Michael Dell Speaks on Bringing Linux to the Desktop

By Alexander Grundner | March 8th, 2006 Comments (0)

DesktopLinux.com (DL) has a great article/interview with Michael Dell, the founder and chairman of Dell Inc. (via Digg). The article reveals that Dell Inc. is definitely tuned into what’s happening in the desktop Linux space, but Michael feels that there are too many distributions floating around to decide which to back for all their systems.

“People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: ‘Which Linux are you talking about?’,” Dell asked.

“If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and Xandros, then someone would ask us, ‘Why don’t you support Mandriva? The challenge we have with picking one is that we think we’d disenchant the other distributions’ supporters.”

“It’s not that there are too many Linux desktop distributions,” Dell said, “it’s that they’re all different, they all have supporters, and none of them can claim a majority of the market.”

“If you look at DistroWatch, you’ll see zillions of these distributions. Which one should we do? And, everyone keeps telling us that they want different distributions. So, our conclusion is to do them all and let the customer decide.”

No doubt he’s right. Linux users are extremely faithful to a particular distribution. For a company like Dell to just pick one would be an inadvertent slap in the face to all others, hence the reason the company’s nSeries models come pre-installed with the open-source FreeDOS operating system.

Unfortunately with all the favorable Linux talk, Michael makes a statement that boggles my mind at the end of the article when asked: “What would it take though to get Dell to offer fully-supported Linux on its complete line of desktops?”

“We love Linux, and we’re doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support. Or, if there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we’d preload it.”

Dude. Ever heard of Debian and the Debian Core Consortium? The majority of popular Linux distributions are based on Debian’s foundation – i.e. Ubuntu, Xandros, Knoppix, Linspire. If Dell could build machines that fully support Debian, the majority of the Linux market would be covered IMHO. Moreover, a pure Debian install would be a better alternative to FreeDOS in the eyes of Linux users.

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