DELL currently offers Linux as an option for certain laptop and desktop models. Talk is that this service may be expanded to all models. This is a good thing, of course. Results of a recent survey by DELL show that more than 70% of over 100.000 respondents want to use Linux for home and office! What has been keeping companies like DELL away from this?
I’ve found five good reasons why OEMs should offer Linux as at least an option:
1. Freedom of Choice You pay for your hardware. Its’ yours. You should be able to use that hardware any way you want. The OEM should not force you to use anything else than what you want.
2. It saves customers money. If a customer doesn’t want to use Microsoft Windows? Why charge him for a license anyway?
3. It’s an unserved market. There are no mayor OEMs out there offering Linux as a default option. You get Microsoft Windows. In some cases you don’t have to buy Windows and get a clean hard drive instead. People want to use Linux, but they don’t want to go through the download-install-configure process. This is a big oppertunity, if you ask me.
4. Your hardware gets more popular. We’ve seen this with Nvidia already. May Linux users buy Nvidia cards because nvidia offers superb Linux drivers. Plug in the cards, install the drivers and off you go. If a player like DELL would support their hardware like that, people would be willing to buy DELL instead of Brand X. Once the word gets out that Linux ‘just works’ on a DELL, you’ll know that more customers will come your way.
5. Current support options are sufficient. A majority of respondents to the Linux survey at DELL indicated that the current community support forums would suffice their needs. Besides that, there’s a big Linux community out there willing to help new Linux users.
This space is reserved for linking to a list of why Linux should be the default OS for OEMs and Windows an option. (Contact me if you want to post that list a a guest blogger to Ariejan.net).
2 Comments
I truly hope that current support options are sufficient for newbies, but I really doubt it. I love Linux and part of that was getting my hands a bit dirty, but when my Windows-using acquaintances cannot tell me the error code on their screen, don’t understand a link vs shortcut (hint: they’re the same), or what program they’re trying to use to read a PDF, I know that they have a long way to go before they should be allowed to even *use* a computer. Walking someone through a “sudo dpkg –reconfigure-xserver.xorg” sounds to be a pain, but for those users without a second computer for internet access and patience to read through postings in a forum, it’s even worse.
Maybe, hopefully, Dell offers some sort of phone support option of some sort, in conjunction with Cananocal or whomever provides the selected distribution(s). And, maybe people will stop avoiding computer knowledge the same way that I avoid sports knowledge. But that last one is unlikely ;)
Anyways, I am posting again because the command above is *wrong* and i didn’t want it to be a support issue! Should read, I believe:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
ok thanks