I find Dell’s half-hearted commitment to Linux as frustrating as everyone else. It took me forever to find the actual link on Dell’s site to their Ubuntu offerings (hint: they look exactly like Google AdSense sponsored links and it just says “open-source PCs”). Once you find it (or even if you use the direct link), you are greeted with a warning page about Ubuntu. Finally, to make matters worse, “Dell recommends Windows Vista” is plastered all over their site. Now it looks like at least some Dell representatives may be discouraging customers from Ubuntu.

For now, though, I would encourage everyone to ignore this. In the long term, it doesn’t really matter if a few customers are discouraged from buying a computer with Ubuntu. The important thing is that the out-of-the-box experience is as close to perfect as possible for those who do buy computers pre-installed with Ubuntu. Any reasonably intelligent person should be able to buy a computer with Ubuntu and have no problem getting started with it.

This means that you should not have to go to the terminal to set up the fingerprint reader and popular applications like Skype should be set up to work perfectly as soon as you install them. This, rather than getting Dell to recommend Ubuntu to people, should be the first priority, since it will, in the end, lead to more happy Ubuntu customers.

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