Well, my laptop is playing up and getting a bit old so I'm in the market for a new one. I only want to buy one with Linux pre-installed, not for any anti-Microsoft reasons as such but just so that it can be noted that there is a market out there for Linux computers. My current laptop was bought from Dell with Ubuntu installed on it, which has done me well for the last few years, so I decided to give them my repeat business. Checking their Linux website shows no current devices available, so I decided to try and contact them to see if there were any future plans.

First off, when trying to contact Dell for any reason, they don't supply an email address! I find this most bizarre as I don't necessarily want to phone, snail mail, or chat online with a sales person. I bit the bullet and went to the online chat to ask the question and here is the conversation:

I got a new laptop about a year ago directly from Dell. I did this for two reasons, they had a good deal, and I wanted to support a company that supported Linux! So far I've been very impressed, it worked right out of the box and about the only thing that I did to it in the first few months was upgrade the OS to 7.10 (Gutsy).

Of course, that didn't last long. I soon started messing around with beta versions of Ubuntu, doing some messy upgrades and installing patches in a fairly piecemeal fashion. After about 9 months of this and breaking various things, 8.10 (Intrepid) came out and I decided a fresh install was called for.