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Why Dell’s Gamble On Linux Laptops Has Paid Off

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @09:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @09:04AM (#598604)

    Ahem. I think most scientists use Mac these days, seen as best of "usability/compatibility" and "can run a compiler/etc". I have seen some folks run windows desktop, do real work on a cluster and interface via e.g. putty.

    True story: There's a Physics Department out there who were seriously into Grid Computing [wikipedia.org] who forced their users into running Windows Desktops, whilst they ran (was Hummingbird, is now OpenText) Exceed (Yes, full XDM sessions) to access a bunch of Linux/Unix servers to then run their code.

    So, here's how their typical user spent their day.

    User comes in in morning, fires up desktop, fires up Exceed, logs into Unix server, spends all day there, logs out of server, shuts down PC.

    In essence, the PC was a bloated Xterm with added security holes for fun (think: insecure SQL Server running on internet visible machine thanks to inept admin decision to install software without locking shit down, person with domain admin rights logs in to compromised machine...you do the rest of the math)

    The Irony of a bunch of supposed Grid advocates not using their 1200+ desktops as part of any sort of distributed computing setup was not lost on a lot of people back then.

    Thank the FSM I'm well away from that place, so I've no idea if that's still the SOP...it would not surprise me.