Slashdot Mirror
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."
Please... If it was really anyone's dream to run Linux, I don't think $50 more on a Dell PC is going to stop them.
Many Linux users are willing to buy their own rigs, or have been content to purchase Windows and then either dual-boot or just format and install Linux.
I don't think this move will equate to widespread acceptance of Linux on the desktop for the home. You're not going to shop Dell's site as a Windows lover with no Linux experience and say, "since Dell is selling Linux, I think I'll give it a try and buy a computer without Windows!"
It is nice that people will save money, however, there is a potential large impact of this move.
Several IT departments in all kinds of large corporations struggle with trying to get corporate suits to accept Linux in the workplace. And while large companies like RedHat or Novell will sell support, corporations like familiarity and standardization. If said corporation has a corporate contract with Dell, and Dell is officially standing behind Ubuntu and selling Ubuntu preinstalled, and you can see it as a cost-cutting move to the suits at the same time, then this might help spread the acceptance of Linux in the workplace.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
.. they're too confused about all the different editions of Vista ;)
I'm sorry, but i gotta say "...who need a little extra push to take hold of their dreams and run Linux." is the single-most pathetic thing i've read on the entire internet, ever.
My little brother just installed Ubuntu on his home machine. He's in the 8th grade and his windows installation had to be wiped after the ISP threatened to shut down his internet service because of all the botware. I'd say it's a pretty easy distro.
I don't think that is a big enough incentive, people that have been brainwashed by M$'s propaganda about how great Vista is aren't going to suddenly turn and say "ZoMG! This OS is $50 cheaper! Forget Vista!"
A $50 difference will do nothing in terms of persuasion for the common man, the people that buy Ubuntu pre-installed are only the ones that have done the research and know at least a bit about what they've doing, and what they want, the rest know Windows, and M$'s advertising.
What Ubuntu needs from Dell, isn't a $50 price difference, but some available INFORMATION, look here: www.dell.com/
I don't know about you, but all I see are Vista loaded machines, I didn't check every page, but nobody is going to buy an Ubuntu loaded machine if it's buried somewhere at the back of the site, or the store.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
It's the distro I install for all my friends.
When I reinstall Windows for a friend, I put Ubuntu on their computer next to windows and tell them to boot it if windows fails again.
It takes a couple of months before they really need to fall back on it. And in the meanwhile, at moments when they feel brave, they take a peek in the rabbithole.
And they confirm; Ubuntu does a great job for a fresh user.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I'd pay 50$ dollars to never read a man-page or hear "RTFM" by a Linux zealot again.
Is this the PC for Vista/XP pirates? I mean, why pay an extra $50 when you don't have to?
Go to dell.com, type in Linux as search, click on suggested link (ignore the recommended M$ stuff)
- select Ubuntu,
"XPS 410 N"
click through "adding features",
leave everything as default and...:
"1Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor - Next Business Day"
I like it!
In Ubuntu's case, the GUI looks familiar and there isn't any need whatsoever for a firewall and anti-virus software, even though that's available too. If your needs are like most, you won't miss a thing.
There are two steep learning curves:
1. Putting the finishing touches on most of the applications included. An example is the kmail spam filter bogofilter. Sure, there's a gui to sort of get it going, but you'll discover it doesn't really work until you set up the wordlist.db and a cron job to feed the wordlist. None of which is obvious.
2. Troubleshooting. It's all different underneath and it takes some time to figure it out. But it's logical. Once you get the hang of it, it's much easier to use.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Wow, rhinokitty can sure lay on the purple prose. What's next, Linux will help me leverage my key skills and maximize my full potential, making my chakras spin in unison to bring me closer to a fully actualized human being?
Go somewhere random
I hate to say this because I'm a huge *buntu fanboy. I recently bought a Dell 1501 with much better specs than the 1505n for $300 less off of dell business via slickdeals.net. The buttons on the front of the laptop are the only major difference.
The Ubuntu ones may be cheaper, but the Dell Business ones go on sale very often and the hardware is just as linux friendly.
