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Dell to Offer More Linux PCs
head_dunce writes "According to this article, Mark Shuttleworth from the Ubuntu camp says Dell is seeing a demand for the Linux-based PC and, "There are additional offerings in the pipeline." I'm starting to see flashbacks of the days when Microsoft partnered up with IBM to gain control of the desktop market. Will other Linux flavors find their way to the likes of Lenovo or HP, etc, or will Ubuntu claim the desktop market working with other PC manufacturers?"
Much as I love Ubuntu, I've not heard of any small or even medium sized OEM looking to market to the everyday PC consumer "switching to Ubuntu as their OS of choice".
I think if they were to hate anything about this, it would be Mark running his mouth off about their internal company information.
This is awesome. I haven't felt so happy about the computer world since I was trying to get my commodore64 to flash the boarder colors as quickly as possible. We have Dell selling Linux, (and apparently it's selling well), we have Macintosh sales up 33% from the same quarter last year (and that's even WITH people waiting for Leopard to come out), and Vista adoption is slow. Suddenly it looks as though finally the innovation stranglehold that Microsoft has held over us for many years is coming to an end. I'm not saying Microsoft will go away, but cross-platform compatibility will become the rule, not the exception. It will be easy to choose whichever platform you like, without worrying about not being able to run half your applications. Freedom will be a realistic choice.
I suppose it was really inevitable in the long run, but I am happy to see the walls finally cracking.
Qxe4
Based on this guy's experience, it looks like they've already killed off one of the Ubuntu Inspiron notebooks (hopefully for something newer). http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?board.id=sw_linux&thread.id=11156
Linux must exploit the low cost angle to get reasonable traction in the PC market. People are starting to realize that they don't actually need the latest and greatest hardware specifications to do 95% of what they want to do with a computer.
The new $200 Asus EEE PC could provide a big boost for Linux if it takes off. The price point makes it extremely attractive as a transportible second computer, and it could find some big markets in schools and universities.
Dell and Ubuntu (or other hardware manufacturers) could start a similar revolution in the desktop market with a very low cost and low specification machine. Especially if it is also compact and stylish.
Major vendor preinstalls Linux.. people are buying it.. all you have to contribute is negative doom-saying.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Can you please elaborate?
Look in your local newspaper.
There'll be a dozen shopfront computer stores advertising pre-built computer systems. They build them in their backrooms and sell them to local families and businesses. Those guys pay wholesale prices of about AU$160.00 for Vista home premium, AU$320.00 for Office 2007 Standard and AU$50.00 for Norton Antivirus.
They can retail a Sempron/Ubuntu home or small office system for less than it costs them in wholesale MS/Antivirus licenses.
That's what Dell (and the second tier vendors) are scared of. If they drop the ball now, and let these little guys get a big enough foothold in the home/SME market, they could be in trouble.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Dell's got to be hating this.
That massive discount Microsoft gives them over smaller OEMs is Dell's biggest competitive advantage. Now they'll have to compete more directly with local whitebox builders.
They don't have much choice though. The local box builders have already switched to Ubuntu as their OS of choice. Dell has to match them or be swamped.
And there was me thinking that Dell's biggest competitive advantages were its huge purchasing power on all components, not just operating systems, and its brand-name recognition.
I guess I was wrong. Who knew that Dell was paying the same price for CPUs, RAM, hard drives, etc that outfits run out of the owners' garages were paying?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm writing this on one of the original Dell Ubuntu laptops. A few days after receiving it, I wiped Ubuntu and put on Centos5 mainly to keep the same software that I use on my servers and other workstations. There was a small glitch in getting the wireless to work, but so far it's been perfect. The laptop hibernates properly, browses wirelessly and wired, and works properly. The annoying stuff that took some configuration were the media keys, MP3 and WMA video playback, and an issue with the sound kicking off and requiring a driver reload via KDE. This wasn't too tough for me to figure out, but I have some experience with Linux. I wouldn't recommend it for the Linux newbie, but heck, that's why it ships with Ubuntu.
I'm not a big fan of Dell home systems (their business machines are much better built), but having a major vendor support Linux is a good thing regardless. By them supporting Linux fixes can get pushed to other systems. The glitches in the Intel 3945 wireless card will be worked out. Maybe the Broadcoms start working without ndiswrapper. Heck, ATI might come around and make a proper video driver set.
