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posted by mrpg on Friday November 17 2017, @05:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-isn't-it-free? dept.

Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!

The whole juggernaut that is now Linux on Dell started as the brainchild of two core individuals, Barton George (Senior Principal Engineer) and Jared Dominguez (OS Architect and Linux Engineer).

It was their vision that began it all back in 2012. It was long hours, uncertain futures and sheer belief that people really did want Linux laptops that sustained them. Here is the untold story of how Dell gained the top spot in preinstalled Linux on laptops.

[...] This first attempt at Linux on laptops failed mainly because most non-technical users were blinded by the cheap price and didn't understand what they were actually buying.

[...] This time the duo had the right initial market. It was big, commercial web-scale operators and their developers who were crying out for a fully supported Linux laptop.

People who do technical work, like Linux. People who don't, don't.


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  • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Saturday November 18 2017, @01:42AM (2 children)

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday November 18 2017, @01:42AM (#598495)

    I'm kind of surprised by that. While the Optiplexes back then (despite their propriety form factors) were solid machines that ran Linux like a champ, Dell's server stuff back then was just.... weird. Installing Linux on one was a challenge, constantly running into various incompatibilities and quirks, and even once installed it never seemed quite right. Even installing Windows on those machines seemed like voodoo, with having to enable special "OS Install" modes in the BIOS and having to turn on memory limits.

    I was pretty happy to see that stuff go away years ago.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @09:38AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @09:38AM (#598611)

    While the Optiplexes back then (despite their propriety form factors) were solid machines that ran Linux like a champ, Dell's server stuff back then was just.... weird.

    Indeed, ran Linux on a fair number of Optiplexes without issue (one was acting as a server, uptime before it was unceremoniously retired due to 'politics' was in the order of 390 days). As people do have the rather bad habit of giving me lots of 'obsolete' equipment to repurpose/dispose of, I'll quite happily take Dell desktop machines off their hands, I'm currently running Linux on the Inspiron I'm typing this on and there's an old Dimension 5150 sitting on the same KVM switch which quite happily runs Linux without issues, Old Dell servers, however, I stopped taking a few years back, far too many weird issues with them, they were starting to clutter up the already cluttered computer corner of the 'Junk Room'.

    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 18 2017, @06:40PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Saturday November 18 2017, @06:40PM (#598713)

      I've had absolutely NO problems running mostly CentOS. Tried a few others, slightly pressured into running CentOS, okay, I've adapted.

      Maybe I'm more tenacious and like the challenge? Maybe I'm lucky? It's a very low-budget operation. If I tried to requisition newer fancy stuff, they'd move to major hosting provider and I'd lose the fun and income, so I keep things humming.

      CentOS 4 (before me), 5, and 6 running on PowerEdge 2450, 2550, 2650, and PE 600SC (tower case- P4, has ServerWorks chipset, 3 IDE ports, Adaptec SCSI, etc.) I know some of the 2450s were originally bought new with RedHat 4 and 5 (the older series- 2000-2004).

      So what "weird issues" do you remember having??