...if I'm spending thousands on a new laptop, I'll still take the OS if it's optional. I can pick up Ubuntu for nothing later on. Vista would cost me hundreds.
This isn't a push in the right direction, it's a slap in the face!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You're right, of course. A $50 difference is not that persuasive. However, at least the Ubuntu machine isn't more expensive than the equivalent Vista one. After all, there was considerable worry that Dell would keep the Ubuntu price higher (for a variety of reasons, such as contracts with MS or kickbacks from craplet installs, etc.).
So, I see Dell's offering of Ubuntu machines as a small step in the right direction. And the fact that they are a bit cheaper than the Vista equivalent is also a step in the right direction.
I highly doubt many consumers will be randomly browsing the Dell website and say "damn, those Ubuntu machines look awesome!"... but at least these prices allow those in the know to suggest to others: "If you're looking for a new computer, consider getting a Dell Ubuntu machine. Ubuntu is very stable and secure and you don't need the most expensive computer to run it. In fact, it's a bit cheaper than the equivalent Windows machine!"
Will this give Linux a 15% marketshare overnight? No. But it's a step towards breaking the current OS monoculture... and that's a good thing.
I've installed Ubuntu on computers used by well over a thousand new computer users. Common tasks were picked up with as much ease as I've witnessed with first-time Windows users.
A few things that new users tend to find useful:
Those are just the first few things that spring to mind. I'm sure others can add to this list.
Those who are accustomed to Windows will be accustomed to certain conventions, and this will rankle a little bit at first. But once you get used to the fact that, for example, the Start button is on the top of the screen rather than the bottom, you quickly find a lot to like.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
$50 bucks cheaper? Who thinks that this is going to make a single person buying a Dell change their mind? $50? One tank of gas? 1/12 of an iPhone (with no service)? 6% of the purchase price? That might not even cover shipping. You gotta be kidding me if anybody would look at this and say, "hmmm... well then... 50 bucks, huh? Well, sure, I might as well learn an entirely new operating system and find replacements for all of my programs that won't work if there's $50 at stake!"
Slashdot has officially hit a new low.
I don't respond to AC's.
- Ubuntu price $0
- Dell incentives from trialware/crapware $0
- Net $0
So IMO a $50 savings for Ubuntu is actually impressive.You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
To be nice, Vista was built with the idea of adding 20 million features to it then trying to make it stable. Which at the moment it really doesn't. Most business customers (Whom BTW account for a vast majority of Microsoft revenues) Want something that that is fast, extremely stable, and consistent. So if it always crashes when you press A 4 and 5 in a sequence it crashes but everything else works perfect. We can work with that. It's stable its easy to predict and easy to fix. Most people in business barely even use those functions in the current windows product. Most companies use a form of exchange server and outlook, word, excel, powerpoint, half a dozen network drives and a dozen or so other 3rd party apps specific to thier field like autocad, Photoshop, testing, etc. All of which slows down when you add in more resource hogging windows functions. The most useful new windows tool I've seen added to date has probably been remote desktop, built in zip functions, run command on the start menu. But even then it has its limits. I'd much rather have a faster way to switch between spreadsheets when I've got 6 open at once, A hotkey wizard for excel and word. A easy hit task manager that functions like the old autoexec.bat file did back in day where all I had to do is just simply take the one I wanted to run doom with and rename it while the old one automatically got named to .bak so I can easily rename it back for other users using other programs.
I'd like something that just keeps track of what programs I am or am not using then highlights the ones I'm not using so I can quickly shut them down for more memory. Or even better. A memory saving profile that I can run just the basics when I'm doing work related stuff on the network access to the net.
I'm not saying I can make an operating system out of my closet(maybe a computer). But as an end user who looks at a machine for 8-12 hours at a time I know what I want.
This is _exactly_ what most people that wanted Linux pre-installed in their PCs said they wouldn't do: whine about details. Why can't I get a better battery? Why is it only 50$ cheaper? Why is it gray?... We wanted this; now it's time we show we can backup our statements with cash. Vote. Wallet. Now.
