wow totally agree with you

you have done a great analisis

Walmart and everex with the gPC / gOS (thinkgos.com) in my opinion are doing a much better job than dell.

Like you said, Dell needs to sell low-end pcs with ubuntu too !

a $300 ubuntu dell pc
a $450 ubuntu dell laptop

• their 2 current high end offerings

ubuntu to the masses, to people who really need a pc or their first pc.

1. It is very difficult to even find the Linux machines on Dell
   website. Which simply means that Dell wants to sell these computers to
   people who * already * are in.

2. Linux installed Dell machines are prices * higher * than their
   windows cousins. This is totally stupid of dell. They could easily
   have brought same computers with windows or Linux with the latter
   being $50 less.

3. When buying laptops / desktops you can’t choose Linux. Nor does
   Dell advertise Linux based machines in anyway either in the media or
   on its site, it just asks “Looking for open source”?

4. Worst of all, it does * not * offers servers with free Linux,
   neither Ubuntu server nor Debian. It only offers expensive Redhat or
   SUSE. That’s totally dumb.

Dell is selling a high end laptop (1420N)
and a high end desktop (530N) with Linux, whereas my 3 year old p4
with 512MB does perfectly fine with Ubuntu. The windows based
Inspiron 1420 and 530 with same config and service duration are
actually more expensive than the Linux based N series counterparts, so
your service cost argument is void. Dell could possibly offer Ubuntu
with simpler / intro level machines simply because unlike Windows,
Ubuntu/Linux is not resource hungry. So when I said just $50 lower,
meant the simplest intro machine minus windows to cost less than what
it would with windows.

I can’t quote the source from the top of my head, but at the end of
2006 equal share of PC users were using Mac OS and Linux (all distro),
and that was about 8% + 8% . On the server side, Linux/Unix based
systems make most sense as people are worrying more about security
that Windows server does not provide (and apple is not even in the
server business).

There is genuine potential for Linux based PC’s, but Dell needs to tap
the market. Just putting something up for sale and hoping people who
need it to find it is too retro. Since they decided to invest
resources into it, they better had done a clean job.

It is of course commendable that Dell was smart enough to venture into
open source and offers Ubuntu Linux installed computers, but their
marketing fiasco is sure to make this cool move a loser. They have to
offer more than just one laptop and one desktop with Linux options,
and people should be allowed to find where these are listed on the
web. There’s nothing to hide!

You can switch from Windows xp home to Ubuntu 7.04 without any problems.

I’m using 7.04 since many months and 7.10 beta since 2 weeks without any problems.

It’s amazing to see the stability of OS linux. You can run hours,days, without any reset or losing efficiency. I believe it’s really improving very fast!

• Email, more than adequate (and yes, Blackberry support is there), not quite as polished as the MS solution, but saving several thousand.

• Office suite, adequate. Not as good as MS Office, but the re-training issue is there with Office2007 just as much as it is with OOo. Saving few hundred per seat.

• Web access. Firefox is just as good as Internet explorer (in fact, most of our Windows users have moved over to the Windows version of Firefox anyway.)

In fact, because our in-house applications are web-based anyway, it really doesn’t matter too much what clients we run for “general business use”.

The two areas where we still need more applications:

• Financials. Sorry, people, but until they release Sage for Linux, then our accountant ain’t going to swap.

• Audio editing. Audacity is good, but for professional work, Audition still has the edge, particularly in things like Fourier noise reduction. Given that one of our divisions releases audio-books for a living, this is kind of important for us… but that is ONE member of the team, who need a high-end application anyway, not a general roll-out issue.

The question is, as ever, one of support costs.

If Linux could do EVERYTHING, then it would be clear-cut. There are enough local firms offering Linux support that we have reassurance, and our in-house IT people all seem to run Linux at home anyway, so would be delighted for us to move over.

The problem, for the moment, is that the overall cost of running a MIXED desktop environment is still a thorn in the side of the budget… I guess we’re all used to that from the odd person who NEEDS (TM) a Mac, though