I'm curious to see if anyone has any experience with any of the systems Dell has put out with linux pre-installed.
I'm interested in a new laptop, and a Linux based one wouldn't be a bad thing.

Hi Ayanami

I haven't tried a Dell with Linux preinstalled, but here in Europe you are much more likely to find a good value for money laptop if it has Windows preinstalled. Just wipe Windows out and install your favorite distribution

Even in the U.S. a Dell laptop with Ubuntu installed isn't much cheaper than its Windows counterpart.

The only advantage I could possibly see with buying a laptop, with say Ubuntu pre-installed, is that the hardware is almost guaranteed to work without tweaking. That is of course if you keep Ubuntu on there, and not install say OpenSuse or Slackware

But by now most laptops will work with many distributions

I too would generally buy a Dell pc with Windows just to keep the licence handy and then install linux if I wanted to.

Also although Ubuntu should work flawlessly with it pre-installed on a Dell, I doubt you can guarantee it'll still work when the next update comes up (which seem fairly regularly). I haven't used it but I've read a lot of people really disliked the latest release because it had issues with their system where the previous didn't.

I remember really great laptop bargains in the UK in shops like Comet, PC World, Dixons, Currys, but they weren't Dell

Very true. Most distros support tons and tons of hardware...

I had no luck with my Acer Aspire, or my MacBook Pro (Dual boot or VMWare).

Or my Gateway T-Whatever the heck it is.



Depending on what Mac Minis are after the keynote today, I might give it another shot on a Mac.

the linux drivers should be on the dell website, so if you buy it with ubantu or windows if its the same hardware you can just get the drivers later.

I think Dell is doing wrong as they don't get a full support for people who buy they're Laptops with Ubuntu.
For exemples :
- The documentation of the laptop still talkes only about Windows.
- Some computers had a wrong login présets, had to réinstall Ubuntu to be able to login
- As ubuntu needs a few knowledge about Linux to get video (w32 /64 codecs etc.) and music reading, they should at least give a little documentation or advise their users to go on the website.
- For a while they gave a slower machine to people who wanted an open desktop (512 RAM max).

And there is more to say but i have to go working...

I think they do this wrong, and it could be a bad thing for the expansion of the open source as it's mostly considered as a real bad experience for some noobs... if they don't do it conciently...

What do you think ?