Remember how only a little over a year ago Dell sold several desktops and notebooks with the options of No OS, Ubuntu, or some copy of Windows on them as a choice when you bought a system? Remember how awesome that was? If you were a SUSE user, for example, you could order a Dell with no OS on it and put the OS you actually liked on it when it came. Well I guess Dell must not be as into Open Source as they once were, or they chose to forget about the famous “Windows Protest Day” highlighted in Revolution OS in the late 90′s. Recently I confirmed two things with some Dell online chat techs. One, they tell me that they now offer no desktops with an Ubuntu option and only 2 Intel Atom processor based notebooks with one, and two they will not sell me a computer without an OS on it period. When I brought up the fact that they can’t charge me for Windows if I don’t want to buy it, the tech dodge the bullet by saying “there is simply no option available to sell you a desktop computer without Windows on it.” Pretty frakking lame. I was actually excited that Dell jumped on the Ubuntu wagon for a while, but the No OS option was the coolest thing that they did and now it is gone. Your computer company shouldn’t assume that you want Windows, and you should have an option to choose not to get it if you don’t want it. Those who want to pay for it can always do so. Also, they bundled the Zino desktop I was looking at with Vista and not even Windows 7. It’s too bad because the Zino is perfect little computer to use with your HDTV, etc. and they would have sold one more today if they just weren’t such asses about the whole Windows thing. Hell, I was even going to pay for the spring green casing. It’s not like the Mac Mini option is much better in comparison, but at least it has a UNIX based OS on it. Still it costs about twice as much…. I wish hardware manufacturers would stop kissing Microsoft’s ass and just worry about what all of their users want, and provide it when possible. Asking for them to not put an OS on a computer seems pretty simple to me. They can always have you sign a waiver that you refused their “tailored” OS for the machine. Dell, you broke my heart today. I guess you’re just a bunch of hypocrites in the end. I think we call that being a big corporation in general.
I have been pretty pleased with Dell’s WARRANTY support, but their chat support is pretty weak. It might be worth while to actually CALL Dell sales, since you usually get a voice that 1) is in the US and 2) knows what the hell they are talking about. I’m hoping that if you talk to a sales guy, you might actually be able to do the no-OS thing. If Dell phone sales really has forgotten how to sell anything but Windows, I’d suggest something like this:
http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=95
The System76 meekrat has a nice dual-core with HT (4 threads) Atom 330, and can handle 4GB of memory. The NVidia ION is a decent graphics card, and the drivers for it in Ubuntu are quite good.