Julian Yap wrote:
Ars Technica reports that the Windows tax is approximately $50: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-windows-tax-is-50-according-to-dell-linux-pc-pricing.html
Greater than $50, when you factor in the cost of something more than Vista Home Basic. So, not bad.
+ you get the added benefit of an office suite and no pre-installed 'crap ware'. I imagine some may buy these machines to re-install Windows XP.
The "no crapware" feature is worth a considerable time savings, at least, but OpenOffice has a perfectly decent Windows version. Can we talk Dell into including it on their Windows models?
I know many people don't buy bare bones systems because the manufactures have charged them more than with Windows included (on consumer machines).
The base Dell laptop comes with 512 meg. of RAM, good to go for Ubuntu, that's for sure. My daughter's school laptop has been going strong for two years. It also came with 512 meg. of RAM installed. It runs KDE 3.5.7 now. Applications like OpenOffice (it started as 1.0 on my daughter's machine) and Firefox have gotten a lot faster. It's nice having machines that speed up over time.
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