Linux PCs: Customer service or lip service 13524

Freeride

Keep in mind that even most Linux users still want and need a Microsoft Windows license of some kind. If they want to run Wine, Bochs, VMWare, Xen, or Crossover, they will need a Windows license to use the DLLs required to run the applications that can't be run on Linux in native mode. As a result, about 1-2 the machines sold with Windows will be converted to Linux AFTER it is sold.

Again, this is mostly because the PC maker purchases Windows licenses in bulk. It doesn't cost any less to sell a PC without Windows, and if the hard drive must be manually replaced with a formatted and untested drive, there are additional labor costs.

The major PC makers aka OEMs are also careful to avoid a lawsuit. It's much easier to ship the machine with a Windows license and Windows pre-pack than it is to try and audit all of the machines sold without Windows and try to prove that Windows wasn't installed after it was purchased using OEM provided Media, corporate images, or other installation images..

Most of the machines are shipped with Windows XP home edition, yet almost all of the machines used by corporations, especially larger corporations, are reimaged with XP Professional, which provides essential networking, security, and update control.

Many companies, including Dell offer "white box" machines, which are OFFERED with either Linux or FreeDos or some other alternative operating system, not because they actually expect to sell them without Windows, but because they know that models so listed are more likely to be purchased by those who want to convert their machines to Linux after they are purchased.

More importantly, the OEM can use these "alternative" offerings to let users know which machines NOT to purchase for Linux. Most of the machines going for bargain basement prices that seem too good to be true, are actually machines that are "Linux Hostile". Even if you wanted to use Linux on these machines, it's highly probable that the display would be painfully slow, the sound card might not work as well as it should, and the WiFi card might not work at all.

The problem is that the OEM is not allowed to put the Linux trademark on the same page as any of the Microsoft trademarks. Such ads-pages require Microsoft's prior written permission, and while nothing is explicit in the contract, the De Facto behavior of Microsoft is to deny permission to any add making ANY mention of Linux.

The article pointed out that over the last 10 years, over 800 million PCs have been sold. This would be an average of about 80 million PCs-year. Furthermore, PC sales have peaks and valleys, and right now, we are in one of the lowest valleys since 1993 when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1. Nobody wanted to buy a new PC until the new operating system came out, and when it did come out, it required too much RAM, Disk, and CPU speed for previously sold computers.

If you figure that PC sales are likely to run as low as 60 million units this year, and about 30 million units are being converted to Linux this year, this means that Linux could end up on the equivalent of 1-2 the machines being sold.

Furthermore, if you look at some of these high-end machines, they have cards, and are in general optimized for Linux instead of Windows, it's pretty clear that most of the PROFIT for OEMs will be made on machines sold with Windows preinstalled, but optimized for Linux.

Even companies like Red Hat and Novell are seeing growth rates of roughly 40%-year which means that even U.S. markets are doubling every 2 years. In some parts of the world, Linux is now growing even faster, and in places like Brazil, Linux is a market leader.

When you think about it, HP has a good strategy. They have millions of 64 bit AMD machines being sold at much higher profits than traditional Celerons and Pentiums, and there is almost no advantage to purchasing a 64 bit machine for Windows except for a marginally faster CPU speed. On the other hand, the same machine running Linux can handle more memory, does faster graphics calculations, and can generally pump through a great deal more information much faster.

The irony is that most Celeron chip basesd machines are also optimized for Linux. Again, Linux doesn't need the graphics acceleration features of the P4 and the Celeron usually has bigger cache and less context switching overhead when running Linux.

Other tell-tale signs that people are adopting Linux much faster than the OEM sales figures show:

Number of external USB and Firewire drives sold, this includes cases which can be filled with a separate drive.

Number of aftermarket hard drives sold - the fastest way to install Linux without losing Windows functionality or having to reparbreastion is to simply install Linux on the second drive and boot from that drive. Dual boot machines are still very popular but as Xen, Bochs, and VMware become more popular, machines running Linux as the "host" OS with Windows as a Guest, and perhaps even a second Linux "guest" have become more and more popular. Using VMware or other Virtual machines has already became the standard configuration for most Intel servers.

Machines which can boot from USB drives. Ironically, Laptop drives with USB-2 drives using 8mb or 16 mb cache, 7200 RPM and 400 bps transfer speeds can often outperform most internal laptop drives which typically spin at around 4200 RPM. It's also possible to get one of those USB flash-card adapters and configure them as a couple of 1 gig hard drives. Many can support SD, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, and Smart Memory cards - ALL AT THE SAME TIME, which means they can be used as very fast swap or boot drives.

Sales of Parbreastion Magic, backup utilities such as Ghost and TrueImage, VMware, and other "reconfiguration" software. These are often used to help parbreastion new machines or to create bootable images which can be loaded directly into "virtual machines".

sales and downloads of Open Source software such as Firefox, OpenOffice, and cygwin. These are indicators that corporations aren't as closed to Open Source as they once were. Most corporations now realize that their e-mail, web server, web browser, file server, print server, routers, firewalls, and wi-fi are all based on Open Source technology. In most cases, the "proprietary extensions" provided by Microsoft have also been the vehicles for worms, viruses, and $billions worth of lost productivity. Even many machines which run Windows are now running with most of these proprietary enhancements disabled.

Many corporations are looking at the success of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and other internet companies who survived the "dot-plant" disasters, and a common theme among them is their unabashed use of Open Source technologies, usually including Linux or BSD in their servers. Even Hotmail is still back-ended with *nix and open source servers such as postscript or sendmail.

Microsoft may be the final "push" that puts companies over the edge toward Open Source. As they continue to say "if we build it, they will buy", and arbitrarily decide to increase the support fees charged for upgraded software such as XP and Vista, and try to strong-arm customers into replacing perfectly functional software - at a huge extra cost, simply because they don't want to support it anymore - often when it is less than 5 years old, corporations are pushing back. Many companies already "allow" OpenOffice and Firefox and many companies are even redesigning internal corporate sites to make sure that they are "FireFox friendly".

Many companies are also using antiword to create archivable docbook versions of millions of Microsoft Word documents. It only takes a few seconds-document, can be scripted, and creates archives which can be searched and indexed using standard text search engine technology.