A few weeks ago, in an effort to get back on track towards once again making quality products, Dell started an initiative called IdeaStorm. The basic gist being that costumers can make suggestions about what they would like to see from Dell in the future. It didn’t take too long for the open source community to take notice and flood the suggestion site with recommendations suggesting that Dell “offer the top free Linux versions for free pre-installation on all Dell PCs.” This suggestion has already garnered more than 115,000 votes and the idea seems to have caught Dell’s attention, since they are now hosting a Linux survey.

So, is there any hope for Linux fans; will Dell ever offer Linux right out of the box, for free? I doubt it, and the reason for this is really simple: economics.

The Linux crowd is made up in large part of individual who know a lot about computers, and who also know exactly what they want and how they want it, which makes the whole “one size fits all” philosophy of Windows unfeasible. Chances are that most users will want, or need as the case may be, a certain distribution of Linux, and possibly even a specific edition of that distribution. So, in order to appease even a minor portion of this tech-savvy Linux crowd, the number of option that Dell would have to offer would be overwhelming to say the least.

Profit margins on PC sales are incredibly narrow, and the substitution of Windows with a free alternative will definitely not aid the situation. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like Dell, HP, IBM, and the rest of the lot, are all pushing cheap computers out to the masses, while trying to earn a profit. In order to stay competitive (and in business), prices have to stay low, and production along with customer service has to be as cheap as possible. With the current state of domestic affairs, this means that outsourcing is an absolute necessity. It’s hard enough for someone who knows next to nothing about computers to get decent customer support for the world’s dominant operating system, and having to verse the reps in the nuances of Linux as well would create an absolute nightmare. If Dell were to offer Linux as a mass market option is would have to provide customer support for it as well. There wouldn’t be much of an option. If this ever goes through, I bet that there’ll be plenty of people who will end up getting Linux, thinking that maybe it’s the newest version of Windows, only to end up calling “Bob” in India asking why they can’t find Internet Explorer or install iTunes. Or, even if you’re a more experienced user, imagine calling in to “John” trying to explain that you’re missing a library in some obscure root directory, or that you can’t compile the code to some SourceForge project.

And then there’s the inevitable price increase for the end user. Have you ever wondered how companies like Dell and HP can afford to offer full-fledged PCs for way less than a thousand dollars? If you’ve ever bought one, you probably know the answer: “crapware” (thanks to Jack Schofield for that term). Internet advertising and Crapware work in a very similar fashion; simply by having tons of useless applications installed on a computer, there exists the possibility that someone might end up actually using it and thereby making the developer some money. In other words, this means that Windows machines are cheap because of all the junk that companies like Dell and HP are paid to include, regardless of whether the consumer actually wants any of them. If Dell were to start selling systems that are geared towards the open source market, then those would, by nature, have to be more expensive, because there would be “crapware” packages available for them. Considering all this, it would probably be cheaper to purchase a Windows machine, nuke it, and install a fresh copy of your favorite Linux distribution.

I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be nice to see OEMs start to offer Linux and other open source packages, like Open Office, right out of the assembly line, but I think that with the current state of the market it wouldn’t be economically feasible for companies like Dell to pull this of. In the short term a far better solution would be for the OEMs to simply give customers the opinion of purchasing a bare-bones computer without an operating system of any sort, much like a lot of them already do for business and enterprise customers. Most Linux distros are easy enough to install without the need for a “professional” to do it and this would also allow the user to customize the setup to their desire. The only thing that an OEM would have to do is make sure that all of the computers that they offer are hardware compatible with the vast majority of Linux operating systems and software packages. I for one would want to know for certain that I can purchase a laptop and install Ubuntu or SuSE on it without having to scour through hundreds of forums to figure out what to change to get the microphone to work properly.