+ linux
Dwight Silverman looks at Dell’s offer of notebooks and desktops with the open-source operating system, Linux, already loaded and asks a very good question…”who’s really going to buy these machines?”
TechBlog: Dell doing Linux, but who actually cares?:
Most individual Linux users are used to installing and tweaking their own distros. They seem to be almost proud of the pain they endure in doing so — like guys in the ’50s who spent hours getting their old cars to run right, it’s a badge of honor to Linux fans that they must tinker under the hood.I think Linux users love the idea of a company like Dell offering pre-installed Linux because it validates their choice of operating system. I suspect most will sit back and say, “Good, now the whole world can enjoy the wonder that is Linux,” but they won’t buy these machines themselves. They’ll continue to build their own systems and roll their own configurations, and recommend the Dell boxes to their less-savvy friends neighbors, who’ll end up buying Windows and Mac systems anyway.
I think Dwight is pretty much on track here. I’ve spent the last 6 months trying out a number of Linux distributions and while I found the OS to have come a long way from what it was a couple of years ago I don’t believe it’s ready for the totally non-tech user.
I take it as a serious responsibility when I recommend a computer to a non-tech friend. I ask a lot of questions and try to judge their knowledge and main use of such a machine in order to make the best recommendation possible. Part of the reason for this is that I value the friendship and I don’t want to let a bad experience with a PC endanger it and the other part is that I know that if there is any problems with what I recommended I will feel obliged to help them find a resolution.
In the past I’ve recommended Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X, but I’ve never recommended Linux to a “non-tech” friend, and I still wouldn’t today. For a technical savvy friend I might, as long as I felt they understood the non-standard difficulties they may have to face.
So like Dwight I think that Dell’s IdeaStorm Site requests for pre-installed Linux may have been skew by technical Linux users that may never buy a pre-loaded system anyway.
Dell may well be investing a great deal of resources that will produce very little return.
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