Dell and Ubuntu: why bother?

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 23 May 2007 09:18

Opinion and Analysis

"We will have a wiki page on our linux.dell.com website that gives technical details of the supported systems, information on the device drivers used for system peripherals, details of our Ubuntu factory-installation, and information on the problems we found during our testing, with their fixes/workarounds."

This rules out anybody except budding geeks from buying the systems. What about the home office dude who's looking to save on a system which can do the basics - is he or she the sort who even knows what a wiki is? Is he or she likely to go reading reams of documentation just to understand a few basics? Well done, Dell, you couldn't have kept the numbers down better.

"For hardware options not offered with this release, we are working with the vendors of those devices to improve the maturity and stability of their associated Linux drivers. While this may not happen overnight, we do expect to have a broader range of hardware support with Linux over time."

When? Take it from me, this will never happen unless there is a timeline.

"At this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04. These include MPEG 1/2/3/4, WMA, WMV, DVD, Quicktime, etc. We are evaluating options for providing this support in the future."

Dell might as well sell Windows on these systems. What is the use of a system with these limitations? To come back to what I said in the beginning, why bother to sell boxes with Ubuntu installed at all?