discounts) Inspiron 8500 twice - once for a DVD+RW that died inside of a couple months, and once for a motherboard that died within a year and a half. Both times, connected with someone from another country. The DVD+RW was cross-shipped quickly, the motherboard was given the "sorry about your luck, a replacement runs $600" routine.
Lesson learned. FYI, we just replaced our entire sales force's laptops, and they were NOT Dells.
SYS 64738
http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2 005/05/09/story1.html
Why would Dell try to convince people that there is no demand for Linux?
Dude, it's just that it's been a l o n g year . . .
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Come on.... that was a well thought out post and a fair point, whether or not you happen to agree with me....
Linux isn't a "wannabe Unix". GNU is the free and opensource Unix clone. Linux is nothing more than the kernel to the system- what lets GNU and everything on top of it talk to the hardware. Given the source code and time, you could make Windows run on the Linux kernel.
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Well, generally the people who get hired for those kinds of jobs tend to have really good English, but I wouldn't say it's the primary language in the country. In Manila, most people can speak some level of English, but Tagalog definitely the primary language. Outside of the capital, English proficiency is much rarer, usually Tagalog or a local language is used (there's around 100 different languages spread across the various islands).
The English that is spoken tends to be a lot more polite than the English of us Westerners. Philippine culture as a whole is much more hospitable and friendly. Another thing is that it takes them a lot of effort and skill to get that competent with English, so the few that do make it tend to be way smarter than their western counterparts.
I have a web site that is hosted at web.com (used to be Interland) and their overnight upgrade of the iMail mail server had a few glitches. Their first tier tech support is no longer in Atlanta, but is handled from the Philippines. The young lady I got on the phone tonight was quite easy to understand, polite, did not fib about where she was located when I asked and got my trouble ticket upgraded after working with me for about 20 minutes doing logical tests on her end. Would I still rather be talking to Jim with a genuine Georgia accent? You bet, but I can't complain too much about tonight's experience. I hope its not the exception.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
There are more dupes in that Dell feedback-thingo than on Slashdot! It's utterly ridiculous...
One interesting thing is the sheer number of dupes asking for Linux. There are almost as many asking for (to paraphrase) "Anything other than Windows" or "No OS". Each of these types of dupes seems to have a score of approximately 300 per dupe. I spotted more than 5 dupes of each idea in the first four pages alone. Requests for Open Office, "Anything other than Microsoft" and "Just the OS, please" are other common themes.
About the only other recurring themes are miscellaneous complaints about their laptops and people wondering why Michael Dell doesn't appear in ads.
Why don't you ask Dell to get a support center in nearby locality? That will solve all your problem with Indian tech support. Also you can ask them to move their assembly from Malaysia. Or better to buy Sun machine with Solaris, that is THE server.
... Cheap desktops get you cheap support. Real servers get you real support. You get what you pay for.Hmm. Everyone has anecdotes.
It's been ages since I have dealt with Dell. For the lap top, they took many weeks (IIRC 1.5 months) to fix a RAM problem. It was that a bad SIMM needed to be swapped out, but it was not allowed for the customer to do it. I could hear the techs backtalking me in the background over the phone. When they did finally return it, they sent it to the wrong address, though I had painstakingly dealt with many managers to confirm that they had the new address. The best part was that the delivery service just left the box on the doorstep. Someone who happened to know me spotted the box lying outside, saw my name on it and brought it in. Even if it had arrived at the right address it wouldn't have done much good: it arrived a day after I started a one month trip.
Another site I was at had a shitload of Dell servers all under some super-expensive 4hr-guarantee onsite service. About half had hardware malfunctions early one, even though many were different models and purchased at different times. Usually the hardware itself diagnosed the problem, other times it was quite apparent anyway. i.e. dead fan. So the techs at Dell would get informed of hardware problem X, Y, or Z and then come later the same day of the call. Fine. They would then get ushered down to the server room, look at the machine and then scratch themselves and say the part needed for X, Y, or Z was not in there car and it would take a few weeks...
That was a while back though, just over 7 years. But all those machines ran Linux, either Red Hat or Debian. I hope they have improved, but not bundling compatible hardware with the linux requests is not a promising sign.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Linux is nothing more than the kernel to the system
Without which the much-lauded "GNU operating system," would not function at all. I'm aware of Stallman and his worshippers having tried to belittle the kernel's importance in recent years; it gets in the way of Stallman being able to compulsively seek credit for everything he possibly can.
