On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Tracy Reed <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 12:24:57PM PDT, Harvey Rothenberg spake thusly: >... > Ways to explore Sputnik > > Build it > > Purchase a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook (which comes with Microsoft® Windows® > preloaded) and download the Ubuntu image and drivers from the website of our > partner Canonical. > > HUH?! Comes with Windows preloaded? So you still pay the MS tax knowing that > you are going to reinstall anyway? > > While I'm not a huge fan of Dell I really would like to support them when they > actually do good things but this is a head-scratcher.
Keeping different physical SKUs in stock just because of a different OS image may not make economic sense to Dell. Given the (apparent) small market for Linux based desktops/laptops, this doesn't surprise me at all. That's not to say that people shouldn't continue to push vendors to preload Linux, but just making a working OS image available is a step in the right direction. It used to be fun for me to track down out of tree device drivers or tweaks to get power management to work. Not so much any more. In the end, it might even be cheaper for some people anyway. For people who have access to discount sales channels, the discount they might receive for buying a stock Windows based via that channel may very well be more then any "Microsoft tax" they might save by going through a non-discounted channel. The thing to remember is that hardware vendors may much less then retail for their Windows licenses. OTOH, if this offends your principals; there are vendors out there who will buy laptops from Dell (and other providers), remove all traces of the pre-installed Windows software, and install Linux for you. That way you never have to know it was ever there. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
