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No Demand for Linux in the UK?
eldavojohn writes "If you're a Linux user in the UK looking for a Linux box, you're not going to get it from Acer. The computer maker has started releasing Linux installed machines in Singapore but cited 'no demand' as a reason for not releasing the same computer with Linux installed in the UK. From the ZDNet article: 'Before the launch of the Acer Aspire in Singapore, there had been no suggestion that any major manufacturer other than Dell was even considering releasing Ubuntu-based products. However, Acer president Gianfranco Lanci did tell Financial Times Deutschland that "the whole [PC] industry is disappointed with Windows Vista". Lanci claimed that Microsoft's new operating system had not boosted PC sales, due to concerns over its stability and overall maturity.'"
They just don't want Linux on an Acer.
Not a troll, just saying.
u-bend
I still down understand why they wont allow people in the UK buy the computers with Linux, it doesnt sound that hard to do..... maybe somebody can explain why they are doing this
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
...there's just no demand for it round here!
Does anyone know if the distro they are shipping is aimed at home or office users? For example, does it have Beryl installed?
I think if you are going to distribute Linux instead of Vista, you should enable Beryl so people can see that at least on the visuals side, Vista has nothing on Linux.
I wonder how they came to the conclusion that there is no demand? Was there a survey among potential new PC buyers? Or is this company another Microsoft buddy, I wonder.
hardware vendors are squeezed for profit margin. selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin. Perhaps the studies they may or may not have conducted to determine market demand indicated that people who wanted linux also wanted a lower price tag for the hardware. Perhaps this expectation was inflexible, meaning that unit margin on a given PC would go down if they were to sell without MS. Or if they didn't conduct that study, maybe this is one of their fears that keeps them from offering linux product.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Why not just buy a computer with no OS or build a computer and install Linux on it? This really seems like a non-issue.
The game.
While I can see the failure of Vista hurting sales as businesses put off purchases of new machines or order cheaper ones that run XP fine, haven't we plateaued for a while anyway? You just don't need anything as fast as the newest machines for running the web and video. People, and businesses, are putting their purchase-dollars into other toys. Relying on a new OS to "boost" PC sales is a pretty sad strategy.
(So how
I remember there was a story a few months back about a guy who rejected the Windows license agreement on his new computer. He got his money back for the copy of Windows (without even having to return the OEM CD), and then proceeded to install Linux on it. So people who want Linux could just opt for that route... Maybe then Acer will notice "demand" for Linux!
My sig is permanently on strike.
And now you come along and post this as anonymous coward...
Which leaves me only one thing to say:
LONG LIVE ANONYMOUS COWARDS!!!! (hilarious post, bud)
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
http://efficientpc.co.uk/
Sell Ubuntu PC's. So, there must be some demand.
Just in case anyone in the UK actually wants a linux PC.
(I'm not affiliated, just found this today while looking for a new laptop)
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Hell, my computer purchases have NEVER been about the OS; that's just the plumbing. I pick my applications first and then see what they need to run on. (One could claim it works the same way in the game console industry: major "application" titles drive console "OS" sales these days, not the other way around.)
Very, very clever indeed ol' boy. Acer, you ravishing young chap, you've really done your homework. First you trash Vista as not providing anything exciting to the PC makers and business community. Then you follow it with the comment that there's "No demand" for Linux somewhere(anywhere). I can think of no surer way to incite riotous demand for your linux-loaded hypothetical product.
I say, you must have stolen a marketing strategist or two from Google or Apple. Don't worry. I won't say, "I told you so" when you finally do offer Linux in the UK and everywhere else. I'll just be standing by and by with a golf clap saying, "Good show, Guvna."
Sure there is no demand, each and every linux user wants to install linux by himself. Installing linux is the first pleasure of using it, if a manufacturer installs it for you, THEY STEAL SOMETHING FROM YOU. Anyway if you purchase a system with a crippled version of linux like lindows, xandros or licoris, the first thing to do is to erase the disk and install a real distribution.
UNFORTUNATELY, linux installastion is too easy today, most of the pleasure produced by difficulties is gone. In the good old days you would spend days and days trying to figure out why X or sound do not work on your laptop. Unfortunately today all pleasure is gone, you are all set up and going in an hour or so, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING, the installer does your job. This is not the kind of linux I like, I want the installation to be hard! Our only salvation is Gentoo!