If the kernel is such a trivial thing, I really wish that someone associated with the FSF would prove that and write their own. That way they could take the completed GNU system and go away.
We could replace the entire GNU system in fairly short order with the BSD utilities and TenDRA, and it'd also mean we wouldn't have to keep listening to Stallman and his army of cultic zombies constantly reminding the rest of us that we supposedly owe them our lives. It'd be fantastic.
I've been trying to buy a Linux laptop. Unsuccessfully. I'm looking for a low-end system, just enough to give presentations and access systems remotely. My main systems are desktops. I don't need to be able to play movies. I don't need dual boot. I don't need much compute power or a big screen. I do need WiFi capability to public access points, and VGA output to projectors. One would think this would be easy.
So first I try Fry's, which used to have Linux machines on sale. No more. Everything is Windows or Mac. I try Best Buy. No joy, even after a talk with the Geek Squad guy.
Online, we have LinuxCertified. No obvious business address on the web site, always a bad sign, and a criminal offense in California. Low-grade domain-only SSL cert. Phone number not answered during working hours. Not looking good.
There's an article about a $498 Linux laptop from WalMart, but it's been discontinued. WalMart no longer seems to have any Linux laptops.
There's EmperorLinux, but their laptops start at $1145 and go up to $6000. Their $1145 machine is a Dell 520, which Dell sells for $599. $400 extra for Linux?
So now we're down to the blogger/enthusiast sites. One guy has a list of Linux laptop vendors. Going down the list, it doesn't look good. The HP link is dead. The Dell link leads to Dell's French site, and even that's selling only Windows laptops.
But some of the links aren't dead. MGE PC Online will actually sell a Linux laptop. It's a bit overpriced; $805 for the cheapest Celeron machine. But you get Red Hat Fedora preloaded. ShopRCubed has Linux laptops that start at $840. Their advertising is deceptive; they advertise a model with "Intel Dual Core Technology" for $799, but in fact that's the price with an Intel Celeron. Adding WiFi and a Ubuntu install brings you up to $840.
There's American Computer, or ACC PC, or CompAmerica, or whatever. Very low base prices, but they don't install Linux; they just sell you a bare machine and claim "Also Certified to run the Linux Operating System."
Let's try Google's "Froogle" system. There we get some Linux laptops. There's a discontinued Acer model that's out of stock. There's a Pentium II laptop on eBay for $80. ("Boots Linux; some keys don't work") Nothing useful there.
Face it. There are no major commercial vendors of Linux laptops any more. There are a few resellers buying machines, adding Linux, and increasing the price. That's it.
He should just post his gripes in broken English to Slashdot, like everyone else does. Sheesh.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
One of the reasons that HSBC gave for off-shoring from the UK to India was to get better staff as well as cheaper. If you look at the quality of the people they employ in the sub-continent it appears to be true.
Funny how American seem to whine about foreign accents in call centres more than the British - even though lots of British companies off-shore. Perhaps it for the same reason that the Americans cannot even make a film without re-writing history to make the heros all American.
I would say what I think about standards of English in the US versus India, but the last time I did so the comment got modded -1 flamebait by the Americans - after first having been modded +5 insightful by the rest of the world (I can guess who modded up and down by that fact that the modding up happened while most Americans were still asleep, and the moddding down when they woke up).
I couldn't let this go by without mention. You compliment their language skills only to butcher your own sentence in the process.
But just to agree with you, all of them had very good spoken english (if a little quiet).
Try all of them had very well spoken english (which still sounds clunky), or maybe all of them spoken english well (we have a winner!).
I can't help but think this has a lot to do with price more than actual preference...
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Linux and run it at home etc, but if you know anything about Linux, it'll be that it's "free" which would logically imply your PC is cheaper?
Not that it's the only reason people request Linux pre-installed of course, but it must be a big one at least.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra 'There's no customer demand for Linux.
I haven't read the article, but I assume that it means that they ship their computers with Linux instead of Windows, and thus do not make you pay for your copy of Windows.
So if I got it right, it doesn't necessarily mean that people want Linux, but that people don't wanna pay for Windows and would rather install their own copy of it.
You just got troll'd!
It is quite likely that you actually are being connected to their call center in Texas. Next time you call, ask to be transfered to somebody in India. It will be a lot easier for you to understand, especially if you ask the rep to drop his fake American accent.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
This may be the most requested feature, but I'm sure there are many who don't care for Linux and can't be bothered to request that Linux be installed. It's not as though they've got every Dell customer to make a request; only those who want something changed...
