Ubuntu Dell $50 Cheaper Than Vista Dell 389
rhinokitty writes "Dell recently announced that their Ubuntu systems will be $50 cheaper than similar systems running Vista (Home Basic Edition). This will be a good fork in the road for those people who need a little extra push to take hold of their dreams and run Linux."
Re:Is Ubuntu good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is Ubuntu good? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I reinstall Windows for a friend, I put Ubuntu on their computer next to windows and tell them to boot it if windows fails again.
It takes a couple of months before they really need to fall back on it. And in the meanwhile, at moments when they feel brave, they take a peek in the rabbithole.
And they confirm; Ubuntu does a great job for a fresh user.
Not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Go to dell.com, type in Linux as search, click on suggested link (ignore the recommended M$ stuff)
- select Ubuntu,
"XPS 410 N"
click through "adding features",
leave everything as default and...:
"1Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor - Next Business Day"
I like it!
Re:Is Ubuntu good? Maybe. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two steep learning curves:
1. Putting the finishing touches on most of the applications included. An example is the kmail spam filter bogofilter. Sure, there's a gui to sort of get it going, but you'll discover it doesn't really work until you set up the wordlist.db and a cron job to feed the wordlist. None of which is obvious.
2. Troubleshooting. It's all different underneath and it takes some time to figure it out. But it's logical. Once you get the hang of it, it's much easier to use.
Re:$50? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the part of the www.dell.com/open site where it asks you if you are there by mistake and suggests you go back to looking at Windows machines. They even put the link to their Windows machines BEFORE the link to the Ubuntu machines. If you were selling cars and someone showed interest in an import, would you ask, "Are you SURE you want to buy one of THOSE?" Their machines work great, but the website is serious WTF material.
Re:What this really means (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh... but as was mentioned before Ubuntu is just for the home market, they won't sell it to corporate customers. They sell either SUSE or Redhat to business customers, which have prices comparable to Windows. But generally corporate IT wants extra expenses, because everything is about insuring that someone outside the company can be called (blamed) when data is lost or productivity is hurt by downtime. "Commercial off the shelf beats just "off the shelf" in corporate decision making circles. And really small businesses will save $50 (times 5, 10 or 20 computers ) by ordering them through the home and small office section and simply have them sent to the owner's house.
I've seen the ways small, medium and large businesses operate and there is a remarkable difference in the way decisions are made. You value money differently when it isn't going into or coming out of your pocket.
Total Cost of Ownership (Score:3, Interesting)
"Take hold of their dreams?" (Score:1, Interesting)
Dell is always doing half-hearted attempt (Score:3, Interesting)
We had bought a few Dell laptops in the last six months, and every one of them is so-called Linux-based laptop. When we open the box, here's the list of what we found:
- The machine and components, the usual suspects (no surprise here)
- one CD containing a partial list of different drivers for
- one CD of junk softwares that you will never use, for
- 3 CDs of Red Flag Linux (yeah, in China, that is).
I booted up the machine, half of them came with DOS installed, but you can't do anything much as there's no driver for anything anyway. The other half came with absolutely nothing installed. Empty disk.
Ok, just for the heck of it, to see if they actually tried to install the linux distro themselves. I installed Red Flag Linux, it installed fine, but missing a few drivers, or won't detect properly. I had to mess with it for a while to get it to work, but still the graphics is not working optimally.
Ok, so far, I don't think any buyer is going with Linux here.
So, I installed Windows XP. And the drivers CD is missing some serious drivers, I ended up with a system which was not any better than with Linux. I looked up the support web site, enter the serial number, and the system told me the serial number of that machine does not exist. Who cares, I just downloaded a bunch of drivers to try out, those drivers that are published for the models close to the one I have. Doesn't work.
After half a day of messing around, I called tech support. Nice guy, actually. He told me that the drivers downloaded from the web site don't work, because I have a "pirated" copy of Windows XP. Ok, fine, give me those that work then. He emailed a few links to get those missing drivers. None of these links showed up on their web site.
Go figure. With that kind of so-called "support", I doubt Joe Sixpacks is going to have Linux on that machine.