Perhaps it's because Linux users are manually installing the OS. I don't think sales of Linux PC's as an accurate benchmark of it's overall use in an area. I would suspect that 99% of PCs come with Internet Explorer but we know Firefox use is much higher than that.
Acer said: "If you're a Linux user in the UK looking for a Linux box, you're not going to get it from Acer. The computer maker has started releasing Linux installed machines in Singapore but cited 'no demand' as a reason for not releasing the same computer with Linux installed"
Acer meant: "Because we're hogtied by Microsoft due to us whoring ourselves out to them earlier, We are currently not allowed to offer anything but their 'wonderful'(TM) line of products until 2045"
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I bought my wife an Acer laptop about a year ago. A month out of its warranty, and the motherboard failed. A search on Google turned up multitudes of people with the exact same problem (no video, so the system doesn't even complete POST). To say I was very disappointed would be an understatement.
I guess you get what you pay for with them...
I will never buy Acer again.
How about selling laptops that are built out of reliable hardware, just for a start? It's practically impossible to tell whether a laptop has decent components in it, even with a spec sheet. Parts change too quickly and websites just don't keep up. These days even buying two of the same model of wireless card is a tossup on what chipset you actually land with.
... AGAIN.
If I knew with confidence that I could buy a laptop with predictable innards, I'd hang the Microsoft tax and install my own damn OS. Instead I end up with Latest Revision Whatever, and I'm scrambling for the compatibility charts
Any hardware that works on Linux will de facto work with Windows, but Windows is, shall we say, "far more accommodating" to fly-by-night hardware vendors. Shore up your component manufacturers, guys. Then we can talk.
Whenever a vendor tells you that there's "no demand" for such-and-such, I think an important question to ask is "no demand from whom?"
For instance, it's possible that the lack of demand in this case comes from a certain Washington based software company.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
is how you misspelled Linux. Oncve or twice I can understand, but...
You're new here, aren't you?
Linux systems are sold at about the same price as windows systems.Why pay for linux when I can get it for free? Buying a windows system I get more functionality BOTH WINDOWS AND LINUX for about the same price!
I run Linux and I'm in the UK. The problem isn't that there is no market (Windows is hated here as much as it is in the US), it's just that there's no marketing for it. If there was an active attempt at marketing Linux as an OS that will allow you to do projects and not have shit crash and such it would "sell" like hotcakes.
A tech show at 5am on a Sunday morning mentioning Linux in passing every few weeks does not make a market but no one else even seems to know of Linux.
I like muppets.
Why would the PC industry think that Vista would boost PC sales? XP is a mature OS. It works. PC's are powerful enough for most people to do most things they need them to do. Why would anybody think that people would have any interest in running out to buy a new PC running Vista? That kinda' seems like a non-starter to me.
People do that with Apple, largely because people have come to fetishize Apple products. PC's are PC's now. They're appliances. There's no reason to run out and buy the latest and greatest, because the latest and greatest don't really offer anything new, and PC's just aren't all that interesting any more.
I don't respond to AC's.
I am the only Linux user in the UK, and I don't want an Asus. Sorry guys, no hard feelings.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
If I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a potential customer that I wasn't reaching I'd be trying damn hard to make room for them in my product line. I had never been a Dell customer prior to the e1505n model. They asked, and like an awful lot of other people I said that I'd buy a Dell if they factory installed Linux. I bought one, and the irony here is that I sold my less than ninety day old Acer laptop to help finance the purchase.
The point isn't that I was just one customer, it's that I was just one more customer. Dell's market share grew by just one customer that day, and probably a lot more than that but I'm speaking about my own story here. Acer (and dang near all American telecommunications companies) need to get what Dell did, that markets are built one customer at a time. I just don't get what they're teaching in business school these days. Damn kids.
load "$",8,1
You don't get out much do you?
I do not know about big companies selling linux computers. Last time when I checked, a few years ago, say in 2002-2003, I found a few small vendors specialized in linux laptops (Emperor Linux, etc). For the same hardware each and every laptop they sold was $400-500 more expensive than the corresponding Windows laptop.
I'm a Linux user in the UK, but I'm not remotely surprised by this news. By and large, people in the UK are extremely conservative about IT: Firefox take-up here has been far lower than in the US or mainland Europe, for example.
