Dell Offering "Open" PC 426
Sans writes "Dell began offering a new desktop Dimension E510n PC this week with no operating system installed. The machine is designed for people who want to run open-source software such as Linux instead of Windows. The PC comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system, which can be installed by customers."
Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Who would buy this machine? A inexperienced home user? They wouldn't be interested in a computer that wouldn't even start up out of the box. Business? Business would buy the equivalent Windows machine for $70 less and replace Windows with Linux (assuming that was the intended use for the FreeDOS machine). Geeks? They'd recycle an old machine or build their own.
If Dell was serious about providing another OS on their hardware, they'd partner with a Linux company (Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, etc.) and let the Linux company provide the software support.
news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell has been selling machines with FreeDOS for some time. We've bought several (including the machine I'm typing this on) for work. Let me know when they start to ship with AMD chips. That will be news.
Re:news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SHENANIGANS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft offer tremendous volume discounts to OEMs to ensure they ship their computers with Windows.
good start (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahh, how amusing... (Score:4, Insightful)
The number of times I've seen people post on here adamant that they don't want to pay the Microsoft Tax on a new PC, only to see the response so far to this, makes me smile. Complaining that the difference in cost is too small, or that Dell hasn't chosen their favourite Linux distro to put on there, doesn't have an AMD processor, blah blah blah.
It's a PC without a preinstalled forcibly-paid-for copy of Windows. So Dell gets Windows for cheap, you don't see a huge price difference, but all those people who wanted an MS-free PC can now buy one. You can't possibly be upset by that, can you???
Shifting Power: HP & Dell vs. Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If it's so open (Score:5, Insightful)
Self-fulfilling prophecy if you ask me.
If you want real choice just find your local vendors and get them to order what you want. You support local business, you get what you want and often you don't pay more [or much more] than the monopoly controlled "wonder box" you get from Dell [et al.]
Tom
would have been better (Score:4, Insightful)
No shi*t (Score:3, Insightful)
-everphilski-
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well - Let's be honest. Most buyers do want Windows on a PC they buy.
Nothing more than a PR stunt. (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, the 510n comes with an ATI card that will be difficult to get to work properly with X.org (dunno if Xi Graphics is still in business), whereas the 510 uses an Intel chipset that, while not great, will probably work better.
And why not simply install a popular Linux distribution on it from the get go? They could "brand" it simply by adding a package with Dell-logo wallpapers, themes, and icon sets.
Dell's just grubbing for some positive press.
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Home users who already have a licenses Windows version but need new hardware might just wanna buy this box and get their nephew to install the Windows they already have (or just add the old HDD to the new box) instead of just throwing away their expensive Windows license.
And as for geeks; if they don't have an old machine lying around, then in these times, it can be cheaper to just buy a complete box, then build your own. And why would a true geek want to do something he already knows he can?
Real news will be when Apple ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember... in slashdot land:
Lack of Microsoft choice = bad
Lack of Apple choice = brilliant
So true. (Score:3, Insightful)
While personally I probably won't buy a PC from Dell one way or the other, at least not a desktop, I'm happy to see that they've taken this small step.
I could see this model appealing to people (admittedly, a small market) who are interested in playing with Linux but don't want to assemble their own system, for either technical or personal reasons, e.g. it's not worth their time for the money saved.
Rather than viewing it as a half-step less than Dell should have taken, I'd prefer to view it as a half-step more than they could have. After all, if they hadn't done this, we never would have noticed. It just would have been business as usual.
To me personally, I hope that it will encourage other models to be sold like this as well, particularly from other vendors (IBM/Lenovo, do you hear me?). This is mostly because I'm more in the market for a notebook right now than another desktop, and I prefer IBM to Dell, but I'm still not going to slam Dell for doing the right thing, even in a small way. That just seems counterproductive.
But then again, this is Slashdot -- counterproductivity is the name of the game.
Re:Dell Machines w/Red Hat Pre-Loaded (Score:5, Insightful)
When you think about it, we all know that the typical Linux installation is far less resource intensive than Windows, so why don't they sell it on their lesser hardware? I really think it's just pandering to a particular crowd that said, "hey, I want this." Now they say, "look, we have it and you're not buying." Well, of course not, I don't want to pay $1k for a workstation, I wanted a $500 desktop with Linux on it.
