Otherwise, some OEMs have tried installing versions of Linux, with negative financial results. A few are still trying. The real problems are selling and supporting them.
The problem seems to be that they're always trying to put them on budget machines, which is completely the wrong market. It's chasing the customers who pinch the last penny and you're never going to make any money from them regardless. Meanwhile those customers don't know what an "Ubuntu" is but pick it because it's cheaper, and then you get overrun with support calls when they want to install Turbo Tax.
The place where it makes much more sense is the corporate and professional markets where the customers actually know what they're buying. An IT department which is just going to nuke whatever the OEM installs in favor of their own volume licensed disk image would be happy to save the cost of a [redundant] Windows license for every machine. And professionals like programmers and scientists who actually use Linux would appreciate being able to buy workstation-class hardware with official driver support.
The main attempt to sell Linux to end users was the use of different versions on netbooks, which were mainly bought on price by relatively clueless users.
I talked to one supplier about the obvious cost-of-Linux-support problem at their launch. We won't do support, they said, it will be like an appliance: we'll just reset to factory condition.
You can imagine how that turned out...
Which isn't much of a surprise considering what I have observed so far (in trying to purchase a Linux PC). I can't recall ever having seen an OEM offer Linux for more than a sparse subset of their product line, usually mid-tier or low-tier machines.
>A few are still trying.
Which ones? The situation may have changed since I last paid any attention a few years ago.
>The real problems are selling and supporting them.
The MVP here is to merely accept returns for units that turned out to be particularly troublesome; which they usually do (ie: the Samsung UEFI thing from 2013).
A non-Microsoft UEFI key thing might be nice as well, but that's another story.
If you think there's a market for Linux PCs, you can always set up a company to sell them. You wouldn't be the first to try, but you might be the first to succeed ;-)
Dell used to. I just contacted Dell sales and according to "Hazel" they do not offer any non-Windows OS for consumer products nor will they sell a system sans-OS.
>But the real problem is that one "support incident" eats the profit from about five sales, or more.
Meh, there is a lot of room for argument here. I think the real problem, after MS' many anti-competitive shenanigans is that most people just think MS Windows is synonymous with "computer". Those who really want a Linux PC will just buy the hardware they want and install it themselves.
>If you think there's a market for Linux PCs, you can always set up a company to sell them. You wouldn't be the first to try, but you might be the first to succeed ;-)
Someone someday will probably succeed at that. I'm probably not that someone, and that day may not be today. I do think that there is a small market for it, and there could be a bigger one, maybe if/after Gaben has any success with SteamOS. OTOH, if we ever have a modular laptop standard with a commodity peripheral market then maybe not, as there would be less need. (given that the only OEM pc's I have purchased in the last 10 years were laptops).
