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No Demand for Linux in the UK? 207
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.'"
Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Not a troll, just saying.
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Bob
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The company I work for (over 100,000) has over 16% (most technical) of their desktops running under Linux. Why we don't have more is the Company has a very good contact with Microsoft but at the moment the policy is "No Vista!".
Actually where you are seeing a huge switc
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I would like to believe that it's a lack of demand for Acer computers rather than Linux, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that buying it with Windows pre-installed basically amounts to getting a virtually free copy of Windows, which as a monopoly OS is always nice to have. Linux, on the other hand, is almost universally a free-as-in-beer download.
Better to buy a computer with Windows and then decide you want Linux, than buy a computer with Linux and decide that you need Windows.
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Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
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I get fed up of telling people.... (Score:3, Funny)
No demand...really? (Score:2, Interesting)
"From Whom?" (Score:2)
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.
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How open are you to the idea that you may be being taking my words a little too literally?
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So are you suggesting that Microsoft are above placing pressure on an OEM not to bundle any OS other than Windows with their hardware?
Oh, I see. It's not that MS aren't engaged in anti competitive practices, just you think it's terribly, terribly unoriginal of me to keep bringing up like this. I'll bear it in mind for next time :)
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A Mac quality O/S that did cost Mac prices, and didn't tie you to Microsoft? I should think that once word got about, they'd walk off the shelves.
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That's true , but why should you be forced to buy an operating system if you are not going to use it . It's not a problem with a regular pc , wich i assemble myself , but i don't have that choice when buying a labtop
Well , Dell is making some progress on it , by selling labtops with preinstalled Ubuntu , but i have no other choice than that.
I guess that means at least some loss for Acer , and some gain for De
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Umm.. but isn't it being offered on this same hardware in Singapore ?
might also be $$$ from MS preinstall (Score:4, Insightful)
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Selling Windows installed adds a lot to sales. OEM Linux is entering the consumer market twenty-seven years after MSDOS and Windows.
Just reject the Windows EULA (Score:2, Insightful)
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Has the EULA actually been tested properly in court? half of the clauses in them are unlawful bluffing anyway aren't they?
One UK reseller (Score:3, Informative)
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)
And this is surprising because why? (Score:2)
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 ne
Because of the hard sell. (Score:2, Troll)
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 l [slashdot.org]
Very clever (Score:2, Interesting)
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" wh
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"Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen? According to the people who hang out around here, consumer demand for Linux has been about to explode for the past 12 years. The demand isn't there on the hardware retailer side. There's no Microsoft conspiracy. The people who want Linux are going to install it themselves. A lot of them are going to build the computers themselves, too. The sl
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Seriously though, there may not be much demand in retail for Linux but that's not to say that there isn't demand in the UK or anywhere else for a Linux supporting desktop computer. Nobody's really won the Linux desktop war in terms of manufacturers and I think this kind of 1-2 PR punch is a pretty smart way to go about it if you were thinking about offering Linux.
Or maybe Acer's head is just a negativ
Translation error... (Score:2)
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 [tuaw.com].
The first pleasure of using linux is installation (Score:3, Funny)
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!
What they said / What they meant (Score:5, Funny)
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"
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Not Really (Score:2)
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 th
Friends don't let Friends buy Acer (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you get what you pay for with them...
I will never buy Acer again.
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A dissenting opinion, for what it's worth - a friend of mine has an Acer still going fine after about two years. Indeed, I have just installed Mac OS X on it, thanks to those wonderful people over at the OSx86 Project [osx86project.org], and it does a very good job. Admittedly, it wasn't one of their cheapest models, but with a Pentium M and a "proper" graphics card (i.e. dedicated memory; none of that shared crap), at least it's got a decent set of components.
Frankly, I can't
Re:Friends don't let Friends buy Acer (Score:5, Insightful)
All laptop brands have a (hopefully) small percentage that fail. Searching google will turn up people complaining about this. In my opinion, it's more important how the company responds to the issue.
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I was wondering about this. First I did a quick search for laptop market share info [rtoonline.com]. Then googled for the terms "brand laptop problems". I corrected the number of results for the marketshare. See below, where lower means less search results.
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Plus lenovo branded laptops haven't been around for as long as all the other brands.
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For some inexplicable reason I believe we stuck with them for 2-3 years before management finally saw the light (ie, the productivity cost of all the hardware failures) and switched us to another brand.
A few hundred employees and a few years of brand loyalty amounts to enough laptops to be statistically sign
I have an old 1501, still works (Score:2)
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 ru
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Forget the OS ... (Score:2)
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
Why buy Linux wnen you can get it for free? (Score:2, Insightful)
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If I order a machine with Ubuntu, it comes with Ubuntu (which I want in the first place), all set up and ready to go out of the box. If I call support, they'll be more than happy to help me with any Ubuntu issues.
Not everyone wants Windows, and not everyone wants to spend 2 hours set
Linux in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Linux in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got it all backwards - a typical techie thing to do. People don't look for solutions to problems unless the problems are hurting them. Most people have never suffered a loss of data/identity theft due to Windows, nor do they have any trouble locating games, driver, support etc. They buy a camera/graphics card/printer/etc and plug it in and it "just works". They either got Windows "free" with their PC or are using a pirate copy, so that Linux is free is not remotely advantageous. You'll have to do better than rely on abstract notions like `free` or `open source` software (only developers give a fuck about that) or that Linux is technically better (more efficient with a given processor or whatever metric you wish to choose). Good enough beats best every time, and Windows is manifestly good enough for most users.
Pushing Linux is a marketing problem, not a technical one.
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>You've got it all backwards - a typical techie thing to do. People don't look for solutions to problems unless the problems are hurting them.
