The other day when Uncle Wyatt and I were at the OpenSourcery offices, Will took the time to show me Ubuntu running on his desktop. It really is a stunning OS! We’ve been using it as a server OS, but I hadn’t seen it on the desktop. Anyway . . . we’re in the market for some laptop to take to academic conferences so we can present Pronetos to professors first hand and get them to sign up on the site. We thought, “well, we’ve been running Ubuntu Server, why not go over to Dell and get us some of those Ubuntu laptops they’ve been promoting?” I tell you why not: PRICE.

Dell retails the Ubuntu notebooks at $744! This makes NO sense!

You can get a Windows notebook from Dell or just about any other vendor for $499. And ostensibly the big cost in that is the Windows OS!

So how come, with a FREE operating system, the Linux notebook costs $245 more? And explain to me then why I don’t just buy the Windows notebook for $500, and install Ubuntu myself? What is Dell trying to pull here?

Anyway, if LGM unconsciously pulls any stupid marketing tricks like this with Pronetos or Unhampered, please let us know.