50 dollars AND you don't have to uninstall Vista and then install Ubuntu. Sounds like a decent deal to me.
hah i know, it's pretty pathetic if your dream is to run linux on a crummy dell laptop.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
how come the Linux system doesn't have this listed?
Lithium is just a plot by M$ to make you less creative. You think Theo de Raadt and Hans Reiser would have achieved what they did if they took their lithium like good little sheeple?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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)
you just have time to cancel or allow?
you just have time to cancel or allow?
Yawn. Now that this has been repeated to death, let's face it: all other OS have similar elevation dialogs. OSX has it, and other flavors of BSD, Linux has it.
It's part of life when you don't run as root all the time.
The fact you may get too many of them on Vista usually signifies improperly setup account, or poorly written software. In my experience, the elevation dialog only pops up rarely and when you'd really expect it to.
I've been a pretty strong opponent of Linux on the desktop for a long, long time now.
The first distro installed was Debian 2.2 off of floppy disks, so I've been at this for quite a while. I'd try it out, work with the desktop for a few weeks, and inevitably move back to Windows. I went through the motions with this for a few years, trying out Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, and Gentoo in the process. Each time, I reverted back to Windows.
I eventually got a mac, and that was that. I had my unix, and I had my desktop, and I was happy. At school, I would occasionally use the computer labs (running Fedora Core + KDE) to compile some code, or whip up a quick TeX document. It was usable to me, but clearly not ready for the average user (that's what my mac's for)
Fast forward to last month. My mac at work was acting up, and because I only use it to run MATLAB through a remote X server, I figured that I'd give the Ubuntu PPC port a try.
On first impressions, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's just as good as, if not better than Windows for desktop usage. The default install is simple and very well polished. I eventually switched to Xubuntu, which was also extremely simple. The settings/preferences panel is top-notch, and the package manager is flawlessly integrated into the OS.
I still like MacOS for my home computer, if only because of iLife, and all the multimedia and photo/video editing apps that Linux doesn't have yet. However, Ubuntu is a very viable competitor to Windows, even for somebody who's never used Linux before.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
However, I just did a quick comparison of Ubuntu vs Vista Home Basic on Dell's new Inspiron desktops (Ubuntu 530N vs Vista 530), configuring them as closely as possible, and the Ubuntu desktop was $150 cheaper. Did I miss something in the configuration? Here's what I configured (copied/pasted from the last page before adding to the shopping cart):
- Inspiron 530 with Vista Home Basic ($479)
- Inspiron 530N with Ubuntu ($329)
Notes: Integrated Intel GMA 3100 and free 56K modem were available options for Windows but not Ubuntu (I'm assuming it's a driver issue for Ubuntu). For some strange reason, the Ubuntu system is configured with an optional $170 LCD (I removed it for the comparison). The warranty/support for the Ubuntu system covers hardware only and software support can be purchased from Canonical (or you can use their forums for free). The Vista system's warranty includes some software support, of course.Intel®Pentium® dual-core processor E2140 (1MB L2,1.60GHz,800 FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic
No Monitor
512MB Single Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 1DIMM
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
48X CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
Microsoft Works 8. DOES NOT INCLUDE MS WORD
1 Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor - Next Business Day
Free 3GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Year
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 7.0
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
Intel®Pentium® dual-core processor E2140 (1MB L2,1.60GHz,800 FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
No Monitor
512MB Single Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 1DIMM
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
48X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
1 Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor - Next Business Day
No Modem Option
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
No Productivity software pre-installed
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
The Ubuntu system seems to qualify for a $100 discount for some reason, and would normally be priced at $429, for another $50 difference. That's a nice little computer for $329.
From our own experience, what Dell is doing is just half-hearted attempt, at best, to gather some good press. Their offer of Linux-based laptop is ridiculous. And anyone who thinks that the move may be the beginning of Linux world domination, well, hate to break it to you, that's pipe dream.
... guess... that's right, Windows. And I said partial list because you still need to go out tracking some of the most important drivers, such the graphic driver, sound driver, etc. (I'll explain later) ... guess again... that's right, Windows.
