Paul Johnson wrote:
On Thursday 02 March 2006 01:20, Star King of the Grape Trees wrote:I am very certain that Dell does sell servers that optionally have Linux, and even says this on their website.Nothing but lip service. I tried this week, still no dice. They advertise it on their website, but Dell will not, under any circumstance, sell you a preinstalled Linux box. You can even call them and ask questions, they'll as politely as possible tell you that you're a freaking moron for even thinking they do.Two years have passed, not one bit has changed: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20040918105850387
Dell sells Linux workstations to businesses, they don't sell Linux desktops to average joes. I suspect it's a support issue. Unless there is some Linux vendor willing and able to provide entry-level OS support, I don't blame Dell for not wanting to take that on themselves. Dell is huge and consequently somewhat limited in its flexibility, like most (all?) large companies.
A few years ago I had a Dell and had a problem with a fan that I had to call tech support about. The rep I spoke with said with surprise, "Oh, you know about computers!" just because I knew how to get into the bios. Right now, people who use Linux are a self-selecting group. We aren't all gurus or technophiles -- goodness knows I'm not! -- but we are willing to read documentation, troubleshoot, read log files, mess around with configs and so on to get things working. The typical Dell customer is not. The typical Dell customer doesn't want to know about apt-get this or dpkg that or Sarge, Etch, multiverse, universe, etc. Typical Dell customers will think their computers are broken when they refuse to play a particular .wmv file they found in a Yahoo! Group.
I suspect it will be many years before any of this changes. -- Michael