Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo to Sell, Support Linux on ThinkPads
Pengo writes "Lenovo has announced that they will begin selling T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 pre-installed beginning sometime during the fourth quarter. In addition to supplying the hardware support, Lenovo will also handle OS support for ThinkPad customers, with Novell providing software updates. 'Unlike Dell, which has targeted its Linux offering primarily at the enthusiast community, Lenovo's SLED laptops are targeted at the enterprise. Whether they are running Ubuntu, SLED, or some other distribution, the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support. If Lenovo is willing to collaborate with the Linux development community to improve the Linux laptop user experience, it will be a big win for all Linux users, not just the ones who buy laptops from Lenovo.'"
My gut reaction is that Vista's poor reception helped make this happen. Partly because of poor customer demand, and partly because it forced Lenovo and Dell to look elsewhere for product differentiation.
Am I right?
I have mod points right now and small part of me wanted to Mod you down. I really do try not to mod people down because their opinions differ from mine though so here I am posting.
Small steps in the wrong direction aren't good steps. They actually get you further from your goal.
While I am not certain that this is actually in the wrong direction - I do know that the Novell - Microsoft agreement is NOT THE RIGHT direction.
Losing does not justify making bad decisions.
Note as well that losing is your word. I did not realize that have a plethora of available software packages and alternatives meant losing. If you mean that the OS community is smaller then Microsoft then I'll agree. But when I want to run a LAMP server or toss Ubuntu on my new box I can do that.
I do have the freedom to choose. Agreements like the Novell - Microsoft agreement lead towards losing many of those freedoms.
No, really.
Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference. When I was in K-8 (eighties), you would have been hard-pressed to find a non-Apple product in any of the classrooms. When I was in HS (90-94), the school computer lab had only Macs. Our two semesters of programming were taught in Pascal on Macs. It wasn't until college that I had a PC computer lab available to me. Didn't make any difference at all.
Why not? Because I didn't make the purchasing decisions for my family. My parents did. And my dad had to use PCs at work. This had nothing to do with what he had grown up using - PCs were thin on the ground when he graduated HS in '67 - but with what his office had purchased. Which means, despite Apple's best efforts at co-opting the brains of America's youth, I learned to use the PC.
Which is why, once the PC was entrenched on the office desktop, that was it. If we want Linux/BSD/HURD/what-have-you to gain widespread adoption, it's the business desktop that we need to target.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
The best part about this is you've got two separate companies (Lenovo and Dell), two different product lines (Thinkpads and Inspirons), and two different distributions of Linux (SUSE and Ubuntu). This means that both companies and both distros will be pushing to get laptop hardware support working well with Linux.
If you've just got Dell trying to buy compatible hardware for a single product line, then good Linux support for each laptop component might only come from a single manufacturer. Now that Lenovo's in the game, they'll be looking for Linux compatibility from their hardware manufacturers' as well; manufacturers which are bound to be different in many cases from Dell's. Let's also not forget software configuration, how many times have you been using one distro and just can't get some piece of hardware to work, you find a solution online, but come to find out it's only if you're using a certain distro with a certain kernel version.
This situation means better hardware support for everyone no matter the distro or company (or lack there of).
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
I think it's "wishful thinking" based on a desire for Microsoft to "get what's coming to it" on your part to think this has anything at all to do with Vista / Microsoft, and don't forget that XP is still an option with *most* OEMs. This has nothing to to with Microsoft's market share, which unfortunately remains strong. Assuming a great shift in the Dark Side is presumptuous at best.
But it's still a great sign that things are starting to move just a little.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yes, Vista was a complete failure -- it only sold 60 million copies so far this year. Microsoft will surely never recover, only having 34 billion dollars in cash.
If that's not failure, I don't know what is.
With all due respect, if corporate management would shut up and listen to what those unwashed hippies are actually saying, they might be able to get their collective head out of their ass and realise that the irrational, unrealistic ideologues are the ones in the Brooks Brothers suits.
Free Software is not jihad. It's a rational and well-developed model for sustainable software development. Even a cursory investigation of the FOSS phenomenon makes this abundantly clear. Dismissing the Four Freedoms as inconvenient rhetoric serves no useful purpose whatsoever, unless the corporate strategy is to take from Free Software and never to give back. And that flavour of corporate piracy is an ideology that I personally find a great deal more offensive than Stallman's.
I know you're probably offering this as empirical fact, rather than necessarily attempting to validate or justify the idea. But honestly, the utter illogic behind an approach like that is astounding. Enriching one's declared enemy in the hope that they won't attack once strengthened - that's madness.
I believe the proper term for this kind of thing, by the way, is danegeld. Most people do not hold such strategies in very high esteem. English poet Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about conflict, had a thing or two to say about it.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
So now they are claiming 60 million by the end of June? That would make 20 million coppies sold in June alone because they were boasting 40 million in May. Given that the market is on the order of 230 million a year, and most people don't want Vista, it's unlikely that many desktops were sold and less likely they all had Vista.
If things were really rosy for M$, you would not see systems with gnu/linux. That you do signals the end of the M$ monopoly.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.