Sorry I really don't want to flame, but that reminded me of the British attitude to housing - single glazed windows so it's freezing in winter and no air-conditioning - impossible to work in summer. My experience with the UK is that nothing is fixed until it REALLY needs to be fixed, and "polishing" & "finalising"
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That's not my experience of Windows, unless "just works" includes inserting a CD to install often buggy drivers and a bunch of useless utilities that take up room in the notification area on the taskbar, and rebooting. Ubuntu by contrast really has supported every piece of hardware I've ever thrown at it out of the box.
As my most recent concrete example, I recently had to do some debugging on an embedded board which was acc
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I'm not surprised. Cybercafés are so 1990s.
Seriously though... the Scottish uni that I went to had a few labs with Linux and Solaris, but in the Computing Science department only. The CSD also had a Windows lab or two, for .NET stuff. In the rest of the uni, all the lab computers used Windows, although to be fair their servers all used Solaris. I don't think they'd dream of using Windows servers.
Fortunately I'm out of uni, in
Vista to boost PC sales? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Vista to boost PC sales? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, when I show people Vista, the conversation goes more or less like:
Me: "check what happens when you open a window!"
Them: "ooooooooooo! Nice!"
Me: "check what happens when you close a window!"
Them: "ooooooooooo! Nice!"
Me: "check what happens when you minimise a window!"
Them: "ooooooooooo! Nice!"
Me: "and, er....."
Them: "That's a nice background...where'd you get that?"
Me: "Oh, that's came with Vista."
Them: "AWESOME!"
So, you see, it's a vanity thing. Microsoft know this too, which is why they spent kazillions on the whole look and feel. It does it for average Joe.
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It's true (Score:2)
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Silliness (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Ken Lay - Enron: Doctorate in Economics from the University of Houston
John Rigas - Adelphia: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York
Just two examples, but hey there is more if you want them. Now let's look at a couple of other business lea
UK = IT conservatives (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Actually, in the UK it is spelled... (Score:2, Funny)
How you know? (Score:2)
Question of time before EC complaints (Score:3, Interesting)
Acer + Linux experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Smaller market... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
This is not uncommon (Score:2)
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
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I don't know the situation in the Netherlands, but in the UK millions of ordinary employees who have tax deducted at source, don't earn enough to pay higher rates of tax or have other sources of income don't need to file a tax return - in which case that would hardly be an unbiassed sample. For starters, that would preferentially select a lot of (e.g.
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There is no need to use virtualization software, the tax form software is downloadable in different versions.
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This was also written
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On the website, you are asked if you want to download a version for Windows, Mac or Linux.
You download and run the program, and it either sends your form back via Internet or it writes out a floppy that you send by post.
Of course the program puts program and OS version in the data sent back. So they have an accurate count of OS users
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I think you over-estimate the effect of this installation hurdle. Even if only one in 10 Linux users would want to take this step and 9 out of 10 would instead install it under Windows (instead of some virtualized Linux
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- this was not a count based on browser but on actual use of their application, which comes in different versions for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
- the count is not anonymous but directly tied to the SOFI number of each citizen filing a tax form.
- there has been demand from user groups to please make versions for other systems than Windows, and it would be unnatural to then use the Windows version instead of the special version for Mac or Linux because one somehow feels more fami
Linux pre-installed: international vendor overview (Score:2)
Zonk = troll (Score:2)
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This canard is incredibly old and tired. A person is not a shill or a troll simply because they happen to write something which goes against reality as it exists in your personal bubble. As this [blogspot.com] so eloquently states, the FUD/troll retort is a very simply means for Linux users to block their ears and avoid being confronted with unpalatable realities.
One of those realities is that Linux,
All I want. (Score:2)
I can do the rest, thank you!.
they could be right. (Score:2)
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
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Informative)
Cost of support, you get a person wanting linux but never used it before, get it and everything seems to go wrong and talking to technical support. I am assuming that they don't use global support.
Cost of wearhousing now you need to manage 2 visual idenintal product lines the difference is the data on each system.
Cost of selling systems without Extra Junk installed, all those demo apps the company pays acer to put default on their system.
Trade Policies, sometimes by changing the OS you may need to renegoate your trade policy with other countries.
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.
Blind Costs. GNU/Linux UI Last Longer. (Score:2)
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 [slashdot.org]. 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
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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
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So? gnu/linux provides better continuity. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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Sales people get training? My experience is that they generally know less than what is printed on the box. How much can it cost to print out a few extra script sheets?
Cost of support, you get a person wanting linux but never used it before, get it and everything seems to go wrong and talking to technical support. I am assu
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Maybe there's a bit of irony in the fact that 50% of our mail servers are Acer Altos servers running CentOS 4 or CentOS 5 - OK, fair enough I had to install Linux myself.
It is, however, possible to get some low-end machines with SUSE pre-installed:
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/128595 [ebuyer.com]
"Esys Computer System Celeron 2.66GHZ 512MB 80GB 2MB 16X DVD Rom. Linux"
But this seems more of a means to avoid a "M$ tax", although you do get a passable general desktop for £145 including VAT (no monitor).
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.xephi.co.uk/laptops/ [xephi.co.uk]
Just because ACER says there's no demand doesn't make it true.
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No demmand means not enough people want their products to make it useful for them. Because demmand is so low they will not offer it so then 0 Demmand.
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The PC as a ready-to-run home appliance or office machine has been the gold standard for sales in the consumer market since the Apple II.
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VNC clients all work 100% fine with beryl.
Some java web applets won't work - they display a single-color rectangle where the graphics should be. Problem with the java plugin probably.
Standard yellow teeth troll response (Score:4, Funny)