Dell's and Canonicial's announcement that Ubuntu Linux will be offered on a subset of Dell's notebook and desktop range is a significant event in what has been an interesting six months for both Dell and mainstream Linux adoption.
The Austin, Texas-based giant is making the move as a result of direct customer feedback to a Web site it launched in February. The most popular request was for an option to preload Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Feisty Linux distribution, and Dell has listened. Shuttleworth himself finds the move refreshing.
"The move was a response to an extraordinary volume of requests on Dell's IdeaStorm Web site," he says. "It's exciting to hear the free software community expressing themselves and equally exciting to see a very large company listening."
This is the first time a mainstream manufacturer will be making a Linux distribution available to the consumer market.
Paul Furber, senior group writer, ITWeb
Dell has offered preloaded Linux on its server range for quite some time, but this is the first time a mainstream manufacturer will be making a Linux distribution available to the consumer market.
Previously, it had been all but impossible to buy consumer computing hardware without paying for a Microsoft operating system, whether you want it or not. Linux users have been forced to buy new computers and return the operating system packages unopened for a refund, a process typically made as difficult and time-consuming as possible by both Microsoft and its OEM partners - even though the licence agreement states quite clearly that you can.
But Dell is in a feisty (as well as Feisty) mood lately: it recently reintroduced Windows XP as an option on certain product lines, because Vista wasn't - and still isn't - selling. Dell, which has traditionally been very close to Microsoft, has recognised it can garner plenty of goodwill among Linux fans, even if early sales are a small fraction of its overall business.
For free software and open source (FOSS) fans, this is just one more excuse they won't have to hear. There has been a long list of them over the years including:
* Linux is a "toy" - that now runs over 70% of the world's supercomputers;
* FOSS is "difficult to use" - unlike the latest Ubuntu, which is easier to install and use than Windows Vista;
* It lags proprietary software - unlike the Firefox Web browser, which leads Internet Explorer in every way; and
* You can't buy an FOSS operating system pre-installed from a major vendor - which Dell and Canonical have just addressed.
"There won't be a big bang event, where the world moves from one platform to another," says Shuttleworth. "But it's definitely coming into its own."
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