2007 18
Michael Dell uses Ubuntu!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Lately I have been blogging that I am an Ubuntu Fan and after a major crash with my Lenovo with Windows XP I left Microsoft for a combination of Ubuntu and Mac.
I use Ubuntu for e mail with Thunderbird and regular Open Office for regular tasks related to the management of Fon. On the other hand, I use Mac for music, videos, pictures and entertainment in general. While most people know Mac few know Ubuntu. Ubuntu is best described as a very simple and stable Linux based operating system. It´s Linux for the rest of us. Ubuntu is for people like me who love technology but are not engineers.
Interestingly I just got an e mail from Michael Dell in which he says he also uses Ubuntu. As the link shows he went as far as to say so in his official bio in the Dell web site. Now if Dell, the corporation goes the way of Michael Dell, the CEO the Ubuntu distro will rise from relative obscurity to the big league of Vista, Windows XP and MacOSX. Fans of Ubuntu should watch this opportunity carefully Michael Dell may be coming your way just as the new Ubuntu is about to be released.
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Mike Sosin on April 18, 2007 ·
That made my entire day
f4rrest on April 18, 2007 ·
Yes, so does my mom now. Ubuntu is great. Just wish Adobe would wise up an release some Photoshop and Dreamweaver for Linux… I would even pay! Then I would hardly ever have to boot into windows.
Rick on April 18, 2007 ·
Jo també puc dir que soc usuari d’Ubuntu i que m’agrada moltíssim! Fins ara, no he trobat no res que no puc fer amb Ubuntu. Gràcies al moviment ‘open source’ – que ens va proporcionar quasi un miracle per als refugiats de Microsoft.
Rey Junco on April 18, 2007 ·
Martin aca I also am usuary of ubuntu and covers tyodas almost my necessities when salio works the migration assistant well is not going to exitir reason not to use it with PC to even make almost all the tasks common today in http://www.wired.com a note of which apps was a month working single with different google
good it is all greetings
is that wacked?
Ubunto rocks! It came up on my E-Machine as a boot CD and everything worked perfectly. I just wish printers were as easy to configure as Windows.
hapbt on April 18, 2007 ·
if i thought that meant dell was going to offer ubuntu on their pcs i would almost care
otherwise its just another non technical user trying ubuntu one day, big deal, he can do that because he probably dosent have to do any work on his own PC, just tells someone else to do it.
Don on April 18, 2007 ·
Linux will become an option for a bigger majority of home users once it starts being taken seriously by game developers. Until then, it’s just an obscure hopeful. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all works out someday.
Kyle on April 18, 2007 ·
What he forgot to mention on his “accessories” is that he owns an iPod. My girlfriend works at the Apple Store in The Woodlands, TX, and he came in to buy accessories for it!
Alex on April 18, 2007 ·
You just made my day. I still use windows because my job requires it and maybe because I have been a PC tech for about 10 years and know Windows pretty well I don’t have the “usual” compliant people have about windows but I have to say that Ubuntu has done an excellent job on making things easier for “normal” people.
I don’t see Ubuntu , or any other Linux distro for that matter, being a player on the enterprise, at least here in the US, but I do see a bright future for this OS in the home user area.
;it just works. Anyway, just my opinion.
Take care.
lefty.crupps on April 19, 2007 ·
[quote]Linux will become an option for a bigger majority of home users once it starts being taken seriously by game developers.[/quote]
Yeah my parents are big gamers. Me too.
Actually, I know very few gamers these days who still rely on a PC. Not that the games aren’t good but that the underlying OS is getting worse… yeah that’d be the ones from MS…
Dan on April 19, 2007 ·
Another Ubuntu user checking in.
Ubuntu is great because it can be a simple system that almost anybody can pick up, but if you want to take that further, it’s still Linux, so you can add to it and tweak it to your heart’s content.
Ubuntu is the distro I recommend when people ask why “the windows” on my laptop “looks different.”
Robert on April 19, 2007 ·
@Don, Silly logic.
Hats off to Michael. Does this mean that Dell will be supporting the Linux community with hardware or money? Seriously, RedBull is $2 a can these days.
