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Ubuntu Dell $50 Cheaper Than Vista Dell
rhinokitty writes "Dell recently announced that their Ubuntu systems will be $50 cheaper than similar systems running Vista (Home Basic Edition). This will be a good fork in the road for those people who need a little extra push to take hold of their dreams and run Linux."
My little brother just installed Ubuntu on his home machine. He's in the 8th grade and his windows installation had to be wiped after the ISP threatened to shut down his internet service because of all the botware. I'd say it's a pretty easy distro.
It's the distro I install for all my friends.
When I reinstall Windows for a friend, I put Ubuntu on their computer next to windows and tell them to boot it if windows fails again.
It takes a couple of months before they really need to fall back on it. And in the meanwhile, at moments when they feel brave, they take a peek in the rabbithole.
And they confirm; Ubuntu does a great job for a fresh user.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I like the part of the www.dell.com/open site where it asks you if you are there by mistake and suggests you go back to looking at Windows machines. They even put the link to their Windows machines BEFORE the link to the Ubuntu machines. If you were selling cars and someone showed interest in an import, would you ask, "Are you SURE you want to buy one of THOSE?" Their machines work great, but the website is serious WTF material.
Doing a quick one over of the systems available, for a 15 inch screen, you're looking at 1,194 dollars for a minimum Vista notebook with full performance. (2 gigs of RAM, and a 2 GHz dual core processor). A 15 inch Ubuntu notebook, will cost you just 599 dollars. Thanks to the low hardware requirements of Linux systems. (It's quite literally twice as powerful as the desktop I'm typing from now.) There's a couple caveats there, in that I'm not sure if the optical drive and hard drive are comparable between the two. (i'm too lazy too check). And that for a desktop, the price difference won;t be as bad. (An acceptable processor and RAM for Vista gets very expensive for the notebooks, not as much so as for the desktops.) I'm also not sure how long this will last, Dell is still shipping the old 1505s for Ubuntu, the price will probably go up if they start using 1520s instead. (There's no appreciable difference in specs that I can find, though this may change once better Intel processors come out (the 1520 uses a different socket type.)). Oh, and if you want the fancy graphics stuff for Vista, you're going to need another 230 dollars (30 for the software and 200 for a 256 megabyte graphics card.) I'm not sure how much of a hardware upgrade it would take to run the 3D desktop options for Linux though, so I have no point of comparison to make there.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
While it is a good first step that Dell is selling Ubuntu machines, and not charging you (as much) for a license that you aren't even purchasing, HP has been doing this for quite a while though they don't seem to get much press for it.
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If you look at hp laptops and desktops in their "business" section many of them will list "FreeDOS" as an available os, or if they have a "Configure PC" link under the model often times it means you can choose between Windows and FreeDOS in the configuration options. One difference may be that if you get a FreeDOS pc from HP, format the drive and put Linux on it HP probably isn't going to give you any software support whereas maby Dell (or Canonical?) offers some level of support included in their price. Though if you are willing to forgo softwate technical support and just want hardware warranty coverage (for example if you are a large institution purchasing many computers is bulk) you can get a larger discount for non-windows machines from HP than Dell. The price varies but for most of their business notebooks and desktops the difference between a model with Windows XP/Vista and that same model with FreeDOS is usually $75-$150
Hopefully Dell's apparent success in selling Ubuntu desktops (and the publicity that has come with it) will push HP into doing something similar, I am a bit surprised Dell beat them to the punch on this one considering HP has:
been encouraging the use of Debian on the server end for a while
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442406-0
Already provides good driver support for Linux with regard to printers
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
And the current "Linux CTO" is a former Debian project leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bdale_Garbee
I would expect to see more announcements like this in the near future from the OEMs. Whatever argument the OEMs still had against selling desktop Linux and thereby irritating Microsoft was recently dealt a significant blow by Microsoft's announcement that they would begin selling their own machines http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
which from the OEMs perspective has changed Microsoft from an annoying element that everyone has to deal with and who gets a cut of their profit, to a company that is now moving towards being a direct competitor.
None of these are deal-breakers, really. And most people will certainly buy the "default" choice, Vista, without really giving it second thougths. But *some* will start thinking.
Linux certainly won't displace Windows on the desktop this year, or the next. But it'll continue doing what it's been doing quietly for years already: growing.
Actually, I do. I generally have a 4G FreeDOS partition somewhere on my drives. It's one of the four OS'es I have on my system. I use it to troubleshoot, run old games, inspect old floppies, create those whacky Compaq BIOS floppies for some old systems I encounter, etc. Quite usefull at times (and DOS has its beauties). Besides that, the partition is used to swap data between FreeBSD, openSUSE and WinXP.
Your main point stands though.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Lets face it Windows users never question why their most essential piece of software should be so easily broken and unrecoverable without re-installation, but lets face it they never will. They'll happily go on blaming Nvidia for their late drivers while it took Microsoft 2 years just to design the damn shutdown button.
Please do go ahead and blame anyone you want for why your system sucks but I will never find it acceptable for my operating system to be so prone to errors and unrecoverable from a system failure whether it is Windows, Ubuntu or Mac.