HP has been doing something simila for a while (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at hp laptops and desktops in their "business" section many of them will list "FreeDOS" as an available os, or if they have a "Configure PC" link under the model often times it means you can choose between Windows and FreeDOS in the configuration options. One difference may be that if you get a FreeDOS pc from HP, format the drive and put Linux on it HP probably isn't going to give you any software support whereas maby Dell (or Canonical?) offers some level of support included in their price. Though if you are willing to forgo softwate technical support and just want hardware warranty coverage (for example if you are a large institution purchasing many computers is bulk) you can get a larger discount for non-windows machines from HP than Dell. The price varies but for most of their business notebooks and desktops the difference between a model with Windows XP/Vista and that same model with FreeDOS is usually $75-$150
Hopefully Dell's apparent success in selling Ubuntu desktops (and the publicity that has come with it) will push HP into doing something similar, I am a bit surprised Dell beat them to the punch on this one considering HP has:
been encouraging the use of Debian on the server end for a while
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442406-0
Already provides good driver support for Linux with regard to printers
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
And the current "Linux CTO" is a former Debian project leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bdale_Garbee [wikipedia.org]
I would expect to see more announcements like this in the near future from the OEMs. Whatever argument the OEMs still had against selling desktop Linux and thereby irritating Microsoft was recently dealt a significant blow by Microsoft's announcement that they would begin selling their own machines http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
which from the OEMs perspective has changed Microsoft from an annoying element that everyone has to deal with and who gets a cut of their profit, to a company that is now moving towards being a direct competitor.
Re:What this really means (Score:5, Interesting)
None of these are deal-breakers, really. And most people will certainly buy the "default" choice, Vista, without really giving it second thougths. But *some* will start thinking.
Linux certainly won't displace Windows on the desktop this year, or the next. But it'll continue doing what it's been doing quietly for years already: growing.
Re:"Take hold of their dreams"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your main point stands though.
Re:I'll take Vista thanks :-) (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets face it Windows users never question why their most essential piece of software should be so easily broken and unrecoverable without re-installation, but lets face it they never will. They'll happily go on blaming Nvidia for their late drivers while it took Microsoft 2 years just to design the damn shutdown button.
Please do go ahead and blame anyone you want for why your system sucks but I will never find it acceptable for my operating system to be so prone to errors and unrecoverable from a system failure whether it is Windows, Ubuntu or Mac.
Re:Is Ubuntu good? (Score:2, Interesting)
Many, if not most, Windows applications can be installed and used easily enough with wine. When my ex-girlfriend's Windows crashed and her 'recovery' cds weren't good enough to recover, I gave her a kubuntu cd to try. She had it installed in 30 minutes and the first thing she said was "I can't use this without the official YIM client" (paraphrased, but that's the jist of it). I told her I don't DO proprietary software and wasn't sure how to go about installing it on kde/ubuntu.
Within 5-10 minutes she had found simple and comprehensive documentation on how to install and setup all of her favorite and necessary Windows applications in ubuntu. Another 30-40 minutes, and she had Word, IE, YIM and several other Windows programs installed with icons and menu entries. I am still not sure how she did it.
My ex had 0 experience with Linux except what I had told her, which was pretty much just stuff about the opensource philosophy and some features I had mentioned. One of the biggest/best advantages of linux is how easily support and documentation can be found and used.
As for the other shortcomings you mentioned, they are shortcomings of the sites and those who developed them, not Ubuntu or Linux. Keep in mind which software/OSes are compliant to standards and which aren't. The question was: "Is Ubuntu good?", not "Is Ubuntu good at viewing substandard websites or running proprietary software for another OS out of the box?". Since it provides alternatives to most of the proprietary software you mentioned and clearly marks their function, as well as can be easily modified to run the proprietary counterparts, the answer to this question should be "Yes".
C For Effort (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a look at the front page of Dell.com. What do you see? Lots of products but no mention of Ubuntu. Let's look at a laptop, I see many options. I look and pick one. The option for this Ubuntu thing must be here. I pick a laptop. I look. Comes with Windows Vista Home Edition. Huh? Maybe its under "Build yours". I try that.
I click a couple of options and see "Operating Systems" Maybe this is it? I click on it. It gives me a choice between Windows Vista Home and Home Premium.
What he doesn't realize that its back on the product page under "Essential Links"...Open Source PCs. Click on that and you get a choice between "Shop Ubuntu" or "Shop for FreeDos" which are under "Shop for Dell PCs with Windows"
I know that Dell Ubuntu products are aimed at tech enthusiasts and Open Source fans but if Dell hopes to be successful beyond a niche market they need to try a lot harder.
But how much is M$ still making on these? (Score:1, Interesting)
$50? pfft.
bet theres still a $100 goes to MS clause in there somewhere.
if the vista basic is a couple hundred in the stores, presume OEM's are getting it at half that ( and passing on to consumers), so knocking off the license sticker and bundling a free OS...
smells like not quite adding up to me.
Re:Is Ubuntu good? (Score:2, Interesting)