The “Break it Down” Blog

Slashdot and just about everywhere else is pointing to the official announcement that Dell will start offering Ubuntu (7.04) as a pre-install OS option later this May on some of it’s lower end PC models; to test the waters.

I’m hugely excited for what this means for Linux, mainly from the aspect of hardware support. Canonical has announced that they have been working with Dell to get proper hardware support for all the configurations that this roll-out will mean. With this new door opening, not only Dell but hardware vendors will start getting some motivation to better support Linux over all.

I believe Lenovo pioneered this when they announced late 2006 that they were going to offer ThinkPad’s preloaded with SUSE Linux. When you consider all the gadgetry on a laptop and issues like power-saving it’s a pretty tricky endeavor for Lenovo to support that, but they did and I believe Linux (at least SUSE/openSUSE) is better for it.

Now we see Dell following up in the wake of user demand for it and doing the same. I look forward to the day that you can get a high end workstation from Dell with Ubuntu pre-loaded, because that will mean all those mainstream/high-performance hardware parts will be supported by Linux which makes everyone’s life a little easier.