Dell + Ubuntu = ???

Dell started selling its Ubuntu systems today.

This is the first time in a long time that a major/mainstream hardware vendor has shipped systems with a non-Microsoft OS pre-installed. I had heard about this for a few months and thought "sure, Dell's going to slap a copy of Ubuntu on machines and sell them on some backwater page from their site, which will only be accessible to people who search for it for an hour." But, they're actually advertising it on the main page. I think that's pretty cool. I mean, it's not hard to install Ubuntu on a machine yourself, in fact it's about the easiest OS I've seen to install yet. But the fact that a major vendor is selling machines with it pre-installed is interesting.

There are other vendors selling pre-installed Linux systems of course (e.g. http://system76.com), but man, they're expensive... I was going to get a cool-looking little system for my wife from them, but after configuring it to the specs I wanted, I could have bought 2 iMacs for the money. That's crazy!

What I would like to see is someone selling this laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. For $400. I would buy 3 of them at that price.