A few years ago, Dell announced they were selling PCs with Linux (Ubuntu) preinstalled or with no OS installed. It was about time! So a couple years ago I bought the Inspiron 1525n laptop that I'm typing this on with Ubuntu preinstalled. Yea! (Though I immediately wiped Ubuntu and installed Fedora--sorry.)
So where do we stand today? Is the market free? Do we have a selection of OSes to choose from just as we do for cars, furniture, books, banks, and grocery stores?
No.
The Dell website offers only Windows under Home and Home Office. On the Enterprise pages they offer--count 'em--fourteen varieties of Windows! Oh, yeah, they do also list these:
What's a select country? Is my country (USA) among the lucky select countries? Apparently not. I tried to customize a PC but only Windows choices were in the OS selection category, not Linux or FreeDOS either for that matter.
So why do I still not have the freedom to buy a Linux PC readily off the shelf?
The last 5 or so new PCs I've bought were pieces that I put together (except for this laptop). I sort prefer that, but I would like the option to just buy something ready-to-go. And I certainly would like to be able to tell friends how they can experience Linux without installing it. (Yeah, a couple have booted live CDs--that's at least something.)
How would you like it if GM was the only car company you could buy a car from? Fourteen GM cars to choose from should cover the market. You don't need any more choices.
Every once in a while a notebook is distributed via the regular retail channels that has no OS, but the market for that is fairly small. For the record, the market you are referring to is the laptop / notebook / netbook market. Anything above that is already for a large part non-OS installed and MS Windows for a premium.
In Asia, Linux is very popular in new systems, but you purchase windows for extra. In addition, Android is really gaining in popularity for both phones and tables.
The trend, as it seems to be, is for the underlying OS to be free and more open, community driven software.
Couldn't it be that the trend is towards the cheapest OS, which happens to be free, open and community driven (or an illegal copy of Windows gets installed after-the-fact)?
The average user has a very murky idea of the difference between hardware and software. Somewhere along the way I think some important education's been lost. People get taught to point and click in introductory classes but nobody tells them what a computer actually is. Without that, the idea of a "different OS" doesn't make any sense.
Yes, education would be excellent. I'm all for it.
But anybody who's used or watched the use of both OSX on a Mac and Windows on a PC can tell the difference between them. If the option to buy Linux PCs was available and easy, some people would buy. And they would talk. And others would learn a little and some would be curious to ask more questions. There would be a demand for Linux PCs.
But instead, we don't have the freedom to buy (at least in the US). If it's not the direct effort of Microsoft that's keeping them off the market, I wonder what is.
