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by freehunter
4981 days ago
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Dell, at various times, has offered Ubuntu machines (their latest offering is an Ubuntu XPS laptop). I don't know if they've offered them in the UK or outside of the US at all, but they've always been discontinued shortly after appearing. If they were discontinued because of Microsoft objecting, Dell wouldn't have done it at all (and wouldn't keep trying every couple of years). My guess is that they've been discontinued due to not selling in enough quantities. Dell also offered FreeDOS as an option. Looking online, Acer has offered FreeDOS in the UK, at least in the past. These computers are usually advertised as "No OS Installed" or something similar. |
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(1) They find that offering one Linux isn't much of an advantage even for Linux users, since so many people have a different preferred distro. Even people who buy a laptop running Ubuntu are likely to replace it with something else, currently Mint.
(2) Supporting Linux is a very expensive nightmare, especially if you try to do it in 30 languages across 50 countries. Selling Linux laptops to newbies is a loss-making proposition, so you only want to sell to geeks and businesses that can look after themselves. And they're the people who install their own OS anyway.
(3) It's not such a big deal to sell business machines with FreeDOS or something similar. With consumer laptops, the pre-installed crapware basically pays for Windows. Business laptops don't have (or shouldn't have) pre-installed crapware so OEMs are not losing to much on installation fees. The exception is probably the anti-virus program, which delivers big bucks if the user signs up and pays.