Dell Offers Computers Preinstalled with Ubuntu

I just recently purchased a &quot;GPD Pocket&quot;, which is in my opinion the best Linux machine I&#x27;ve ever owned. Its a unibody-like case (just like MacBook) with a touchscreen, in a very small package:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;gpd-pocket-7-0-umpc-laptop-ubuntu-or-win-10-os-laptop--2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;gpd-pocket-7-0-umpc-lapto...</a><p>I&#x27;ve been a Linux user since day one of its release, and an &quot;Apple laptop user&quot; since the day of the tiBook release - and these two aspects of my professional life have always been a little incongruous to me personally.. the MacBook is in my toolbox because it is, simply, a great laptop in terms of physical comfort level, even if I&#x27;m not a huge fan of MacOS - the physicality of the thing matters. And Linux, of course, is just plain powerful.<p>So the moment I realised someone produce a laptop that wasn&#x27;t from Apple, yet had very similar physical attributes (albeit smaller), which would also give me a way to escape MacOS and run Linux as a first-class OS, I jumped on board.<p>The point is, I hope manufacturers continue this trend - to build a better laptop than Apple, but make it really worthwhile for the user to install Linux on it.<p>I&#x27;ve had a lot of systems, but my GPD Pocket is really one of my favourite devices - the best of the hardware world combined with the best software you can find, and when I open it up and start using it, I really don&#x27;t have any desire to buy another Apple machine.<p>Could this be the start of the exodus? Time will tell - the GPD Pocket has many aspects that are not so great - but if they follow it up with an improvement over its existing design, I will definitely become an ex-Apple customer.<p>The physicality is important, and it seems its no longer an Apple-exclusive desire to build such wonderful machines.<p>(Note: this means I don&#x27;t find any of these Dells&#x27; particularly attractive for the same reason .. but maybe someone has compared them in reality and knows where I&#x27;m coming from here?)

The big deal, IMHO, is not so much that it comes with Ubuntu preinstalled, but that it (I naively assume) contains only hardware supported by Linux.<p>I have been ridiculously lucky when buying hardware, but I am told it is not that difficult, even today, to run into machines with hardware that is not well-supported by Linux.<p>So I think I would actually prefer if vendors sold machines that have been tested to work well with Linux, kind of like the &quot;Designed for Windows&quot;-stickers on PCs and notebooks.<p>If a machine is made of hardware that Linux supports well, I do not care what OS is preinstalled, since I will probably wipe it and install one myself anyway. But having a guarantee from the vendor that I can do so without trouble or fear of bricking my machine would be helpful.

My best Linux experience laptop continues to be the venerable ThinkPad X200 (circa 2008). It has <i>perfect</i> Linux support - every single piece of hardware works with drivers in the upstream kernel. It has good battery life, it&#x27;s lightweight, and it&#x27;s very durable - it&#x27;s almost 10 years old and both of mine look brand new. The keyboard, RAM, disk, etc is all user-upgradable and each screw is labelled so you know what to remove to get into which components. The keyboard is the best I&#x27;ve ever seen in a laptop - and it&#x27;s user replacable. The laptop has WiFi, ethernet, bluetooth, a fingerprint reader, and a webcam, all of which work perfectly with open source drivers. The hardware is so well understood that I&#x27;ve also had most of it work correctly on NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and 9front. 9front! It&#x27;s also supported by coreboot.<p>It&#x27;s not an 8-core powerhouse, but I don&#x27;t expect that from my laptop. It compiles the Linux kernel in about 10 minutes on one (of two) cores. It runs KVM just fine. If I need to do something really heavy I&#x27;ll SSH into some remote box that can handle it better, but I&#x27;ve done that pretty rarely. It copes very well with almost any workload I&#x27;ve given it.<p>You can pick one up on eBay for anywhere from $40-$150. No other laptop even comes close for me. Is it glamorous? No. Does it play games? No. But it&#x27;s the best damn laptop you will ever use.

Bought a 7520 and am keeping it on 16.04. could not be happier.<p>Highlights:<p>32 GiB of RAM<p>15&quot; 1920x1080 FHD matte screen with no mic or webcam<p>1TB storage<p>Xeon processor (equivalent to top end Mac processor)<p>So... Many... Ports<p>Battery life with screen I picked is amazing<p>Ability to fully customize the beast<p>Painless Linux experience (truly).<p>Down sides:<p>Heavier than a MBP<p>A teeny bit of coil whine<p>Charger is 180W....and big too<p>Cost -- as much as a rMBP, but for the dollars the hardware is dramatically better in the areas I care about. Go spec it out if serious and make own decision though :)<p>I love this computer. I know some people may consider the 1920x1080 15&quot; screen not as nice as Retina (you can get a Retina density display on the 7520 if you want), but I find 144ppi perfect for 15&quot;. Better than anything of yesteryear. Also I was able to get &#x2F;exactly&#x2F; what I wanted at each option for a reasonable price and no compromises. Anyhow I can finally tell people this is a good idea if you are comfortable on Linux.