It's too early to make sense... What I'm trying to say is that the proportion of people who have gone to the feedback site is likely to be rather small from the total customer base.
This just means all the people who wanted to demand something of Dell - more RAM, shinier cases, please go AMD - demanded Linux too half the time.
The people who signed up on the site to make their little ideastorms aren't representative of Dell's entire customer base even in the slightest.
You can bet there is a post on every Linux distro forum linking Dell's site telling people to go and suggest preinstalled Linux of some flavor. That skews the results too much. Internet polls just don't work, it's a fact. For statistics to be useful you first have to know what you are going to do with them once you've got the data (i.e. have a goal that needs statistics, don't collect statistics for shits and giggles) and when you do collect the data you need to be suitably impartial. There are good ways of collecting data about customer needs the same way there are good ways to interview employees for a job (psychometric testing ftw)
If you're in the UK, the Real Tech. Support guys are in Ireland. Every single time I have called Dell for any of our desktop (Dimensions), laptops (Latitudes) or servers I have received excellent support from knowledgeable people who go out of their way to help (For example, calling me back because we have a bad connection).
Real businesses pay for Real support. You are clearly not one of them.
I suspect most people aren't too fussed which dialect or accent the people answering the phone have.
They just want someone that can understand the dialect and accent they are using, and they want to be able to understand them too.
However empathetic you are with the Indians, if you can't understand 80% of the words they're saying, and they struggle to understand you, it's a pretty fucking worthless service.
"suggest that they move their call centers only to NATO countries"
Hmm. you don;t seem to have quite grasped the point behind outsourcing. Almost all NATO countries have better working conditions, labour rights and minimum wages than the US. That is, better from the point of view of the worker.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Surprising to me nobody suggested that one yet. It annoys the crap out of me every time I see our latest purchase from 2007. Optiplex computers together with shiny Ultrasharp displays. Connected analog because someone in purchasing forgot to add the PCI Riser Card together with the DVI Addin Card. His fault maybe but how comes DVI simply isn't standard? Make people pay for the adapter if they really want to screw their eyes by using a analog flatpanel display instead of one with dvi input. -> http://www.dellideastorm.com/article/show/62483/DV I_incl_DVID_for__everything__please - Vote
Am I the only that notices a difference between analog and digital signal at 1280 * 1024?
* Do we really want to let people loose on Linux who can't [be bothered to] install it themselves?
As long as we maintain this sort of elitism, Linux will *never* make it as a viable desktop OS. Until Linux can pass the mother-in-law test, we're doomed to obscurity. So yes, we want people to use Linux with no fear of having to learn nasty words like "compile", "distro" and "drivers". Most people just want it to work out of the box.
-- Religion is not an exact science
2007 is the year of Linux. Vis... er... XP sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
2008 is the year of Linux. Vis... damn... XP sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
2009 is the year of Vista. It's about time! Come back! Please! Or I'll throw you a chair! Now! Here! Please!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Good in the GP modifies English, not spoken, so good should be an adjective (which it is) and not an adverb (which it isn't). Smiles.
Put identity in the browser.
We only want one distribution supported. Chances are that if that one works, people will be able to easily get the others working, too.
I don't even care if Dell doesn't ship Linux with their PCs, but there are a couple of specific things I do want:
- I don't want to pay for Windows. I don't want Windows. I want a discount for not picking Windows.
- I don't want to be sold hardware that won't work in Linux. I don't expect Dell to provide "official support" for hardware in Linux, but some sort of promise or indication that they won't knowingly sell hardware incompatible with Linux would be really good.
What are the chances of that. I know I saw this on there just days ago. But they seemed to have removed it. It used to be on severs that part of the operating system choices where "No operating system, Microsoft config" and "No operating system, Linux config". Did it get removed because of my comment?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
your own fault for buying an Inspiron then isn't it.
Seems like those Poweredge servers are not that powerful. Their site is having a hard time...
Cinépatas.com - Locos por el CINE
Don't you mean ridiculou$ ?
Yes, the message itself is paid misdirection from Microsoft. The number one bullshit message in this thread is that the poll was stuffed. About a dozen well moderated posts claim as much, but the chances are remote.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It isn't pressure from Microsoft, it's the fact that they make so much money from the extra crap they install on Windows before they ship.
