If you could tell Dell which flavor of Linux you’d be most likely to buy pre-installed on one of its machines, what would you say?The PC manufacturer recently polled its user base (both current and potential) to find out which factory-installed software options it found most desirable. Not surprisingly, pre-installed Linux came out on top, followed by pre-installed OpenOffice and pre-installed Firefox.

After arriving at the shocking conclusion that a rather vocal sector of its user community loves open-source software, Dell is getting down to the brass tacks. The company has set up a survey page to determine which machines deserve Linux the most, which distribution is the best fit and what sorts of tasks customers will be using these machines for. Go take the Linux Learnings survey through Friday March 23 to make your voice heard.

The survey is a little user-unfriendly — the weighting of tasks could have been handled better. Also, the choice of Linux distributions is a little scant. As Ubuntu Project founder Mark Shuttleworth points out, open-source geeks are fussy:

You know what you are like - you sit and configure that Dell system down to the finest detail, you want a specific model of HP laptop, you want the one that has the Intel graphics chipset not the other chipset because you prefer the free driver approach from Intel… you are in short an expert, demanding customer… Worse, we are not “Linux” users, we are users who want version 6.06.1 of Ubuntu, or 10.2 of SuSE, or Fedora 6. We want a specific distro, and in many cases also a specific VERSION of that distro.

Shuttleworth also brings up the fact that Dell is heading straight uphill with this tactic. PC sales margins are so slim — and so largely underwritten by Microsoft — that Dell is going to have to charge more than a base price for these machines or take a hit on the predicted rise in tech support costs Linux will bring about.
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Regardless of the shortcomings, I see Dell’s initiative as a positive step. Also, it’s refreshing to see such a huge interest in OpenOffice as a trusted alternative to Microsoft’s office software offerings. Although it’s tough for me to speak to that, seeing how I’m off in Googland…

[via InfoWorld]

Source : blog.wired.com

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