We already discussed David Finch, Dell's senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, last week. We missed, however, some more interesting statements by Finch; Dell is looking into the ARM-based netbook smartbook market, and close to a third of all of Dell's netbooks ship with Linux.

 

Even though Dell is only the fifth-largest manufacturer of netbooks in the world, it is widely praised by the Linux community as one of the few vendors who does this whole Linux OEM thing right: a well-supported, default Ubuntu installation, without toy user interfaces or software releases that are two years old. Finch told PCWorld that Dell is about to update their Linux offering to the latest version of Ubuntu somewhere in the coming weeks.

 

more > http://www.osnews.com/story/22002/Close_...with_Linux

That's partly excellent news.

 

I say partly, since Dell currently have a laptop advertising campaign (


<div><iframe width="459" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UBXYU746jEw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe></div>) and there's no mention of Linux support (nor windows either). I recall the days when Mikey Dell stated he wasn't going to bother offering Linux on their kit because there was no call for it - only for hundreds of complaints from people that had previously asked the same thing to be told "there's no demand for it" - so then changed tack and began offering Dell "shipped with Linux".  

However, this wasn't without faults. The Linux offerings weren't much cheaper than the Windows offering (50 dollars or so) plus the link to ordering them seemed buried deep down in their website - although Dell made a large noise about Linux support, their (unwitting) barriers to takeup impacted sales which was viewed as low demand, not low supplies.

 

I also know of some netbook suppliers that have dumped a generic Linux distro onto their hardware without fully understanding customer requirements - the more savvy have found communities that have optimised distros specifically for netbook hardware (http://www.linux-netbook.com/linux/distributions, for instance) and found drastic improvements once the vendor-supplied distro has been replaced. I believe companies like ASuS have began working with those communities so that they can ship a better build on their kit, I hope Dell work towards the same aims.

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/..._netbooks/ - interesting observations there...