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Why Dell Won't Offer Linux On Its PCs
derrida sends us to an article in the Guardian by Jack Schofield explaining why he believes Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves. Quoting: "The most obvious [problem] is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system... so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naive users who don't RTFM... and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying 'Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support' isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?"
When cars first came out, they broke down all the time, and every driver was also his own mechanic. This persisted through to the 60s when men were still expected to be able to fix a car by pulling up the hood and futzing about. You also saw a lot of opining about the internals of how cars should be put together.
Then Toyota showed up, and made cars that stopped breaking down. Gradually, nobody was hyper-opinionated about the internals of cars, till we get to the point today where nobody but Toyota dealership can actually understand the internals.
Same with Linux distros. We've been so starved of turnkey solutions for so long, that we're all hyper knowedgable distro experts! Just like the early auto operator/mechanics. Of course these people are going to have fine-grained and diverse favorites.
When someone gets a new laptop and figures out that its "good enough", they'll stop worrying that it doesn't have Slack (or whathaveyou), and just appreciate its "good enough"ness. This can't happen from the demand side, the supply side has to lead the way. Then the userbase of Linux will change. Then we'll start to complain bitterly. Remember when AOL happened and the Internet started to suck? That fate awaits Linux too.
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And anywho, nobody's asking them to support every possible distribution for their computers. They're asking for two things:
1) support SOME distro, it doesn't matter what it is
2) open source any hardware wierdness you control, stuff like sleep/suspend, software volume control buttons, and whatnot. Just put that stuff out there and all the big distros will automatically move to support you. That's what distros do.
We're not asking, say, Toshiba to create a huge linux compile farm and put out Toshutils for every distro. Just expose the API, create a reference implementation, and let the community do the rest.
BSD doesn't have distributions. At least not in the same way that Linux does, wghere its pretty much the same kernel with differet packages distributed with it.
The BSDs are all different operating systems, with diferent designs, different objectives, different philosophies, differet kernels, different stregths and weakness and different purposes. The diference between on BSD and another is far greater than say ditro X ad distro Y, where asidefrom the package manager and default packageset, its the samething under the hood. Take FreeBSD vs. OS X for example. They're indeed both BSDs, but they'recompletely different OSes, not distributions of BSD4.4.
Back to the point:
Ruling out OS X, FreeBSD is the only BSD geared explicitly to desktop/workstation/server use, as is developed primarily on x86. The rest focus on uber-specialized roles (OpenBSD = paranoid security, netBSD = it'll run on anything under the sun, but since they only need it to run on Dells, who cares?, MicroBSD/PicoBSD = embeded devices and boot floppies, OpenDarwin isn't developed anymore, MirOS/PCBSD/DesktopBSD are all FreeBSD spinoffs, and still in their early infancy, e.g. also ruled out).
Ergo, GF is right. FreeBSD does solve the "distribution sprawl", since its the only one built for the role in question.
I very much doubt the support issue is the problem. If enough people would buy it Dell could just start the Dell Computer Expert line and make it damn clear that you don't order one unless you know what your doing and their is no support on anything but the hardware. Hell if they were worried enough about their name they could just sell them under some name other than Dell.
I suspect the problem is economic.
For starters I bet people demanding linux are far more willing to voice demands than they are to put up money. I bet tons of the people who asked dell to offer a linux PC wouldn't really buy one. They might like linux but when it comes time to buy a new computer they decide to dull boot and realize it's cheaper just to buy the computer preloaded with windows. Even if this isn't the case the possibility that linux advocates make more noise than they would buy computers is something Dell must consider.
Secondly Dell doesn't have apps to sell people who buy linux only boxes printer ink and all sorts of other high margin items. If anything the problem is they realize the people who buy linux boxes wouldn't buy extended support, at least not the sort of support it was economical to offer. Dell probably has a nearly zero margin on the basic PC and makes up their money on the extras. Why bother selling a linux PC if the purchasers are smart enough not to buy any of the high margin extras?
Finally there is the concern of pissing off MS. Whatever anti-trust rulings MS is constrained by why risk pissing them off unless it would bring you a high margin business?
The issue isn't offering support it is making money!
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