We had bought a few Dell laptops in the last six months, and every one of them is so-called Linux-based laptop. When we open the box, here's the list of what we found:
- The machine and components, the usual suspects (no surprise here)
- one CD containing a partial list of different drivers for
- one CD of junk softwares that you will never use, for
- 3 CDs of Red Flag Linux (yeah, in China, that is).
I booted up the machine, half of them came with DOS installed, but you can't do anything much as there's no driver for anything anyway. The other half came with absolutely nothing installed. Empty disk.
Ok, just for the heck of it, to see if they actually tried to install the linux distro themselves. I installed Red Flag Linux, it installed fine, but missing a few drivers, or won't detect properly. I had to mess with it for a while to get it to work, but still the graphics is not working optimally.
Ok, so far, I don't think any buyer is going with Linux here.
So, I installed Windows XP. And the drivers CD is missing some serious drivers, I ended up with a system which was not any better than with Linux. I looked up the support web site, enter the serial number, and the system told me the serial number of that machine does not exist. Who cares, I just downloaded a bunch of drivers to try out, those drivers that are published for the models close to the one I have. Doesn't work.
After half a day of messing around, I called tech support. Nice guy, actually. He told me that the drivers downloaded from the web site don't work, because I have a "pirated" copy of Windows XP. Ok, fine, give me those that work then. He emailed a few links to get those missing drivers. None of these links showed up on their web site.
Go figure. With that kind of so-called "support", I doubt Joe Sixpacks is going to have Linux on that machine.
Say an SMB buys 10 computers..
$50x10 = $500 savings
Say an Enterprise begins its upgrade/replace rollout of 10,000 computers..
$50x10,000 = $500,000 Savings
It might not seem a lot to a 1 purchase user but that money adds up. In my university they didn't spend $20 extra dollars per Dell for an optic mouse because of the costs.
Aren't you getting a bit mixed up?
Linux is supposed to be the complicated one. If you need to read all that just to use Windows safely, how do you expect a granny to cope?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I think it's nice that Linux users save $50, but I think this will have zero effect on Windows users. People aren't going to switch because it's cheaper; rather, they're more likely to say, "You get what you pay for," and see the $50 extra as a vote for Windows' quality.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
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.
- 0-0-121.html
/ 28/181204
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.
Solution the the above users issues that "Ubuntu/Kubuntu and most distros don't have support for Quicktime, Real Player, MP3's, ATI drivers, NVidia drivers, etc. Often these aren't hard to install, but they can't be bundled with the original installer" Absolutely agreed...however you can install Linux Mint which is Ubuntu with the codecs already installed. Im using GNOME but I know there is a KDE version and I believe an Xfce version as well. Personally Im generally an Arch Linux user which is not newb friendly but can be learned...because Arch was the first distro I ever ran from Linux. Anywho I tried Linux Mint just to see how it worked out because of the ever growing popularity of Ubuntu and wanting to know if the codecs would actually work right after install. I have to say I AM impressed Linux Mint has been quite nice, but Im ready to get back to my Arch box ;-)
You've got to be kidding me.. Ubuntu Dell versus . . . V.D.?
Everyone who runs Linux on a laptop knows how tricky it is to make sure your distro works with all the laptop features, and the wireless, etc.
When Dell sells an Ubuntu-loaded laptop, you know it's going to work out of the box.
When HP sells a FreeDos laptop, you don't know what's going to happen when you put Ubuntu on it.
- Are you sure you want to copy an executable from a shared folder? Yes
- Are you sure you want to write something to a system folder? Yes!
- Sorry, Dave, I can't do that. Copying
.exe files from the network into "Program Files" is disabled for security reasons. WTF???
Which is obviously an idiocy, and one I haven't seen elsewhere (in Ubuntu, anyway; haven't had a chance to play with Mac OS).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.
You know these "There's too much choice in Linux, it's too hard to make selection" whine-trolls we see around aren't very accurate.
It's not 1995 anymore. The time when either you had to pick manually everything up or when the default installation included 3 different products all in crash-prone alpha version (because all the application where recent and none functioned 100% of the time requiring you to mix the use of all 3 to cover your needs) is over.
