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No Demand for Linux in the UK? 207

Posted by Zonk from the we-like-tea-not-penguins dept.
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.'"
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No Demand for Linux in the UK? More

No Demand for Linux in the UK?

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  • Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by u-bend ( 1095729 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @12:54PM (#20073313) Homepage Journal
    They just don't want Linux on an Acer.
    Not a troll, just saying.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CowboyBob500 ( 580695 )
      Personally, I'm seeing a migration away from Linux onto Macs over here in the UK. I was a regular Linux user myself (as in my only OS) from Mandrake 8 all the way through to Ubuntu Dapper Drake. But in November I got myself a MacBook and haven't looked back. Amongst my peers I'm also seeing this trend.

      Bob

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wykthorr ( 999067 )
        I don't think MacOS has the future either. They are a lock-in company. I think in the longer therm people will be looking for open systems that offer good interoperability. We've all seen what closed source can do with security. I think people will get more and more concerned about stuff like Trusted Computing and DRM and they'll aim for the open systems. Even if they can't look inside themselves, people know that at least 1% of the users can and if something is wrong they'll shout out loud. I personally ca

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by donaldm ( 919619 )
        I live in Australia and Linux is making quite serious inroads into the server market. The problem with the Desktop is you normally get a MS Operating System and unless you really want to go to a lot of trouble you pay the Microsoft Tax.

        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)

      by teh kurisu ( 701097 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @04:05PM (#20076597) Homepage

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zemran ( 3101 )
      Maybe, lots of Linux people want to keep a Windoze partition for games and therefore buy a Dozer box and dual boot it.

  • I get fed up of telling people.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @12:55PM (#20073361)
    ...there's just no demand for it round here!

  • No demand...really? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 )
    I wonder how they came to the conclusion that there is no demand? Was there a survey among potential new PC buyers? Or is this company another Microsoft buddy, I wonder.

    • I wonder how they came to the conclusion that there is no demand?

      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.

  • might also be $$$ from MS preinstall (Score:4, Insightful)

    by conspirator57 ( 1123519 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:06PM (#20073545)
    hardware vendors are squeezed for profit margin. selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin. Perhaps the studies they may or may not have conducted to determine market demand indicated that people who wanted linux also wanted a lower price tag for the hardware. Perhaps this expectation was inflexible, meaning that unit margin on a given PC would go down if they were to sell without MS. Or if they didn't conduct that study, maybe this is one of their fears that keeps them from offering linux product.
    • selling windows preinstalled adds a bit of margin

      Selling Windows installed adds a lot to sales. OEM Linux is entering the consumer market twenty-seven years after MSDOS and Windows.

  • I remember there was a story a few months back about a guy who rejected the Windows license agreement on his new computer. He got his money back for the copy of Windows (without even having to return the OEM CD), and then proceeded to install Linux on it. So people who want Linux could just opt for that route... Maybe then Acer will notice "demand" for Linux!

  • One UK reseller (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:14PM (#20073699)
    http://efficientpc.co.uk/ [efficientpc.co.uk]

    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)

  • ..."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.'"

    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

    • 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)

    by Statecraftsman ( 718862 ) *
    Very, very clever indeed ol' boy. Acer, you ravishing young chap, you've really done your homework. First you trash Vista as not providing anything exciting to the PC makers and business community. Then you follow it with the comment that there's "No demand" for Linux somewhere(anywhere). I can think of no surer way to incite riotous demand for your linux-loaded hypothetical product.

    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      I can think of no surer way to incite riotous demand for your linux-loaded hypothetical product.

      "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
      • Ok, you got me. I was hyperbolic. I also used English idioms and phrases when in fact I am not English.

        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
      • "Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen?

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:15PM (#20073727)
    Sure there is no demand, each and every linux user wants to install linux by himself. Installing linux is the first pleasure of using it, if a manufacturer installs it for you, THEY STEAL SOMETHING FROM YOU. Anyway if you purchase a system with a crippled version of linux like lindows, xandros or licoris, the first thing to do is to erase the disk and install a real distribution.
    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)

    by CaptainPatent ( 1087643 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:19PM (#20073795) Journal
    Acer said: "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"

    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"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Otter ( 3800 )
      Even the most cursory reading (TM) of the summary would indicate that Acer does sell Linux systems elsewhere. As Dell is discovering, trying to please the Linux zealot community by doing X mostly gets you abuse for not doing Y and Z ("...because their a bunch of M$ shills!") and complaints that doing X is a GPL violation.
    • When you get to be a company the size of Acer, the whole notion of starting something new like selling a system with Linux installed just doesn't happen. In normal circumstances, this kind of thing comes down from on-high. Like "UK subsidiary set up a Linux SKU for product xyz."