They can't exactly install the 30-day trial of McAffee antivirus on Ubuntu now, can they?
From my experience with Solaris, I assume that you mean he is going to love his Dells after trying Solaris :p
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
But just to agree with you, all of them had very good spoken english (if a little quiet).
Funny, I'd say speaking quietly is not exactly characteristic of an American accent.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I too wish they'd offer linux preinstalled as an option... that way my mom could choose Linux when she was buying a new computer... ("Oh I can save some money!"), then her computer would show up and she'd have no clue how to use it. She'd curse linux, beg me to come install something she knows how to use, and you guys may finally realize that my mom doesn't want linux on her home computer.
- www.dellideastorm.com is slashdotted
- The floundering server is running Apache on Fedora
It's a setup!Yes, I've called them repeatedly for servers within the same price range, as well as desktops in a cheaper range. I have spoken to an Indian every single time. Personally, this doesn't bother me though; the service they gave was fine, their English was fine, so for me it's no problem. They were just as clueless as most tech support is, but that's not the point; just demand what you actually need until they give it to you :)
Side note - I was calling from NZ instead, so I would be surprised were I to speak to someone in Texas...
What was wrong with Solaris? Besides the weird userland tools -- eg, not GNU.
Check out http://www.gnusolaris.org/ , a GNU/Solaris aimed at addressing those who would like a GNU userland.
Actually, I'd really like if Dell supported an OpenSolaris option as well -- it's a fine piece of work.
Just like stats.. you can make the numbers mean whatever you want if you spin them right.. 1) Many companies that order DELL PowerEdge servers may already have a copy of the OS they want to install. For example, we used to use DELL servers and have a select/corporate Microsoft License agreement and purchase our licenses in bulk so we didn't want to (a) buy another copy or (b) have DELL do the install since we'd have to re-do it anyway. DELL is not allowed to sell a box with NO OS, so people buy the Linux box because it's cheaper. 2) as for the DELL customer request page.. that's a bunch of unscientific crap as well and if that's all DELL is using to decide what customers want they're more hosed than I thought they were. Seriously, all that ranking for "give me linux" means is that the site was floated around all the hot Linux chat rooms and all the passionate Linux geeks went and voted. There is no proof they're valid votes, or valid DELL customers, or anyone that's even old enough to buy a computer from DELL. Linux has it's place, and is making some headway, but it's not ready for the corporate desktop yet..
GNU/Solaris is in the works. If Torvalds keeps antagonizing GNU, I wouldn't be surprised to see GNU/Solaris become the favored system. Furthermore, the GNU HURD kernel is complete, but still experimental.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Actually I have a friend that works in Dell Server Support. The person you are speaking to may actually be in Twin Falls Idaho.
It sounds as if Dell server support is actually pretty good. But then we just bought our first Dell server and haven't needed support yet.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I am very much being upset that you are of the thinking we cannot speak English very correctly, you insensitive clod!
Well, maybe I'm just remembering wrong, but I could swear Dell DID offer Linux on their systems back around the turn of the century. If there really was a large demand for it - as in people actually buying pre-loaded systems - wouldn't they still be doing it? And we all know just because tons of people sign a poll saying they'd like to see Linux on the systems - that doesn't mean they're all willing to cough up the dough to actually *buy* one of those systems.
Anyone remember that? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wider adoption of Linux, but when you open something up to the public like that its an invitation for zealots to pump the numbers. And they usually do. How serious is this, Really?
-xski
Hehe. So far, from my limited experiences, which mostly comes from the curses of my co-worker, it is hard to install (hint: Use VMWare. Forget about installing directly, it's just too painful), the tools are awful, tar especially elicit a lot of curses (probably, GNU tools would help, but if you are going Linux... why not go all the way?) and the OS is rather unstable (As in crashed hard. No boot after crash.)
But other than that it is probably fine. But then, Linux is free, GPL and better, and so is BSD from what I hear. Well, except the GPL, obviously :)
Of course, this is completely anecdotal from one (1) install. I encourage anyone with a lot of free time to waste to try for himself.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
The difficulty is being able to support every distro of Linux. It's impossible. I say that one is picked, say Ubuntu and support that with proper drivers and support.
You are telling me that Dell can't demand free Linux kernel support for any hardware they offer? First off, most hardware worth selling already has a free driver. Second any hardware maker would jump through the hoop for an order with Dell.