I chose to buy this laptop precisely because the hardware is Linux compatible (well, except for the closed Nvidia drivers which are not too bad). If more people did this it gives an incentive for hardware manufacturers to release code and drivers for Linux. That helps everyone.
If by "others" you mean a name randomly chosen from the Yellow Pages, yes. But if it's a local vendor who you can talk to and check his references, it becomes a much safer proposition, and a lot less hassle than dealing with an enormous company that makes you press a dozen buttons on your phone before you can speak to anyone, who is never the same person who you talked with before and so you have to explain your problem over and over again.
Nonsense. The main problems Linux have are the lack of commercial software support and hardware drivers. If Ubuntu takes off (scratch that, it already did) it'll fix both problems and that's obviously not something distro-specific. Then you're forgetting about the GPL. Last but not least, Ubuntu is Debian based and there's no way the GNU zealot over at Debian (I mean that as a compliment) will ever bend to the will of a corp. EVER!
I trust Mark. The guy transpires good faith. He's wasn't solely after money like Gates. He was the man with the vision (how long till we have nerd-cults dedicated to him?).
Res publica non dominetur
I have always used nvidia cards.
Since nvidia's 9xxx series of drivers, the graphical configuration utility allows you to hotplug monitors and set up dual head without touching xorg or even restarting the X server.
it's a bit disappointing that the feature isn't there for users of other cards, but it appears X is going through some big changes and hopefully soon enough it will hit the 21st century...
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
The margin on hardware is much smaller than it is on software, MS can give maybe a 70% discount whereas they might be able to get 10% on hardware.
Dell might be able to get 10 percent on hardware?
If you think that the difference between the price that Dell pays for the average piece of hardware and the price that a one-man operation would pay for the same hardware is 10 percent then you're nuts.
Dell undoubtably buys directly from manufacturers. When it buys Intel CPUs, it buys them directly from Intel. When it buys Belkin accessories, it buys them directly from Belkin. When Dell buys, there's no middleman.
When a one-man operation buys Intel CPUs or Belkin accessories then it buys them from a distributor. There might be one, two or maybe even three such middlemen between it and Intel or Belkin. Each middleman takes a cut, which drives the price that the one-man operation pays for the products higher and higher. How much is that cut? Well, 10 percent per distributor would be a fair figure.
(If you want to get a fairer idea of distribution costs, take the cost per 1,000 units that is typically quoted regarding CPUs and compare that to the typical single unit street price. Allow a small (maybe 5-10 percent) profit for the vendor and you'll see that the distribution chain takes a fair chunk along the way.)
And all that's before you talk about how much of each product is bought by Dell. There's a big difference between maybe buying 5 CPUs a week through the channel and buying almost 200,000 a week directly from the manufacturer.
In 2006, Dell accounted for 16.1 percent of the 59 million PCs shipped worldwide. Last year, Dell shipped 950 million PCs.
Are you really telling me that you think that, with that sort of buying power, you don't think that Dell gets deals that give it a more than 10 percent hardware cost price advantage?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
It isn't about the cost, it's about the software or in particular the desktop software and how easy it is to install and get running, although perhaps of more importance is the availability and range of software (ne: programs) available, and how reliable they are.
As soon as Unix/Linux people realise this and look beyond their own nose (ne: favourite flavour of GNU/Linux), they will realise that the API is the real jewel. The reason that Microsoft beat IBM at its own game with the OS2/Windows war was because it won the API war. They convinced, or scammed (depending upon your point of view) programmers to write to the Win31 API and OS/2 was killed. Providing development tools such as Visual Basic and Access which removed the whole API schema just made their task a whole lot easier.
Forget the fancy esoteric languages and "scripted" (ne: interpreted) tools, because they are not what is needed to wrestle the end user away from Windows. What is required is a common platform (display, communications, and file API's to name just a few). Sure, let the system level person choose between a Gnome or KDE desktop. Let them run either RedHat, Suse, or Ubuntu (insert flavour of the week) but provide a common interface to of them all via a simple and straight-forward API. Then provide the killer application development tools like Visual Basic and/or Access which will let newbie programmers write their killer app with no knowledge of computers or programming and then GNU/Linux may just stand a chance.