I was so tired of being forced to buy overpriced hardware from Apple that I&#x27;m not even happy with just because I work with OS X.<p>I then bought a new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and was surprised that a) the scaling does not even work with Dells own &quot;tweaked&quot; Ubuntu (even the installer looked horrible) and b) &quot;coil whine&quot; is a thing at this price point. I was so unhappy with it that I sold it and replaced it with an HP spectre x360. Except for thunderbolt everything worked fine so for me there was no real advantage over the &quot;preinstalled&quot; Ubuntu on the Dell.

The headline was altered in a confusing way, this article is about the Dell Precision line.<p>FWIW, I have a Dell XPS 13 9350 laptop with Linux on it (Ubuntu 17.10) and it runs marvellously.

Dell has been offering these for a long time. I bought a 1525n (laptop) with Ubuntu pre-installed in 2008, it was my primary machine for years. I don&#x27;t use it often now, but it runs xubuntu 14.04 fantastically well.

Have they fixed the Windows key? I remember from my XPS Developer Edition it came pre-installed with Ubuntu but the windows key was not replaced with a would-be-awesome Ubuntu key. A tiny detail, but still...

Still not a single one in Australia? :(<p>Honestly, it cannot be that hard...I&#x27;m this close to writing off future dell purchases on principal...<p>That&#x27;s as someone who loves his XPS 13 and had to put ubuntu on there himself...

I bought a Dell Precision 5520 earlier this year. I have to say that the Ubuntu it shipped with was not &#x2F;quite&#x2F; there. But it did not suffer the custom kernel woes of earlier XPS models which shipped with linux. It was mostly stock Ubuntu.<p>After throwing arch Linux on the thing it was more akin to &quot;old thinkpad&quot; levels of compatibility. I&#x27;m really impressed and not sorry that I gave Dell my money. It&#x27;s a rock solid machine.

No they don&#x27;t. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dell.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dell.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;</a> (to which I am redirected from every link in the OP) has nothing other than Win10 or Win7pro. I don&#x27;t know exactly who they are selling these Ubuntu laptops, but it isn&#x27;t to me.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dell.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;shop&#x2F;dell-laptops-netbooks-and-tablets&#x2F;sc&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;alienware-laptops" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dell.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;shop&#x2F;dell-laptops-netbooks-and-tab...</a><p>I&#x27;d jump at the chance to buy a Ubuntu laptop. Not for me, but for those family members who want laptops but cannot stand windows. I already am going to spend this chirstmas installing Linux on my parent&#x27;s new machine, bought at Costco with win10. I would have ordered them a dell Ubuntu laptop, but I guess Canada is just too small a market. Victory to Costco and another &quot;sale&quot; for Microsoft.

That list is not really complete --- just 2 weeks ago, we needed 2 &quot;small form factor&quot; desktops for a project, so I emailed our Dell sales guy, mentioning &quot;we&#x27;re going to install Linux on these anyway, don&#x27;t care about the windows license&quot;. 3 days later, we had 2 x OptiPlex 3050&#x27;s, with a fully functional Ubunutu image right from Dell.<p>I&#x27;m not sure the Linux option was available for that via their web site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they support Linux on more systems than their site indicates.

The pain-point for me with Ubuntu (I personally installed) on laptop is the power management. Are these pre-installed models any better w.r.t power management?

I don&#x27;t like Ubuntu, but I&#x27;d buy one. The real meaning of this is that they&#x27;ve validated the hardware to work against modern Linux.

I thought they have done this for a long time, at least since they sold that poor woman a laptop with Ubuntu, causing her to drop out of college.

Shame the laptops are all — I think — 15&quot; and above. And shame that page doesn&#x27;t provide any information apart from a photo and the model number: at least list the screen size, maybe processor etc. so I&#x27;m not <i>completely</i> in the dark having to dip in and out of each one.

Does this mean you can buy a dell without paying for the Windows license?

in India, most laptop vendors sell a version with Ubuntu. Which is why India is kind of turning as the real market for desktop linux over the west - where it is affordable for most people to buy a macbook.<p>This is a very large market that Fedora is potentially ignoring. I have much better experience installing and running fedora on bleeding edge hardware (NVME, etc) than any other OS. Currently I run a XPS 9350 non-developer edition with Fedora 27 and everything works out of the box.

Good news but I prefer Fedora nowadays... Of course it is an easy switch and being tested with Ubuntu means that all hardware should be linux compatible.

Dell XPS 13 battery bloated, warped keyboard and track pad, and Dell refused to accept responsibility for the dangerous defective product.

Do you remember when people (well linux people) used to say that Microsoft pressured companies into not providing linux? Was that true?

If only they&#x27;d put discrete PgUp&#x2F;PgDn&#x2F;Home&#x2F;End keys instead of making people use Fn+arrows.

That is for the US. What about Europe?

Dell Precision laptop has nVidia GPU. No thanks.<p>I want a laptop with 4k built-in display and no nVidia GPU.

With an egregious EULA. I wouldn&#x27;t touch a dell Ubuntu image with a ten foot pole.

s&#x2F;5&#x2F;5 more&#x2F;

I encourage all Linux users to buy Dell as often as possible. We need more companies that actively support open source software. Next step will be open <i>hard</i>ware.

They look kind of expensive (1000 plus dollars) compared to the refurbished Lenovo x220 and up (200 to 500 dollars). How do they compare ?

As usual not on the German store.