Who Says Linux Ain’t Ready for the Desktop?

Apparently not the nearly 50,000 people who are asking Dell to make their systems available with Linux pre-installed. Dell ostensibly created a website called Dell Ideastorm, a support portal with a Digg-like interface for people to make requests and post ideas. Well in the lead are requests for Linux, requests for no OS installed, and related Open Source requests.

Tell me again people don’t want Linux on the desktop, or at the very least an alternative to Windows on the desktop.

The latest issue of Maximum PC was promising for Linux as well: in a sidebar article with a  pie chart of survey results, over half of all users surveyed said they would either stay with Windows XP (something like 40%) or switch to Linux (10%).  Another chunk are going to wait it out and see what happens before upgrading to Vista.

10% isn’t a lot, but it’s more than it would have been in the past (and does not take into account current Linux users who may not be reading a Windows-oriented mag in the first place).

Irritated with the current state of Linux Journal and the poor handling by the publisher of sister “magazine” Tux (in no way shape or form do I consider it a true test of interest in a Linux-related publication), I sent an email to Maximum PC associate publisher Anthony Danzi. I wondered if Maximum Linux may just have been ahead of its time, talked about how far Linux has come, and a couple ideas for what a Linux magazine for users could be (versus what Tux was) and how the only real Linux mags for users available in the US are British mags that cost around $15 an issue.

I won’t quote or post his email because I didn’t ask him about doing so, but in a nutshell it appears there will be some Linux content in an upcoming issue and they have been receiving several letters about Linux.

These are exciting times.

And I’d like to remind those of you who don’t want to ditch perfectly good hardware just to keep up with Vista that Linux is a perfecty good alternative. Fedora Core 5 runs wonderfully on my six-year-old 700MHz laptop with 384MB of RAM, a system even XP would struggle with.