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The latest announcement from Dell is that they will be offering desktop PCs and notebooks with Linux pre-installed. This is great news for the Linux community, and another step towards Linux being accepted as a desktop operating system.
Bringing this to the marketplace may seem like a daunting task, but it shouldn’t be that bad for a company like Dell. Back before Linux was a viable OS and before SCO were the bad guys, Dell were offering PCs with SCO Unix pre-installed. I was one of the few to own one and it was a great machine; nowhere near ready for the non-technical user but fantastic for geeks like me. Since then Dell have continued to support *nix based servers, switching from SCO to Linux which they have continued to support in the server market to this day. They have a support infrastructure in place so extending it to the desktop should be easy.
My only concern is that in the server market they promote the Red Hat and Novell SuSe distributions. These would be ok for the desktop too, but they should seriously consider something like Ubuntu instead.
Maybe with a company like Dell supporting desktop Linux other companies will sit up and take notice. Can we hope for Linux support from Videotron and Bell Sympatico anytime soon?