As for "support" for all the software on top ... do they really offer that now? When someone buys Photoshop, do they expect Dell to help them out? How about games? At that point, what you want is someone like Red Hat which does provide support for applications. It really is beyond scope for a hardware provider to "support" software, but GNU/Linux is easier to support than stuff that has owners.
The bottom line is that they only need to make hardware that has free drivers available. If they do that, then anyone can install whatever distribution they want and they will depending on the sensitivity of the data stored on the machine. Non free drivers are not really what people asking for GNU/Linux are asking for. A Dell specific distribution is only moderately more trustable and flexible than Windoze. No one is going to want something they can't replace or upgrade.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Given the documentation LFS doesn't make you an uber geek. I'm pretty certain they could train a chimp to follow the instructions. The key is to understand WTF is going on as you are doing it, that's what most in our dear race have problems with. How many times must you teach someone to be able to send E-Mail before they learn to do it.
:).
Now LFS undocumented would be a learning experience
Because GNU is not Linux. Linux is a kernel. Because Solaris has some good features, like ZFS, that Linux cannot always match.
If Torvalds keeps antagonizing GNU
Should the kernel developers adopt version 3 of the GPL without question then, in your view?
Downgrade the Dell BIOS to A02, and Linux runs fine. You can download the BIOS flash from Dell.... but it only works in Windows! Duh.
OpenDell | linux http://www.dellideastorm.com/article/show/62705/DE LL_Linux_Distribution
Hi to all, I'd like to apologize (?) for "taking your jobs away", i'm a GM customer care rep in Argentina. I do agree with most of you in the fact indian support sucks mainly because of their accent. I do want somebody to give me a call just to hear my voice message and to see just how we have evolved here in south america, (i hope you don't have any complaints from us down here) and after hearing my message some of you will be surprised about how some guy in the middle of nowhere speaks just like me. Well, i thank your country all the time, will always do, for everything i've achieved and well just listen to my message and give me feed back, that'll tell you that outsource support is not always sucky. 866-790-5700 *22375 Ps: the name you'll hear on the recording is not my real name, GM doesn't allow us to use our real names because most Americans don't know how to pronounce. Thanks for reading this and ill be waiting for some feedback.. if you don't feel like replying here my email address is leandroibarra@gmail.com
Yes.
sorry incorrect. Try reading any of these articles.
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
So what would Microsoft say to the customers when the majority starts using Linux? "I have a dream that someday all OS are prefered and used equally." "What's in a name? Linux by any other name is still just an OS."
I am playing around with the Developer Express version and it is actually rather nice to use in vmware (after installing the tools).
/usr/ccs/bin - which is not in the path) but when that is settled, very nice :)
There are still some things that show that Sun still misses their target.
* In order to download a DVD-ISO you download 5 snippets which you have to _manually_ unzip and _concatenate_ to get the image. Come on - I can live with a large download
* There is no shutdown button - you need to go to root and "init 6".
There are some PATH issues (oh, why would make go in
I recommend it strongly as a Java testing/deployment platform. If your Windows build works there, you are pretty certain it it ok.
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Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
Well, for my case, even if I have to use Java for whatever reason, I would first develop it in Linux... the best developer OS around, in my not so humble opinion. E.g, the tools are all available on your fingertips right out of the box. Then I would test it on whatever platform it is to run on, since Java is so very sensitive to the target platform. So using Solaris as a test would only be relevant if it has to run there. But maybe Solaris is more familiar to people from the windowsworld, I wouldn't know.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
The way I understand it, Linux doesn't need the "latest and greatest" CPU, MEMORY, etc. Then why would anyone waste all that money buying brand new $600 Optiplex PCs when you can buy 3yr warranted "refurbished" units from someone like TKOEDucation.com? I know there are plenty of folks selling used equipment, but none (to my knowledge) that deal almost exclusively in off-lease Dell Optiplex ~ and we've been doing it for nearly 10 years. We offer 3yr warranted Optiplex starting at just $109 (including a new keyboard and optical mouse). Our most expensive PC is the GX280 - a Pentium 4 D 3.2GHz with 1GB of memory, and an 80GB SATA drive. For the higher-end P4s, we include brand new Logitech keyboards and a brand new Optical mouse. I did a comparison today, and what we sell for $429 is being sold on Dell's site in the high $600 range. So I ask everyone this - why would anyone consider buying new Dell units with Linux, when older Dell units (load your own Linux) is clearly the most cost-effective way to go? sdion@tkoelectronics.com www.TKOEDucation.com