[AnthonyMouse]

> Otherwise, some OEMs have tried installing versions of Linux, with negative financial results. A few are still trying. The real problems are selling and supporting them.

The problem seems to be that they're always trying to put them on budget machines, which is completely the wrong market. It's chasing the customers who pinch the last penny and you're never going to make any money from them regardless. Meanwhile those customers don't know what an "Ubuntu" is but pick it because it's cheaper, and then you get overrun with support calls when they want to install Turbo Tax.

The place where it makes much more sense is the corporate and professional markets where the customers actually know what they're buying. An IT department which is just going to nuke whatever the OEM installs in favor of their own volume licensed disk image would be happy to save the cost of a [redundant] Windows license for every machine. And professionals like programmers and scientists who actually use Linux would appreciate being able to buy workstation-class hardware with official driver support.

[scholia]

You are exactly right on both counts.

The main attempt to sell Linux to end users was the use of different versions on netbooks, which were mainly bought on price by relatively clueless users.

I talked to one supplier about the obvious cost-of-Linux-support problem at their launch. We won't do support, they said, it will be like an appliance: we'll just reset to factory condition.

You can imagine how that turned out...