Yes, for each task in Linux there exist at least several dozens of possible candidate application.
*BUT* for most mainstream application, if you just Yes-click-trough the installation (something that the EULA-trained Windows user is very used to) you just get a basic set of everything you need. Most distro will provide with 1 default desktop (Gnome or KDE in most cases, depending on your religion), 1 browser (usually Firefox. Or Konqueror) 1 email program (Thunderbird, or Evolution, or KMail) 1 Office suite (OOo or Abiword+Gnumeric+etc. or KOffice).
No need to choose a solution a default choice has been pre-maid to help you. Just hit the icon in the menu and let the default application startup.
Want something else ? Then only you have to fire up the software package manager (Yast, Synaptic, RpmDrake, Anaconda etc. or whatever starts when you click on the icon labelled "Add/Remove software").
And even here, there's still an easy route :
- Most installator provide a "task oriented" mode. Want to make a web server ? Just check the box next to the webserver "Activity" and the installator will take care to provide you a default set of tools.
- Only when you need a specific package will you have to hunt it in the list.
And all that is when installing a distro yourself. Now, I'm sure that Dell has already put the trouble to make sure that every Ubuntu laptop ships with a perfectly functional set of basic application covering all the needed tasks. User don't have to hesitate between 4 different word processors or a dozen of different web-browsers (include a couple of text-mode only).
Just clic on the menu entry that says "E-Mail".
For the lazy user, everything will be, I suppose, set to go. That "burden of choice" some bloggers always complain about is left only for those who actually care to make very specific choices.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I believe you are mistaken in your conclusion and most of your supporting statements. I installed kubuntu for my 12 year old sister over a year ago (she's 13 now) and have only had to help her with a few minor problems like upgrading to Flash 9 before there was a package ready.
Many, if not most, Windows applications can be installed and used easily enough with wine. When my ex-girlfriend's Windows crashed and her 'recovery' cds weren't good enough to recover, I gave her a kubuntu cd to try. She had it installed in 30 minutes and the first thing she said was "I can't use this without the official YIM client" (paraphrased, but that's the jist of it). I told her I don't DO proprietary software and wasn't sure how to go about installing it on kde/ubuntu.
Within 5-10 minutes she had found simple and comprehensive documentation on how to install and setup all of her favorite and necessary Windows applications in ubuntu. Another 30-40 minutes, and she had Word, IE, YIM and several other Windows programs installed with icons and menu entries. I am still not sure how she did it.
My ex had 0 experience with Linux except what I had told her, which was pretty much just stuff about the opensource philosophy and some features I had mentioned. One of the biggest/best advantages of linux is how easily support and documentation can be found and used.
As for the other shortcomings you mentioned, they are shortcomings of the sites and those who developed them, not Ubuntu or Linux. Keep in mind which software/OSes are compliant to standards and which aren't. The question was: "Is Ubuntu good?", not "Is Ubuntu good at viewing substandard websites or running proprietary software for another OS out of the box?". Since it provides alternatives to most of the proprietary software you mentioned and clearly marks their function, as well as can be easily modified to run the proprietary counterparts, the answer to this question should be "Yes".
"it took Microsoft 2 years just to design the damn shutdown button"
Now be fair, it took them two years to design _and_ implement the shutdown _dialog_, which has several buttons on it. The pressure must have been pretty unbearable when Vista was about to ship after they'd only been given two years to decide how big those buttons should be, what order to put them in, how much space should be between them, how far to inset them from the edges of the dialog, and if that wasn't enough, also ensure that their event handling code called the correct OS routines to prevent potential disasters such as the Cancel button making the machine reformat its hard disk after sending Ballmer an insulting EMAIL. QA people and beta testers can't be relied on to spot this sort of error before the OS is being shipped out on millions of OEM machines, so the responsibility for getting it right was entirely on the shoulders of the poor shutdown dialog team, who probably used special teams of mouse-wielding robots for months to ensure that each of the buttons did exactly what it was supposed to with the legendary level of reliability that's become the hallmark of Microsoft software.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I just ordered one of laptop from Dell, due in a week or so. I knew where to look and what to get. Then I did it as if I was Joe Clueless who heard about Ubuntu and wants to look at Dell and what they offer.
