Posted on Saturday, December 01 2007 @ 20:05 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Register
reports Dell has shipped close to 40,000 computers with Ubuntu preinstalled. Not bad but it's really not that much if you take in mind that Dell sells about 10 million computers per quarter.
By most accounts, that's a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system. Ubuntu fans are urged to hold back their virtual quills of vitriol following that last sentence and remember that the OS trails major desktop and notebook OSes by quite a margin.
David Lord, a spokesman at Dell, declined to discuss the 40,000 figure, saying the company "does not break out" those types of numbers. Lord was, of course, willing to say that, "Adoption has been very good" and the IdeaStorm push where Dell asks customers to promote things they would like to see represents "a two-way street" where Dell hopes users "will vote with their minds and wallets."
The Ubuntu experiment marks the second time Dell has flirted with letting any old customer order a Linux PC off its web site. Grizzled open source warriors will remember CEO Michael Dell telling the 2000 LinuxWorld that "the only thing growing faster than Linux is the number of Linux systems Dell is shipping" after Dell revealed that Red Hat Linux would appear across its entire computer and server line.