I also want to see the price drop if I get a machine without Windows. Microsoft thinks Windows XP is worth $100. Why is it that if I buy an OS free machine the price changes $0?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:good start (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ahh, how amusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a PC without a preinstalled forcibly-paid-for copy of Windows. So Dell gets Windows for cheap, you don't see a huge price difference, but all those people who wanted an MS-free PC can now buy one. You can't possibly be upset by that, can you???
First, you can buy this same machine, from the same vendor, with a better hard drive, and with Windows for significantly less money. That does not sound like they have removed the cost of Windows. More likely they are still paying a flat fee to MS and have added an additional fee to cover whatever "penalty" MS is charging them. Second, this comes included with FreeDOS. Why do you suppose that is? No one really uses it. It is not popular, well supported, or in demand. Why would Dell ship any OS with this, and when shipping with an OS, why such an obscure one?
Clues to answering these questions may be hidden in their choices. I surmise that they ship an OS because for some reason paying someone to press copies of FreeDOS and package it is cheaper for them than not including any OS. Is that perhaps because they have a contract with MS that penalizes for or forbids them to ship boxes without OS's? If I were a large PC seller and was going to ship an alternate OS, I'd pick one of the popular Linux distributions. Pretty much any of them, on the surface, seems to be a better choice. What does FreeDOS have? Well it is DOS based, like Windows. Could Dell have a contract that forbids them from shipping Linux specifically, or one that is worded in such a way that only FreeDOS and Windows meet the specifications of OS's they are allowed to include without incurring a penalty. Either of the above contracts would be blatantly illegal and a violation of anti-trust statutes. Of course it would also be a protected trade secret and the only people who could do anything about it would be Dell and MS. I know if I was running Dell I would not bet the future of my successful company on the hope that the American legal system would properly deal with MS. It has already shown that it is willing to ignore MS's tactics.
Or maybe Dell just does not want to piss off any given faction of Linux users by favoring another. I wouldn't bet on it though. My opinion is MS is behaving in a criminal manner and this is just more indication of it.
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:news? (Score:1, Insightful)
-DSX
Re:Dell Machines w/Red Hat Pre-Loaded (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the license difference, I'll point out how he's off the mark in a reply to him.
Re:Dell Machines w/Red Hat Pre-Loaded (Score:4, Insightful)
What eats resources is the X11 windowing system. {Though object-oriented, interpreted languages -- such as the JavaScript embedded into web browsers -- probably don't help much either.} It used to be that KDE was horribly bloated, but GNOME is no longer a lightweight alternative. Of course there are less resource-intensive desktops {my favourite, which I will be using in my own distro, is WindowMaker} but most people are expecting a Windows XP clone. Hence, KDE or a heavily-customised GNOME.
I'm sure that you could create a display server optimised for applications running locally on a desktop machine with a single monitor {most people's configuration} and it probably would be less resource-intensive. But would it really be worth it? Who is the intended market? The people that are running older hardware generally know what they are doing. There are still a few '486 and first-generation Pentium boxes in every co-lo; and they churn out web pages and e-mails that are viewed on machines with ten times the RAM and twenty times the processor speed.
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
This machine seems engineered to fail.
Small business side (Score:4, Insightful)
No thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Just my two cents.
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Most corporate buyers don't want an OS or applications. They've already engaged in volume licensing deals with their OS vendor and their applications vendors. They're just going to strip off the software that's on there and install their own customized load.
Has ANYONE been able to install flawlessly on this (Score:3, Insightful)
Everytime I've tried to do a 'naked' install on a 'brand-name' low-cost system, I end up with driver problems, either with Windows or Linux.
Something is *always* futzy. You *always* end up downloading strange roll-up drivers from the manufacturer, and they never seem to work properly. Basic things like suspend/resume end up being flaky unless you can figure out the exact set of drivers your system has been certified 'workable' with; this is true even down to the revision!
Sony, Dell, HP, Compaq, the lot of them. In the low-end market, these machines feel like crap.
I thought the purpose of buying a system with a pre-install was so that you didn't have to go throught that hassle?
Mind you, I haven't had near as many problems with the higher end stuff.
It's been awhile since I've purchased one of these, however, so I can't be sure.
Re:If it's so open (Score:3, Insightful)
For as long as I've been going to these meetings, the answer from Dell has been the same: "We'll offer AMD when they can support our production volume and comply with our JIT order process." For five years now they've been saying the same thing. Dell got the message- they don't care about the GHz battle. They don't care how many superpoop pipelines the chip has. They don't care about whether or not it implements the latest instruction set tweaks.
