This seems like the sort of thing where they don't really care whether they sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they'll probably sell enough of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they've already got their foot in the door.<p>It's kind of awesome that we're at a place where releasing a Ubuntu desktop is a matter of "why not?" Rather than "why?"
Surely it would make sense to at least offer a dual boot option?<p>I can't really think of a solid reason for buying this, Steam on Linux is great and all but when your marketing is saying "With over 25 gaming titles available"..
This is interesting, but not compelling.<p>I want:<p>1) Better video drivers.<p>2) An option to Dual-boot with another OS.<p>3) To remove the painful Unity interface.<p>4) More titles to play.<p>And then I would buy this without a second thought.<p>With just Ubuntu, with very little games with mediocre Graphic card drivers and a painful interface like unity (try hiding/unhiding/switching between hidden windows for example) it's hard to convince myself to buy this..
Nice to see a big name company is doing this. It will surely help Linux adoption by a wider array of users.<p>On another note, anyone else get that floating ad? Horribly placed and very annoying.
I don't know anything about gaming. But I assume that means it has a great GPU as well as a solid CPU... in which case this might be a good option for those of us doing scientific computing.
I think it looks promising if you have an external monitor and considering to buy the box alone for your dev/day-to-day purpose, more like an alternative to desktop. You get 1 TB additional for 50 bucks as well.
It's a nifty form factor and a reasonable graphics card, I would consider getting one as a portable VR station for use with the Oculus Rift (whenever, uh, you know, Oculus release the linux SDK).
<a href="http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx</a><p>> <i>Equipped with the new NVIDIA® GTX 645 graphics card</i><p>Don't bother. They want you to use proprietary driver
blobs without any source code for them.