Dell to Offer More Linux PCs 282
head_dunce writes "According to this article, Mark Shuttleworth from the Ubuntu camp says Dell is seeing a demand for the Linux-based PC and, "There are additional offerings in the pipeline." I'm starting to see flashbacks of the days when Microsoft partnered up with IBM to gain control of the desktop market. Will other Linux flavors find their way to the likes of Lenovo or HP, etc, or will Ubuntu claim the desktop market working with other PC manufacturers?"
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
The year of change (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose it was really inevitable in the long run, but I am happy to see the walls finally cracking.
Re:The year of change (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh.. fuck off with your spin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumbfuck (Score:0, Insightful)
preconfigure (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm so fed up of messing up xorg.conf and having to reconfigure it every time I reboot just to get video...
Re:preconfigure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
That massive discount Microsoft gives them over smaller OEMs is Dell's biggest competitive advantage. Now they'll have to compete more directly with local whitebox builders.
They don't have much choice though. The local box builders have already switched to Ubuntu as their OS of choice. Dell has to match them or be swamped.
And there was me thinking that Dell's biggest competitive advantages were its huge purchasing power on all components, not just operating systems, and its brand-name recognition.
I guess I was wrong. Who knew that Dell was paying the same price for CPUs, RAM, hard drives, etc that outfits run out of the owners' garages were paying?
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "others" you mean a name randomly chosen from the Yellow Pages, yes. But if it's a local vendor who you can talk to and check his references, it becomes a much safer proposition, and a lot less hassle than dealing with an enormous company that makes you press a dozen buttons on your phone before you can speak to anyone, who is never the same person who you talked with before and so you have to explain your problem over and over again.
Linux preinstalled is "no OS" or "Pirate Windows"? (Score:2, Insightful)
How many use it just to dodge the license cost, and just install their pirated windows copy? Any guesses? Is linux becoming the "no OS" choice available at other whitebox builders?
Re:Advantage lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell might be able to get 10 percent on hardware?
If you think that the difference between the price that Dell pays for the average piece of hardware and the price that a one-man operation would pay for the same hardware is 10 percent then you're nuts.
Dell undoubtably buys directly from manufacturers. When it buys Intel CPUs, it buys them directly from Intel. When it buys Belkin accessories, it buys them directly from Belkin. When Dell buys, there's no middleman.
When a one-man operation buys Intel CPUs or Belkin accessories then it buys them from a distributor. There might be one, two or maybe even three such middlemen between it and Intel or Belkin. Each middleman takes a cut, which drives the price that the one-man operation pays for the products higher and higher. How much is that cut? Well, 10 percent per distributor would be a fair figure.
(If you want to get a fairer idea of distribution costs, take the cost per 1,000 units that is typically quoted regarding CPUs and compare that to the typical single unit street price. Allow a small (maybe 5-10 percent) profit for the vendor and you'll see that the distribution chain takes a fair chunk along the way.)
And all that's before you talk about how much of each product is bought by Dell. There's a big difference between maybe buying 5 CPUs a week through the channel and buying almost 200,000 a week directly from the manufacturer.
In 2006, Dell accounted for 16.1 percent of the 59 million PCs shipped worldwide. Last year, Dell shipped 950 million PCs.
Are you really telling me that you think that, with that sort of buying power, you don't think that Dell gets deals that give it a more than 10 percent hardware cost price advantage?
Re:Advantage lost (Score:2, Insightful)
A common API is the key (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as Unix/Linux people realise this and look beyond their own nose (ne: favourite flavour of GNU/Linux), they will realise that the API is the real jewel. The reason that Microsoft beat IBM at its own game with the OS2/Windows war was because it won the API war. They convinced, or scammed (depending upon your point of view) programmers to write to the Win31 API and OS/2 was killed. Providing development tools such as Visual Basic and Access which removed the whole API schema just made their task a whole lot easier.
Forget the fancy esoteric languages and "scripted" (ne: interpreted) tools, because they are not what is needed to wrestle the end user away from Windows. What is required is a common platform (display, communications, and file API's to name just a few). Sure, let the system level person choose between a Gnome or KDE desktop. Let them run either RedHat, Suse, or Ubuntu (insert flavour of the week) but provide a common interface to of them all via a simple and straight-forward API. Then provide the killer application development tools like Visual Basic and/or Access which will let newbie programmers write their killer app with no knowledge of computers or programming and then GNU/Linux may just stand a chance.
Re:The year of change (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no such thing as innovation stranglehold.
I'm not saying Microsoft will go away, but cross-platform compatibility will become the rule, not the exception. It will be easy to choose whichever platform you like, without worrying about not being able to run half your applications. Freedom will be a realistic choice.
Cross platform compatibility of what? As I see it Apple is the hold out here. Apple feels that virtualization is fine and good as long as it's not their OS. Do you know what sucks more then Microsoft's vendor lockin? Apple's hardware and software lockin. Don't act like the increase in Mac sales is making things better in the face of Apple's attitude towards third parties. If anything, computing would suck worse with Apple riding the high waves.
I suppose it was really inevitable in the long run, but I am happy to see the walls finally cracking.
Again, wait and see.
First off, many products are big on initial release only to die a quick death. I will be confident of the Dell-Ubuntu thing in a couple of years. I don't know why people are expecting a pass or fail on this in the first 100 days. This isn't politics as much as some people make it out to be. It's a product.
Secondly, don't start to think things have really made a turn without software support. Hardware has never been the hang up for Linux overall, at least not the lead hang up. Without software you can make a grade-A system and make it cheap and people will not hold on for long. Look at Atari and Amiga. Fantastic machines with a ton of potential. Where are they today? Oh, that's right, no one ever wrote software for them, for the most part.
Lack of software support is stopping me from becoming a big Linux adopter. I run it as a VM only for right now.
Maybe things will change. I'd go with it. But I'm not going on my own without a bit more happening first.