Those of you following this story may have already heard. Dell will sell computers with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.
As I said in a previous post, Dell had promised to provide a Linux option on some of its computers and they made a survey to help choose a distribution and other details. The other distributions they were looking at were Novell/SUSE and Fedora. Personally I’m glad they chose Ubuntu but ultimately it doesn’t matter what distribution they choose. Any distribution validates GNU/Linux as a desktop solution and any distribution would provide confidence that the hardware will work with your favourite distribution.
As part of the deal, Canonical will certify the computers and provide commercial support which users can purchase straight form Dell. That seems like a smart move as it frees Dell from having to build support infrastructure for Linux, which is one of the issues that discourage vendors from supporting Linux.
I will be interested to see if the Linux computers retail for the same price as Windows. I don’t know how much Dell pays for each copy of Windows it installs.
The Tipping Point
What does the future hold? Will this deal cause a massive migration away from Windows this year? Well, it doesn’t have to. What we have seen today is just a symptom that we’ve reached the tipping point for desktop Linux. Change happens gradually, often imperceptibly. The tipping point happens when a certain social change becomes irreversible. No one notices the tipping poin when it happens, and its effects don’t become obvious until long after.
I think that this move from Dell is an indication that the Linux desktop crossed the tipping point in the recent past, maybe in the last couple of years. The effects still won’t be obvious for some time to come, but the tipping point has been crossed and “desktop Linux” is now inevitable.
