MemeMachineGo!

There was some fuss earlier in the month about how Dell was offering an open source PC. Woo hoo! Great for Linux users! Go team!

Well, except it doesn’t come with Linux. It ships with no OS installed, but a Free-DOS (an MS-DOS clone) installation CD, doomed to be ignored. (Free-DOS is cool for what it is, but no one wants to dedicate a modern machine to running DOS.) And they offer absolutely no support for any user-installed OS, so they’ve just saved themselves all kind of support costs vs. shipping with Windows.

So, what with no license fees for an OS, and no support for one, they must be much cheaper than Dell’s Windows-laden alternatives, right?

Wrong. I tried it myself. A Dell 5150n with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4, 512M of memory, an 80G hard drive, and no OS costs $689. A Dell E510, which looks to use the same case, modified for the same specs (more memory, no monitor) but shipping with Windows XP Media Center Edition costs $569.

Dell wants to charge Linux users a $120 premium to install Linux on a blank drive over installing it on one that Bill had gotten to first.

But, c’mon — wouldn’t it be worth it? (search on the page for “Solidarity”) (Answer to my rhetorical question: no, but I love that joke and felt like an excuse to link to it.)

And Dell’s been selling OS-less computers suitable for a Linux installation for years — I’m writing this entry on a 2-year-old Dell Poweredge 400SC that shipped without an OS and is now running Ubuntu Linux.But it was labelled a “server” instead of a “desktop”. They were so keen to establish its not-a-desktop props as not to mention its AGP slot in its specs (a high-speed slot for video cards for non-techies out there — desirable for many desktop applications, superfluous for servers,) and to put it in a case that blocks the front (perfectly functional) USB ports.

So this is wholly an exercise in branding and marketing. And damned if I know what it’s supposed to accomplish.