Christian Einfeldt on April 19, 2007 ·
Martin, you said that you use the Mac for movies. You should know that the free open source video tools are getting to be fairly useable as well. Most people will still prefer Mac’s ease of use and sophistication, but it is now possible for a simple end user like me to make a feature-length documentary with Free Open Source Software (FOSS, for short) tools like blender, kino, cinelerra, the Gimp, and CinePaint. Most of the major Hollywood studios are Linux top to bottom and front to back, and I’m not talking just about their render farms. Most of them also use Linux on the desktop. Almost every major motion picture since Titanic was rendered on a Linux server farm. Many of the tools running on top of Linux are still proprietary apps, but FOSS is making in-roads there, too. CinePaint, for example, is widely used, such as in Tom Cruise’s “Last Samurai” film. There were absolutely no arrows at all on the set of “Last Samurai”. They were all painted in using CinePaint.
bob on April 19, 2007 ·
why is this piece of crap on digg?
azazel on April 19, 2007 ·
Something tells me it’s just a PR move to make him look like he cares about linux at all. Fact is, Ubuntu is the most popular distro atm. Him saying that he uses Feisty just makes a ‘bigger’ amount of people happy.
I am an ubuntu user, but from a business perspective I’d say Ubuntu might not offer Dell the support it needs in order to successfully deploy Linux on his machines.
Joel on April 19, 2007 ·
Great news, great laptop! I just now called Dell to try to buy one just like it inculding Ubuntu installed so it has all the correct drivers. Dell sales says they’ll create this laptop, including Ubuntu, if I can get 50 orders. Are you possibly interested? Email me: joelparkerhenderson@gmail.com
MeTheGeek on April 19, 2007 ·
Ubuntu is for engineers too. It is the preferred Linux distribution at my office. And we are all engineers!
Meneer R on April 19, 2007 ·
“starts being taken seriously by game developers”
Three things:
1- game developers only care about market-share; supporting a platform costs money: it has to be profitable
2- when it is profitable, they are very quick to port (compared to other sectors of the software-industry). This is because content is also a large part of their costs. So the bigger the range, the better the costs get covered.
3- not everybody plays games. Believe it or not. But people playing state-of-the-art games are a minority. Secondly, of that minority, a even smaller group of people chooses to do so on their PC instead of on their Wii or PS3.
Linux is already an option for a big majority of home-users. Convince them, and the games _will_ get ported.
phill on April 19, 2007 ·
Way to go Michael Dell! I’m all for Dells shipping with Ubuntu. I’m glad they finally give you the option to order a PC sans OS. Then again you probably won’t see this Apple fanboy ordering a PC. I’ll leave that to my Dell lovin’ boss.
Zarcu on April 19, 2007 ·
f4rrest:
you would pay for photoshop? thats amazeing
Paul on April 19, 2007 ·
I botched a dual boot setup with ubuntu and Windows 2000 and killed my partition (my own fault).
Once I got over the shock and sent my drive to be recovered, I figured it’d be a good time to make Linux my primary OS… I’ll never go back. I’m so happy with ubuntu and have been trying to get everyone onboard.
Now, with a major player like Dell on board, Linux has a real chance to make it to the “Big Time”!
Jeswin P on April 19, 2007 ·
@f4rrest:
Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks work flawlessly on Wine + Ubuntu (feisty). Photoshop, I am not sure.
Shannon VanWagner on April 19, 2007 ·
Ubuntu works pretty good. I once had problems installing it on my old Dell Inspiron 2650, turns out the hard drive was going bad. So because I wanted to switch to Ubuntu, I went and bought a new hard drive for my 3+ year old laptop. Ubuntu saved me from loosing my data!! So now my Dell laptop runs Ubuntu with a PCMCIA Netgear wireless card perfectly. I picked Ubuntu because most things work with minimal or no configuration and it’s so easy to install. Let’s get on with the OS revolution! It’s time to kick Windows to the curb for a less GREEDY product!
Shannon VanWagner
Mentalo on April 19, 2007 ·
Martin if you do this in your ubuntu you will have an aspect like your office Mac 🙂
linuxhata on April 19, 2007 ·
That’s wonderful. Now Linux guy will get charged for windows and get an OS that’s available for free. Very smart. Good luck getting your wireless card, or really any other hardware to work under ubuntu. Have fun not being able to run any games, useful programs, and new hardware too. brilliant!
Martin Varsavsky on April 19, 2007 ·
Thanks mentalo, will try it out!
Mr.K on April 19, 2007 ·
One of my friend has install Ubuntu, which as format all the partitions of his hard drive without asking him anything… result, he lost all his data, pictures, movies, MP3…
Not that nice…
Esteth on April 19, 2007 ·
Ubuntu mentions during installation that it’s going to clear the rest of your data if you select that option, if you have it selected to delete a partition.