Basically most people don't want to appear remotely "geek-ish", and to show the slightest interest in what software your computer is running, or to change any of the standard default settings (internetexploreroutlookexpressmicrosoftoffice...) , is to break this anti-geek taboo.
This applies in business and the public sector as well as the consumer market. The use of FOSS in the UK is far lower than in most other EU jurisdictions, in all sectors.
And I'm sure comments like "Microsoft's new operating system had not boosted PC sales, due to concerns over its stability and overall maturity" isn't going to feed the FUD that caused the problem in the first place. If you can't stand by the operating system you choose to sell with your computers (or have made an agreement to sell with your computers), who else will?
LinUKs
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Well I got Vista w/my laptop (it was still a cheap deal via my work) but I can assure you I only picked the laptop cause it was cheap hardware-wise not because of Vista. If I could have bought XP or Ubuntu I would have bought that for day a $50 cut. Alas. This makes me wonder whether they know what their customers want or just shove Vista up their throat. I'm not impressed with Vista's performance, btw.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When you get to be a company the size of Acer, the whole notion of starting something new like selling a system with Linux installed just doesn't happen. In normal circumstances, this kind of thing comes down from on-high. Like "UK subsidiary set up a Linux SKU for product xyz."
If the people running the UK office have some sway with Acer HQ, they would say, "Market Research says there's no market so we don't want to sell it." The elusive "market research" could be anyone from the resellers that sell their product now, to paying for sell-through data. In both cases, it's quite typical that the information is totally dependent on what's sold over a long period of time.
The quotes also point out that the entire sales chain wants to do as little work as possible to make their money. Microsoft represents the least possible work. Selling a Linux desktop is still hard work in most cases and from a cost of the entire system package, probably less profitable.
Yeah, Microsoft has Acer by the short-and-curlies. As described above, there's a confluence of other factors that factor in there that help the situation stay the same.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Why do people buy these pre-built computers anyway?
I mean, putting a PC together is about on-par with making a sandwich, in terms of difficulty....
$350 Acer box + $50 video card + $30 1G RAM (total 1.5G) + Ubuntu = One nice, little, and inexpensive GNU/Linux box. Bonus: the power management stuff works. I've done this on three box so far with no big user complaints. While I like Ubuntu I suspect other distros would have similar results.
Don't worry so much about OEM installs (since there's nothing most of us can do to change it right now) and start giving people your favorite distro a la live cd this week. Think of MS Windows Vista like a cheap factory car radio: it's there until you get the time to put a real one in.
11% in 2006: ZDNet article
19% now: study (French), this is far below the ~25% European average.
IE is extremely prevalent in the UK.
I seriously think that that it is just a question of time before Microsoft's OEM deals end up in the European Commission. Expect something along the lines of disallowing the license to be tied to a specific motherboard, disallowing per-machine pricing, require vendors to offer system's without software pre-installed at a reduced cost .. etc. There is plenty of precedence for this in other EC rulings so it is just a matter of when somebody pulls the trigger and files a complaint. Sure, it will be hard for the OEMs or other organisations to do so, but at the rate that Microsoft is pissing on everything they get within financial proximity to, it will happen sooner or latter.
This story didn't happen in the UK... a little bit south of that, in Spain. We bought a dozen Acer Aspire "something" preloaded with Linux. It was a pretty good deal and I thought that if they came preloaded with any flavour of Linux it should be pretty simple to either change it or upgrade it... right? WRONG!!! They came preloaded with something called Linpus Linux without X or any recognisable management software or even a note with root password (it happened to be '111111' but it was a long guess process).... so... I decided I would just install any other distro... HA! Tried Debian, OpenSuSE, Fedora and many more but the install system would fail in all of them. After long (and when I say long I mean days...) tweaking we managed to install OpenSuSE on one of them unplugging the floppy disk drive. That gave us a clue on changing some startup parameters to be able to load a full install (I recall noirqpoll and some other obscure settings...). Conclusion: Acer didn't intend that no one would ever be able to use those systems with Linux... I mean.... how much did Microsoft pay them to preload those systems with Linpus Linux in such a way????? Regards,
Lets say that 10% of the market wants Linux...
There will be certain minimum fixed costs in staff training for pre- and post- sales support support, localising manuals and packaging, having the committee meeting about exactly how much you're gonna gouge uk buyers this time, etc. which you will need to shift a certain number of boxes to justify.
