On 22/06/12 10:08, paul sutton wrote:
On 22/06/12 08:09, Chris Fox wrote:
On 22/06/12 07:38, richard wrote:
On 21/06/12 17:47, john wrote:
Thought that this may be interesting :
ww.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dell-to-bring-Ubuntu-laptops-to-850-retail-stores-in-India-1620657.html
John
so why not sell them here too ?
From what I recall, they did for a while and it was a monumental
failure. Perhaps it was before its time, perhaps Dell didn't do a good
enough job of marketing it, but either way I think they did it for a
while and then binned the idea.
Personally I'd like to see someone try it again. The big stumbling
block, I think, isn't telling Joe Public that Ubuntu is better than
Windows: They can figure that out for themselves, and if they can't then
maybe for them Ubuntu /isn't/ better.
What Dell, or PC World, or whoever tries this at a national level needs
to educate your average home user about is that Ubuntu is different, and
isn't compatible with Windows, and why. I vaguely recall stories from
the last time someone tried selling pre-loaded Linux laptops to Joe
Public that a number of users were returning them as "faulty" because
their Windows software didn't work.
Good luck to the chap who posted to this list a few days ago trying to
do the same thing - I hope it's a big success.
Cheers,
Chris
I think given when I ask people what Operating system they use they say
Windows and some struggle to then tell me what version of windows they
are running, this is going to be a real struggle.
I think the Raspberry Pi may perhaps suffer the same fate, illiterate
adults will struggle with them while children and computer literate
adults will probably understand what is going on and thrive to a point,
then be frustrated at the illiteracy of adults who are then unable to
help them progress further and what is worse they won't admit they are
clueless on the topic.
It won't fail per-se just highlight how bad things have got with regard
to peoples technical literacy.
Going back on topic the biggest fail was putting linpus on netbooks, a
lot of Linux users hated it, and it really gave a bad impression as to
what Linux is. As for the impression given to non linux users it was
probably enough to really put people off.
For this to work you NEED local support and this is hard to get,
people support windows and know windows and can fix most issues,
fixing issues with ubuntu does require the same level of knowledge which
for the avg user is lacking,
Paul
I would be happy if they sold them on line with a warning that you would
get no software support. But last time i asked one of the salespeople
that pop up when you visit their site I was told "we don't do that",
only a few weeks ago.
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