Also, what was he doing installing an OS without even a basic grasp of what partions are?
steven on April 20, 2007 ·
By default ubuntu can not play avi nor mp3… so if you want to see a movie or listen to music they want you to go to an “open” format…
luckily there are internet pages telling us how we can enable this formats on our ubuntu…
I do hope the new ubuntu supports wireless internet… last beta was rather limited… it didn’t even have a “wireless network neighbourhood” default installed to find wireless…
Mr.K on April 21, 2007 ·
To Esteth:
my friend cleared on partition, put all his data in another one… while installing, ubuntu has merge all the partitions in one totally clear of any data… so he lost everything.
Plus after installing, he need to do more installation just to be able to read a mp3, or movie…
Still progress to do before pushing more people to swap to Linux.
candtalan on April 21, 2007 ·
Installs:
Ubuntu install says clearly that the default install takes over the hard drive, if you do not want this read the options carefully.
There is also a resize option and a manual option. The latest version gives two guided options and a manual option.
Multimedia codecs:
The latest version will find and install these for you if you wish
Wireless:
the latest version comes with drivers already installed (in the kernel)
al on April 21, 2007 ·
what about Kubuntu?
best regards from the mediterranean see
Craig on April 21, 2007 ·
Oh, forgot to mention, if Dell started bundling ubuntu with their computers that would be awesome because then you would have the “Mac effect” where the OS is guaranteed to work well with the hardware because the hardware is known. Ubuntu could have a badge campaign much like the “Works with Windows” badges so users could know which peripherals also work with the OS.
oker1 on April 26, 2007 ·
it would be great if they sold a notebook with preinstalled linux and working drivers for all the hw.
its easy for the windows users to badmouth bad hardware support on linux, especially notebooks with all those oem parts noone knows a thing about. If hw companies would release proper linux drivers, preferably opensource, hw support would be just like windows. binary only drivers would be good compromise for new products, especially in a highly competitive field (graphic cards for example), but not the way nvidia does it, making buggy binary drivers, not releasing source/specifications even for the legacy cards.
and this whole not releasing specs, no linux support thing the vendors are doing is a vicious circle, they wont support linux until its widespread, but the userbase will not really grow without PERFECT hw support.
vista is about nothing more than eye candy + copyright enforcement + feeding the hw industry, if people would realize this it would be a great opportunity for linux
Motorcycle Guy on April 28, 2007 ·
I don’t think adobe sees a “free operating system” as a good market exactly. They probably are kind of wary of releasing software for people who are too cheap to even buy windows or os x.
Dell on May 19, 2007 ·
Wow, thanks for this post. I came across your post from digg and found it very enlightening. Thanks again.
Freelance Website Design on June 11, 2007 ·
Good for Mr Dell. It’s nice to see Linux spreading. Though many would argue that Ubuntu doesn’t make a linux user, but has been simplified for the masses. I think that it’s great and definitally counts you as a linux user.. after all… is it mac? is it windows?
cpanel hosting manual on December 16, 2007 ·
Cool. I always liked Dell laptops because, from my experience, they are far more reliable than any other I’ve tried (well, except a MacBook, haven’t tried it yet). I was contemplating installing Linux on my Dell, but always hesitated. I think that this post is the little push I needed 🙂
trademark registration on April 6, 2008 ·
Good for Mr Dell. It’s nice to see Linux spreading. Though many would argue that Ubuntu doesn’t make a linux user, but has been simplified for the masses. I think that it’s great and definitally counts you as a linux user.. after all… is it mac? is it windows?
Seth on December 11, 2008 ·
don’t know if everyone reading this post already knows or not, but Dell is indeed offering ubuntu on it’s new computers!!! How great is that, they now offer computers shipped straight by Dell with Ubuntu on them and will support Ubuntu, one more step in the right direct, I applaud Dell for this move.
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federico on April 18, 2007 ·
martin aca yo tambien soy usuario de ubuntu
y cubre casi tyodas mis necesidades
cuando funcione bien el asistente de migracion no va a exitir motivo para no utilizarlo con pc para hacer casi todas las tareas comunes
incluso hoy en http://www.wired.com salio una nota de alguien que estuvo un mes trabajando solo con las distintas google apps
bueno es todo saludos