When I ask vendors why they have yet to ship Linux PCs and notebooks despite the growth and increasing maturity of the operating system, I get a variety of responses: “there’s no demand,” “Linux on the desktop isn’t ready for primetime yet,” “the cost/benefit isn’t there for us…yet,” or, off the record, “we’re concerned about what it would do to our relationship with Microsoft.” Ok. I don’t really accept any of those arguments fully – and am living proof that the second is false, but I’m not running a hardware business so I can’t refute them all of them either.
But what I don’t get is the lack of soft support; as in aftermarket efforts to help those with an interest in running Linux like, oh, say, me. Surely many of the engineers or developers within the vendors such as Dell, HP and IBM know the answer to questions such as: is the Intel Extreme Graphic chip supported on Linux? Or, is there a modem driver that works for the Thinkpad X40? Etc. Instead, those with a Linux bent are forced to seek out answers to every one of those questions separately.
It’s one thing if you can’t ship and official support the OS, it’s another if you do little or nothing to assist the buyers that are willing to help themselves. Now there are exceptions here and there; HP did ship a Linux laptop early, and IBM does have some Linux driver information available on its support pages, but all in all, the support out there is minimal. That means that when someone like myself is in the market for a laptop, I have to check all of the individual components separately – why can’t a vendor help me here?
In a perfect world, the build page common to just about every manufacturer these days would give you buy time information about a particular piece of hardware’s Linux support (good, bad or non-existent), so when I have to pick between 3 different wireless cards, I know that two of them have no Linux support. But failing that, why can’t we have vendor sponsored and backed pages like this? Not that it should be purely vendor, mind you, but I’d love to see vendors step up and assist the community financially and with technical expertise, because, frankly, it’s a big job. It’d certainly be a short term differentiator for vendors that were aggressive about it.
This makes so much sense I’m sort of appalled it’s not available; basically purchasing a laptop with Linux on it today is no better than when I bought my X23 three years ago. Or maybe it is – anyone know of a great resource I’m missing?
