Comment 1312 for bug 1

Hi :)

I think the idea about Cannonical selling hardware with Ubuntu tailored to it is
not such a bad idea. There seems to be a gap in the market at local level.
Dell and others sell machines with Ubuntu pre-installed and there are a lot of
Dell machines being sold in computer shops locally but sadly none of the Ubuntu
Dells are on display and the sales staff are clueless. Perhaps getting a
smaller distributor /OEM might make a difference? Perhaps getting a local shop
to have a specialty section or something might help?

The original suggestion from Torpedolos seemed based on a few widespread
mis-conceptions. Apple is growing but Ubuntu is almost certainly growing faster
but is starting from a smaller market share. Apple are highly visible and spend
a fortune on PR and advertising. Ubuntu just gets on mostly by word-of-mouth.
I doubt Apple costs less to develop as a lot of Ubuntu is developed for free,
certainly a lot of the bug-squad work for free. Do we really know if Apple's OS
is lighter and faster than Ubuntu? I have found installing Ubuntu on different
machines makes Ubuntu look and feel quite different, especially on machines that
have bluetooth devices or wireless or both. Sure there are usually 1 or 2
things that need to be tweaked but usually on almost all hardware it seems to
set-up just fine. Out of 4 recent machines 2 didn't need any tweaking to get
hardware working although i swapped the window buttons back to the Windows side
rather than the Mac side. 1 machine needed to have "cheese" installed but then
intgrated the web-cam into all appropriate apps without any further agro. Just
my own home-machine happens to be awkward with 10.04 for some reason but was/is
fine with 9.04. Oh and i never have been good at setting up network printers on
any OS.

Still there is clearly a big gap there in local stores.

Regards from
Tom :)