      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)

    by Thumper_SVX ( 239525 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:21PM (#20073817) Homepage
    I bought my wife an Acer laptop about a year ago. A month out of its warranty, and the motherboard failed. A search on Google turned up multitudes of people with the exact same problem (no video, so the system doesn't even complete POST). To say I was very disappointed would be an understatement.

    I guess you get what you pay for with them...

    I will never buy Acer again.
    • I guess you get what you pay for with them...

      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)

      by flynt ( 248848 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @02:00PM (#20074579)
      Can you find a brand of laptop where the same Google searches don't turn up the same results of customers that feel ripped off because theirs happened to be one of the ones that failed?

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cerberusss ( 660701 )

        Can you find a brand of laptop where the same Google searches don't turn up the same results of customers that feel ripped off

        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.

        Hp 0.26
        Dell 0.82
        Acer 0.12
        Toshiba 0.1
        Lenovo 0.07
        Fujitsu-Siemens 0.02
        Sony 0.12
        Asus 0.04
        Apple 0.4

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )
          A lot of lenovo laptops are still sold under the IBM branding...
          Plus lenovo branded laptops haven't been around for as long as all the other brands.
    • Yet I still have 2 x Acer Travelmate 600TER (PIII-600) units bought in 2001 and used round the house as Internet terminals. At work we buy Acer for the Managers and in the last 3 years the maintenance required has been two new batteries and on one 2-yr old model I replaced the power connector on the motherboard. Out experience with Acer has been very good but there you go.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mascot ( 120795 )
      Smart choice. We bought Acers a few years back (laptops). Failure rate was over 50%. That's not an exaggaration. Literally over half of them had to go back, a large portion of those for new motherboards.

      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
    • Now over three years old and so out of warranty. The original HDD with XP still runs, but I also have a 5400 rpm HDD with Ubuntu which works just fine. The only thing wrong with it is that I have worn the lettering off several keys, and worn the feet off (replaced with some handy self adhesive closed cell foam to ensure that the vents were kept open.) We all have anecdotal evidence.

      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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by l0b0 ( 803611 )
      The first desktop I bought was an Acer Aspire in '99, and it was a crash-ridden POS from almost the word go. Strangely, the keyboard and speakers were good enough to hold on to years after getting rid of the cabinet and screen.
  • How about selling laptops that are built out of reliable hardware, just for a start? It's practically impossible to tell whether a laptop has decent components in it, even with a spec sheet. Parts change too quickly and websites just don't keep up. These days even buying two of the same model of wireless card is a tossup on what chipset you actually land with.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux systems are sold at about the same price as windows systems.Why pay for linux when I can get it for free? Buying a windows system I get more functionality BOTH WINDOWS AND LINUX for about the same price!
    • That's like paying for a four bedroom apartment, where one of the rooms is pre-filled with sewage, when you actually only need a 2 bedroom place to begin with.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by HumanPenguin ( 889927 )
      When you buy a laptop and try to install Linux on it you often find that some of the hardware is not well supported. When ACER sells you a laptop with linux you can be sure you have hardware that is supported by linux. More to the point you have one more company giving the hardware manufactures a hard time for not releasing details on their product and allowing the Open source community to write hardware. or even providing Linux drivers of their own in binary format ala Nvidia Currently many hardware ven
    • If I order the Windows machine, it comes with Windows (which I don't want or need), and I have to install Ubuntu myself and spend 40mins setting it up so it works sorta-right, and they'll only support me if I'm running Windows.
      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)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:28PM (#20073973) Journal
    I run Linux and I'm in the UK. The problem isn't that there is no market (Windows is hated here as much as it is in the US), it's just that there's no marketing for it. If there was an active attempt at marketing Linux as an OS that will allow you to do projects and not have shit crash and such it would "sell" like hotcakes.

    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.
  • Why would the PC industry think that Vista would boost PC sales? XP is a mature OS. It works. PC's are powerful enough for most people to do most things they need them to do. Why would anybody think that people would have any interest in running out to buy a new PC running Vista? That kinda' seems like a non-starter to me.

    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)

      by Toreo asesino ( 951231 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:57PM (#20074537) Journal
      Why? Because Vista has funkier backgrounds, Aero (which I must admit does look the business), and, er, a nifty utility for sorting photos. That fades in and out. And shiny blue buttons!

      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.
    • Vista is a resource pig. It demands more CPU, more RAM, and more disk than older Windows releases, and thus encourages profitability on individual sales if not overall numbers of sales. Also, it's easier to buy a set of new machines all with the same new OS than try to maintain slightly older systems with a different OS, even if it is more expensive.
  • I am the only Linux user in the UK, and I don't want an Asus. Sorry guys, no hard feelings.