All Dell cares about is that when they place an order, the order gets filled, immediately, no questions asked- which is important, becuase Dell assembly plants sit on less than 24 hours of inventory for any given part. AMD doesn't have the fab capacity or logistics systems to meet that demand criteria, and Intel does. End of story.
Re:news? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, I don't believe that dell's windows cost per pc is $0 or even $30, which is the lowest discount anyone has been able to find so far, and since dell sells support as a separate line item, it should be possible to drop the windows cost without adding in a corresponding support cost (ignoring the crappiness of dell hardware for a second, it would be nice to be able to buy a dell without paying for windows or for software support
Not open enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
Duel Booting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Most buyers want something that runs their (Windows) applications. Windows as such? Most people don't recognize much more than the boot screen and start menu. Not that it really makes any difference for the end result.
Re:Dell Machines w/Red Hat Pre-Loaded (Score:1, Insightful)
Which would be the biggest fucking mistake of your life. Half of the people working their phone support don't speak english well enough to take down your name and the other half will give you the run around until you wind up with one who doesn't.
And you had better hope you don't have a fucking defective item, because good luck getting that shit replaced. I bought an LCD from them in July and it took three weeks calling them every day to get them to finally offer me an exchange, and by then I was so sick of it that I just returned it for a refund. A refund that still hasn't shown up.
So fuck dell. Who cares if they ship Linux or not? I'd rather have a piece of shit gateway from 1995 than anything from dell.
Re:If it's so open (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that Dell doesn't have a social conscience. What they do have is a very successful business model, built in part on top of very rigorous control of their supply chain. It would be downright irresponsible of Dell to jeopardize that business by making a decision based on some trendy marketing gimmick- whether that gimmick is called "HyperThreading" or "Predictive Poopchute Execution." Yes, I'm being glib with my choice of terms, but the point is that when an enterprise is making a long-term technology decision, the detailed implementation of that technology is often transparent to the ultimate decision-makers. Dell knows this and has accepted that sometimes technical superiority plays second fiddle to production capacity.
As a for-example, consider a large business deciding to buy ERP software- do they buy Oracle or do they buy SAP? Let's look at this from 3 levels- end user, technology architecture, and CIO. The end-users don't care whether the code runs on IBM, Dell, or HP- and they shouldn't need to care. The hardware layer is ideally transparent to them. All the end-user should care about is whether the application does the job they need it to do without getting in the way of actual work.
Zoom out to a different level: the architecture guys probably care a lot about whether it's IBM or Dell, but they probably don't worry too much about what chip is inside that box as long as the box has the cojones to support the load of running the application. All they care about is if the application goes down becuase there are too many concurrent users, or someone at the colo kicks the plug out, or someone ouside the datacenter digs up the cable with a backhoe. As long as ther are no bugs in the chips, the actual chips inside the boxes running the application are transparent to them.
Now, zoom way out to the CIO level: the CIO cares about overall cost, and he cares about perception of success. The CIO's job is to make sure that the technology STAYS transparent to the end users. Now, he knows that if there are delays in implementation or roll-out, his team will take the blame and probably bear the cost. So his biggest concern after the initial choice is made is keeping the project running on schedule, to avoid the perception of delay and cost overruns due to techology complications. Assuming for the moment that SAP and Oracle are equally easy to roll-out, inservice, and admin, and equally easy for the end-users to use, the CIO's biggest concern is picking a server vendor who delivers products on schedule without any hiccups. He knows that HP is all fucked up from a corporate perspective, and they need 5+ weeks lead time on new boxes, and they're having delivery problems, so he's not picking HP. That leaves Dell and IBM as serious contenders.
He doesn't give a shit about Hyperthreading or Intel vs. AMD because it doesn't impact his decision at all... that is, unless he picks Dell, and Dell pushes boxes with AMD, and then AMD has supply problems and Dell can't ship his boxes on time... Dell knows from experience that the CIO won't blame AMD, he'll blame Dell. It only takes one story about a project that's 6 months late and $5 million overbudget because of the missed Dell delivery timelines, and all those CIO's out there go back to IBM as a default choice.
That's why Dell can't run with AMD in ANY of their boxes- Dell is still trying to prove to John Q.CIO that they're a serious player in the enterprise space. There is still a widely-held perception that Dell computers are, as a whole, a bunch of s