Turns Out Ubuntu Dell Costs $225 More

An anonymous reader writes "One week ago this community discussed the apparent price advantage of Ubuntu Dell over Vista. The article linked to a Dell IdeaStorm page with the status: 'Implemented.' Today the status has changed on that page to 'Reneged: Ubuntu Dell is $225 More Than Windows Dell.' The full price of a Ubuntu Inspiron 1420N is indeed $50 cheaper than the identical hardware configuration with Vista — except that a $275 free upgrade to 2GB memory and a 160-GB hard drive is available for Windows only."

Comments

DUH!

[Lumpy]

I love how these "revelations" happen far later when the rest of us that looked at it saw right away that the "specials" or "instant rebates" only apply to the windows machines.

There has been people here on Slashdot posting for a few months that the Open source and now linux laptops are in fact more expensive by around $200.00.

Statistics

[ilovegeorgebush]

"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." ~Gregg Easterbrook

I'm quite impressed how the (quite obvious) spin was placed on this claim. It's only $275 more if you WANT to upgrade.
Still, i'm definitely disappointed in Dell; i'd have liked that upgrade for free too...(Although Vista would need it to Pagefile usage, whereas Ubuntu would use it for the hoards of FOSS that's available...)

Re:Vista needs the space

[sqldr]

sounds like you need to try a different distro :-)

At risk of fanning the gnome/kde flames on this thread already, you could try kubuntu.. i'm not saying it's better, but it is different. You might be happier.

    I've not noticed any of these things in kubuntu, except the movie player thing, and that's likely to be a driver issue. Try configuring the underlying player to use a different rendering target, eg. X11 or opengl instead of Xv.