Breaking News: Dell & Ubuntu

Google News feeds are alive with a press release from Dell and Ubuntu. Dell will be making the wildly popular free Linux distribution available on select Dell laptops and workstations.

Many folks assume this will drop the price significantly due to the price difference between Windows and Ubuntu, but don’t hedge your bets. Dell will be spending a lot of money on maintaining support and driver compatibility for Ubuntu, something that will arguably cost more than Windows XP (but probably not more than they’re spending on Vista).

What this does bring to the market is a corporate sponsored and supported linux distribution specifically made for home and corporate users. Others have tried, but none landed a sweet deal like this one.

RedHat tried – failed, but succeeded in the server market. SuSE partnered up with Novel, but never really took off.