  • Silliness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fishthegeek ( 943099 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:34PM (#20074071) Journal
    If I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a potential customer that I wasn't reaching I'd be trying damn hard to make room for them in my product line. I had never been a Dell customer prior to the e1505n model. They asked, and like an awful lot of other people I said that I'd buy a Dell if they factory installed Linux. I bought one, and the irony here is that I sold my less than ninety day old Acer laptop to help finance the purchase.

    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.

  • UK = IT conservatives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by john-da-luthrun ( 876866 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @01:40PM (#20074199)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mgblst ( 80109 )
      I am a Linux user in the UK as well, and I wouldn't call people in the UK conservative about IT. I would call them lazy, incompetent, lacking in work ethic, and more. Mod me down, but this has been my experience. I have tried to explain people the benefits of using Firefox over IE, but the majority just get scared of anything new, have no interest in anything that may involve 5 seconds of learning, and will be happy as long as they can still get to their celebrity sites. And because of lack of competent wor
  • Well I got Vista w/my laptop (it was still a cheap deal via my work) but I can assure you I only picked the laptop cause it was cheap hardware-wise not because of Vista. If I could have bought XP or Ubuntu I would have bought that for day a $50 cut. Alas. This makes me wonder whether they know what their customers want or just shove Vista up their throat. I'm not impressed with Vista's performance, btw.

  • Question of time before EC complaints (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BlueParrot ( 965239 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @02:07PM (#20074723)
    I seriously think that that it is just a question of time before Microsoft's OEM deals end up in the European Commission. Expect something along the lines of disallowing the license to be tied to a specific motherboard, disallowing per-machine pricing, require vendors to offer system's without software pre-installed at a reduced cost .. etc. There is plenty of precedence for this in other EC rulings so it is just a matter of when somebody pulls the trigger and files a complaint. Sure, it will be hard for the OEMs or other organisations to do so, but at the rate that Microsoft is pissing on everything they get within financial proximity to, it will happen sooner or latter.

  • Acer + Linux experience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ptarra ( 814310 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @02:12PM (#20074795)
    This story didn't happen in the UK... a little bit south of that, in Spain. We bought a dozen Acer Aspire "something" preloaded with Linux. It was a pretty good deal and I thought that if they came preloaded with any flavour of Linux it should be pretty simple to either change it or upgrade it... right? WRONG!!! They came preloaded with something called Linpus Linux without X or any recognisable management software or even a note with root password (it happened to be '111111' but it was a long guess process).... so... I decided I would just install any other distro... HA! Tried Debian, OpenSuSE, Fedora and many more but the install system would fail in all of them. After long (and when I say long I mean days...) tweaking we managed to install OpenSuSE on one of them unplugging the floppy disk drive. That gave us a clue on changing some startup parameters to be able to load a full install (I recall noirqpoll and some other obscure settings...). Conclusion: Acer didn't intend that no one would ever be able to use those systems with Linux... I mean.... how much did Microsoft pay them to preload those systems with Linpus Linux in such a way????? Regards,

  • Smaller market... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by itsdapead ( 734413 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @02:14PM (#20074845)

    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 year in the Netherlands, the following figures were published by the department of finance, for the number of income tax forms returned electronically.
    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

    • This year in the Netherlands, the following figures were published by the department of finance, for the number of income tax forms returned electronically.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pe1chl ( 90186 )
        The majority of workers have to file a tax form here, which already can be seen looking at the number of forms returned electronically (5.7 million) versus the working population (about 7 million).
        There is no need to use virtualization software, the tax form software is downloadable in different versions.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pe1chl ( 90186 )
        I have not written (and have not read) that the government intends to stop supporting Apple and Linux for tax forms. I only want to indicate that the actual user base for those systems is so astonishingly small, that it would not be sensible for a commercial company to pay any attention to it. Probably even a public institution can rightly claim that it is not worth the tax money to maintain a separate version of the software that is only being used by one promille of the population.
        This was also written
  • From my experience the market for pre-installed Linux boxes is still small, at least for PDAs, laptops and notebooks. I guess for pre-configured servers there is a bigger market and rumours are that more and more mobile phones are coming with Linux. BTW: here is my international overview of Linux laptop, notebook, mobile phone and PDA vendors [tuxmobil.org].
  • "No Demand for Linux in the UK" is far fucking removed from "Second-rate Manufacturer Refuses To Support Linux On One Of Their Shitty Prefab Boxes". Dell does that in the US, who gives a shit?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by petrus4 ( 213815 )
      "Person expressing views contrary to my own, or that I percieve are anti-Linux = troll/shill/paid Microsoft astroturfer."

      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,
  • Is a laptop with no operating system.

    I can do the rest, thank you!.

  • 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

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