10% of the market in the UK is far fewer boxen than 10% of the market in the USA (not sure what market Signapore is covering but it could be large) - so a viable proposition in the USA might not be viable in the UK.
Secondly - the Linux market may be more tech savvy and less inclined to buy from a big player such as Dell or Acer. Not every PC supplier forces you to buy Windows.
Thirdly, lots of us would like to dump windows but know that sooner or later we're going to need it (if only inside a VM). By far the cheapest (legal) way to get Windows is to get it bundled with a machine - a "full" version costs 3x as much (and bear in mind that, in the UK, we're already being reamed for Windows at £1 = $1). It doesn't make a lot of sense not to get Windows with a new machine (especially if the supplier's deal with MS means that MS gets paid either way).
It make even be that the UK is more MS-centric than other areas, because Apple priced themselves out of the market - most importantly education - for most of the 80s and 90s (the 'ol $1=£1 trick again). The other alternative platforms (there were some good ones, but that's not important right now) occupied Apple's ecological niche, but eventually failed for one reason or another. Hence, govenment, education and big business are used to assuming a MS monoculture.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's amazing how people can be so blind to the TCO of Windoze:
There are a lot of extra costs and little have to do with Linux but selling a product in an area where there is little demmand.
Now you understand the man's frustration with Vista. Really. Every few years M$ changes their UI without substantial changes to anything else. Vista is the most radical change since 3.1 to 95, yet people like you just take that cost for granted.
With GNU/Linux, on the other hand, you have a choice of UIs and they remain the same over decades. Have you ever seen the first web browser, made in 1990? Compare that interface to Window Maker or AfterStep, which have been stable for almost as long and is still available to those who want it. Those are only the beginning of your choices and they all work well together.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Big vendors like Dell were forced to carry nothing but Vista but very quickly were forced by low sales to offer both XP and GNU/Linux. Just about everyone knows about Vista but less than 12% actually wants it. More people might actually be interested in free software than that! M$ has pushed hard against people's will, but Vista is looking more like a failure every day.
This move is also surprising, given the CEO's gripes about Vista not making his company any money and not being ready. M$ must have whacked him or something.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IQ higher then double figures
Oh, the iorny.
Since late 2004 it is easy to purchase a barebone laptop, put in your own CPU, memory, hard disk, optical disk, wireles card. You can buy them from abspc.com. excaliberpc.com, allasus.com, or even directly from manufacturers. All Asian brands are available, ASUS, UNIVILL, MITAC, COMPAL, etc. From my own experience ASUS barebones are the best.
'Building' a laptop if you can call it that, takes about half an hour, easier than building a desktop. You get a laptop without a brand name on it, you can put your own, "Joe's Company etc.". No windows sticker either, ready to install linux.
Ummm. O.K.
Except for the fact I was explaining why a company wouldn't sell a product with little demmand...
But they are some problems with your argument.
With windows while you got a new interface which you have to lear it will for the most part be consistant across the workforce all vista will look and work alike... Vs. GNU Linux where differences between distributions even cross versions of distributions are radically different. Sure if you have admin access or a lot of time you can make it look like your old desktop (assuming you have permission to do so) but you can also do that in Windows there is still progman.exe still there. You may in the shortrun save money by keeping the UI the same in Linux from version to version but over time it will cost more because more and more new people will be unfamiluar with the old interface and the old interface normally will be loosing productivity features of the new one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When is Slashdot going to learn that there are readers OTHER than the Americ... ...Oh, nevermind.
This year in the Netherlands, the following figures were published by the department of finance, for the number of income tax forms returned electronically.
This should represent the number of "home users" for the different operating systems. The absolute number would be a bit higher because it is still possible to use a paper form, but one would expect that the group not using a computer but a paper form would not likely be potential Linux users.
Windows users: 5.7 million
Mac users: 41653
Linux users: 6589
In such a market, it is not surprising that only Windows is supported.
That's not a valid argument, as the manufacturer would not be supporting "Linux". It would be supporting Ubuntu, and then only one specific version. Of course pointing out the flaw of our argument, also points out the flaw of the parents argument.
Are you STILL alive? Pls fix, tx.
Simple, use Plan 9. Then all your problems will go away.
I'm posting this from an Acer dual booting Vista (came with it, never used), and Linux (Ubuntu Fiesty, in use right now). For the record, Ubuntu picked up every piece of hardware perfectly, including the webcam, wireless card and special function buttons - it's like a first party OS.