Take a look at the front page of Dell.com. What do you see? Lots of products but no mention of Ubuntu. Let's look at a laptop, I see many options. I look and pick one. The option for this Ubuntu thing must be here. I pick a laptop. I look. Comes with Windows Vista Home Edition. Huh? Maybe its under "Build yours". I try that.
I click a couple of options and see "Operating Systems" Maybe this is it? I click on it. It gives me a choice between Windows Vista Home and Home Premium.
What he doesn't realize that its back on the product page under "Essential Links"...Open Source PCs. Click on that and you get a choice between "Shop Ubuntu" or "Shop for FreeDos" which are under "Shop for Dell PCs with Windows"
I know that Dell Ubuntu products are aimed at tech enthusiasts and Open Source fans but if Dell hopes to be successful beyond a niche market they need to try a lot harder.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I took Vista because I had no choice. It came with the HP Pavilion laptop I purchased, and MS would not allow the store to sell any other MS operating system. No big deal, I thought. I made the system restore disks as per instructions. I then shrank Vista's NTFS partition using the Vista tools, and installed Ubuntu in the empty spot. I left the HP restore partition alone. I was dual booting fine for a couple of days. However, it started taking longer and longer for Vista to shut down. Now it won't boot at all.
:-) Don't have time to fix Linux problems anymore.
I've tried "Last known good configuration". I've tried "Repair your system". I've tried "Safe Mode", "Debug mode", and "Safe mode with Command Prompt". I've tried the HP restore partition. I've tried the System restore disks that I made. I've even tried the Vista Anytime Upgrade disk that came with the machine. Vista refuses to boot up. The closest I get is a blank blue screen with a mouse pointer. I've left the machine for hours, hoping that the desktop would populate, but no dice. Many people are in the same boat that I am. Vista hangs when it loads CRCDISK.SYS I've been scouring the net, but so far the only solution seems to be return the laptop.
Ubuntu and Fedora both work fine, however. No problems with the wide screen graphics. No problem with the WIFI. There's even no problem reading the NTFS partitions.
I'll take Vista thanks
I'll take Linux thanks. I don't have time to fix Vista problems anymore.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Do your own homework.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
To all those bitching about how a $50 discount won't convert any Windows users: you're missing the point.
Dell is in shit, in a very competitive, saturated market. Common business sense says the best thing they can do is to be the first to into a new market.
Headline: the new market is not one of potential converts from Windows - not yet, anyhow.
Dell's hoped-for market consists of :
* long-term linux users with Real Jobs who need a new PC but don't have the time or just can't be arsed to build, install, and customise Yet Another Linux Box.
* The type who sometimes, against their best wishes, might feel themselves lured back to Windows because they feel it's just *easier*.
* The type who would quite like official support on a preinstalled linux box, instead of banging their heads against the ITSupport wall when the Windows box they just bought, wiped, reinstalled & voided the warranty for has a hardware problem.
These types are likely to discriminate in the long term against a company that quoted them *more* for a preinstalled linux box. For these types, $50 is not an outright incentive, but it "is" a nice goodwill gesture. Converting Windows users comes later.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dell's intended market is *us*. And no-one's bothered with us before.
As the man said elsewhere : Vote. Wallet. Now. I know I will as soon as the UK gets the same offer.
Cheers,
C
I recently bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu (which I am typing this message on) and it is extremely easy to pick up. One of the cool little things that the post above forgot was that when you're connecting to wireless networks, its a simple dropdown menu that lists all the available networks with bars for their current signal strength. Much easier and more user friendly than windows. Thats true pretty much across the board. The only real problem I've had was when I ran the updates and the basic linux updates screwed up the boot loading. There are instructions on how to fix it but I've been nervous about updating my core ever since that happened. So, not _perfect_, but compared to Windows I'd say it is very, very good.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.