Ubuntu Dell Now In UK, France, and Germany

mrcgran writes "Dell announced the availability of Ubuntu in Europe and future plans for China. 'I hinted at this before, but today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed... In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China.'"

Comments

Canada?

[javacowboy]

Why wouldn't Dell extend this deal into Canada?

Seems like the next logical step since Canada is a very similar market to the U.S.

I don't buy the excuse that they would have to deal with French language regulations, since they're extending their deal to France and to another non-English country, namely, Germany.

Wow... MS really fractured OSS community...

[3seas]

...but apparently its the OSS fractions that's wedging into territory occupied by MS...

Re:Decision point

[pboyd2004]

The way I see it choice is good. Dell or other OEMs selling other OSes than just Windows is good for the customer. Even if they try to make it "into the Same Old Thing" it is still a different choice and that's a good thing.

KDE?

[Karma Sucks]

Is KDE the default on any of these configurations?

Re:KDE?

[kripkenstein]

Is KDE the default on any of these configurations?

No. GNOME is the default on all distros that are likely to be pre-installed these days, Ubuntu, SUSE and Red Hat/Fedora.

You can of course very easily install KDE on these systems, a simple apt-get on Ubuntu for example.

The reason, I suspect, is mostly the licensing of Qt and KDE, which is the GPL (and not LGPL, which GTK+ is). This makes it less corporate-friendly, in a way. It probably explains the big shift to GNOME in the major distros, as well as the focus on GNOME in nearly all the new mobile Linux initiatives.

waiting for a better deal from dell

[Anonymous Coward]

As I recall, from a few weeks ago, dell's cheapest desktop is $349 and is available with Vista Home only.

The cheapest dell/Ubuntu is $499.

I'd buy a machine right now if the pricing made sense.

Even if they shipped the $349 box with a blank hard drive I'd buy that over the Ubuntu @ $499

And the walmart everex 20 watt machine that was in all the news a couple weeks ago is MIA. I went to the local superstore and they not only did not have any everex desktops, they had no idea what $298 offer I was talking about. Two people told me it sounded bogus. Even the walmart website has a monitor bundled, nothing for $298. The superstore had one small aisle space with desktops, all starting around $600 and all having far more cpu and ram than i need for my low power 24/7 home server project.

A lot of these linux friendly claims are just vapor.

Re:waiting for a better deal from dell

[gujo-odori]

Another factor in the valuation is the hardware life cycle. For example, at my company you get your choice of a Mac, a Windows machine or installing the BSD or Linux distro of your choice (on pretty much a support-it-yourself basis), and you're eligible for a new machine every three years.

When I was hired in January, I chose a Mac, and they issued me a 15" MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM/120 GB disk. I'm fairly confident this will still be a highly usable machine in three years. Lots of people have PowerBooks that are between 2 and 3 years old, and while they think a new MBP would be cool, they have no complaints with their current hardware; it's getting the job done and performing well. The people running Linux or BSD are doing OK, too.

But the ones with 3-year old notebooks running XP, they practically have their upgrade eligibility date marked in red on the calendar (some probably really do). Compared to the Mac and Linux and BSD machines of the same age, those 3 year old Windows boxes are just wheezing along. What this means for the purchaser of a Dell Ubuntu box, then, is that if they buy a decently speced-out machine now, the can reasonably expect that in three years it will still be very serviceable. Even if you pay a little more for it, you'll get that money back in the form of longer hardware upgrade cycles. This fact can't be lost on Dell, I wonder if that's a factor in any price differences?

Interestingly, a thing I hear regularly from people waiting for their hardware upgrade cycle is that they plan to get a Mac next time instead of a Windows machine. At least in engineering, Macs have already become the majority platform. I was in a meeting today and looked around the table and counted that 80% of the attendees had Macs.

Regular users still mostly opt for Windows, of course, but both here where I work and at a couple of recent conferences I went to (not Black Hat and Defcon, but security-oriented anyway), there were a lot of people with Macs or PC notebooks minus Windows. A guy a couple rows in front of me was running FreeBSD on his. Everywhere, I hear people who currently have Windows saying they are going to take a serious look at moving to Mac or Linux. Microsoft is losing, or at risk of losing, a great deal of mindshare in the community of programmers, engineers, and other technical fields. One of the things that helped make Microsoft who they are today is great mindshare in that group. If they lose it, that loss can go a long way toward breaking them. Interest in, and acceptance of, Macs and Linux machines in the corporate environment seems to be at an all-time high and going up rapidly.

I'm sure Microsoft is concerned, but I don't believe they fully appreciate the peril, fully appreciate how close the tipping point may be. The next 2 or 3 years, while they work on the successor to Vista while many of their users cling to XP or move to Mac or Linux should be very interesting.

Re:Is this a win?

[bberens]

I have mixed feelings about proprietary software on a Dell box. On one hand I try to promote the open source movement where I think it belongs (generally speaking any software that 'everyone needs'). On the other hand I can see many people wanting to try this 'open source' thing buying a computer from trusty Dell and going WTF when they can't play a DVD in their DVD drive. Dell, having complete power over what it installs in the box should have no problem choosing only hardware with open drivers. At the same time I wouldn't mind it too badly if they cut a deal a la Linspire so that users could (legally) get DVD playback.

Good job, Dell

[TheModelEskimo]

I "voted with my cash" as I've seen others mention, and ordered a Dell Ubuntu laptop. Best computing decision I've ever made, easily. If you are even entertaining the slightest thoughts about getting one, do it.

The machine made it through its first major presentation to clients today (not presenting the laptop, but presenting materials to the client) without a hitch. I've installed Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Enlightenment, and Fluxbox on it so far. I was really, *really* tempted to run Enlightenment during the presentation today, just because of the slick animations and minimal GUI.

I'm not the most talented Ubuntu apologist, but I think that most of us who should be using it, know who we are.

BTW, my non-techie wife uses this machine every day without problems.

Ubuntu preloaded PC in France

[dankh]

Dell are acting like amateurs. At Dell France website there is no way to find any machine with Ubuntu, I tried the search, "/ubuntu", manually checked almost all their offer, there is no Ubuntu on the page. At best the client is redirected to Dell USA with the USA offerings of PCs with Ubuntu.

I have a friend of mine who runs his business with only email and phone, he have 4 employees that do the same thing. All the PCs at his office are used for email, browsing the web and some document editing sometimes (spreadsheet and doc). He is complaining about spyware viruses and all that stuff. Many times I talked to him to switch to Linux, not because is free (he gets all the OS and Word licenses for free shipped with the PCs by Dell) but because of the stable and virus free system it is. Just to write emails and browse the web, he already uses the Mozilla soft. But he is scared of that Linux thing, not sold and supported on the desktop by any major vendor.

For guys like this , I think this is a great news ! This September I'll buy for him new machine, and I know with which OS it will be sold, loaded, supported BY DEFAULT !

From the Dell website(!)

[wandm]

From Dell Ubuntu Page:

"The main thing to note is that when you choose open source you don't get a Windows® operating system."

Aaahh, so that's what this Ubuntu thing is all about..