Meanwhile, with the 3 year warranty on Acers so cheap, why did you only pay for 1?
I have also found that Acer AMD64 desktops run Ubuntu 7.04 just fine, thank you. Everything works out of the box. When I tried to downsize one to W2000 (for testing purposes) I had trouble getting the motherboard drivers that were just installed automatically by Ubuntu.
Pining for the fjords
From my experience the market for pre-installed Linux boxes is still small, at least for PDAs, laptops and notebooks. I guess for pre-configured servers there is a bigger market and rumours are that more and more mobile phones are coming with Linux. BTW: here is my international overview of Linux laptop, notebook, mobile phone and PDA vendors.
Acer in the UK is really a supermarket brand for people who want a cheap laptop for the kids. I'd guess that most Linux home users are self build, recycle-build, or blank OS buyers.
Perhaps those most likely to use Linux are not buying pre-built machines in the first place? Though Linux certainly shouldn't be pushed into the "Enthusiast OS" corner, I think that the market for pre-installed Linux on any mainstream manufacturers' machine is pretty darn small in the first place.
"No Demand for Linux in the UK" is far fucking removed from "Second-rate Manufacturer Refuses To Support Linux On One Of Their Shitty Prefab Boxes". Dell does that in the US, who gives a shit?
+5, Truth
"Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen?
Yes, once you remember that it is the UK we are talking about. Riotous demand does not mean quite the same as it does in the US.
This just goes round and round:
Ummm. O.K. Except for the fact I was explaining why a company wouldn't sell a product with little demmand...
But the best excuse you can come up with for selling Vista is that Vista will be "uniform" with itself if everyone used it. That's circular, don't you think?
You then go on to completely ignore the flexibility of free interfaces to talk about progman.exe as if it does anything of importance outside of Win3.1. KDE, for example, has been made to look exactly like the current versions of XP. No doubt, usability studies will show that people used to working with XP will be more productive on KDE than Vista, just as they did back when M$ switched from 98 to XP. Distributions like Xandros provide a smoother transition to modern software than Vista but give you hardware that works, data security and system stability.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Thankfully we have The Linux Emporium - I bought a laptop from them at http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/laptops/ recently.
Ali-Baba, I can't find the monitor!
Is a laptop with no operating system.
I can do the rest, thank you!.
Acer could be right - except that I would say that there is no noticeable demand for linux from Acer customers.
Acer never hears of any of its customers who use Linux. It should listen really.
The biggest linux market here in the UK are large enterprise organisations. I've worked with large UK gov and financial organisations to take on Linux (mostly on server side it has to be said) and they would never dream of including Acer on their ITT lists.
I would say that here in the UK, the only organiations who have the all round product set for the enterprise customer to support Linux are HP and IBM. I've seen Dell attempt to provide consultancy but they aren't ready yet (hopefully we'll see this soon). UK Gov is looking at linux for desktop use seriously now after many NAO (National Audit Office) documented successful server room implementations.
Acer are looking at their market and the types of customer - except for their expensive "Ferrari" range, most of the notebook sales are in the low-end GBP299 to GBP399 (which is very cheap in rip-off Britain) and their desktop and server range is an 'also ran' that most corporate departments have never heard of.
In terms of notebook sales, IBM/Lenovo has it wrapped up with the Thinkpad range (my X41 is fully supported by fedora 7), one large bank I worked at buys 20,000 of them a year. Look in the business lounges at LCY/LHR/EDI and it is Thinkpad heaven.
If (and when) Linux hits the mainstream home market, then Acer will have a market to tap into - but if they are not planning it now then they will miss the boat and Dell will take the lead. Note that the Sunday newspapers mention Linux now on a regular basis and the BBC mentions OSX and Linux in the same sentence as Windows on most of its media (because they are not allowed to market individual commercial organisations).
The thing that bugs me about Acers statement is that it is very chicken and egg
rd
It says that you can refuse the EULA (else it isn't accepted) and get a refund.
Your supplier, like mine, will whine and whinge but will settle out of court. You'll get your money back.
??? Out? Is it in the repositories?
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
A least one french shop site (www.rueducommerce.fr) sells some ACER Aspire with a minimalist Linux pre-installed. The Acer Aspire T180-2B7Z is sold 385,00 Euros with Linux and 515 Euros with Vista Premium.