Fitting the battle of life

I posted yesterday that I had some very long boot times (reaching almost 3 minutes if I didn’t hit ctrl+alt+f1) due to usplash being a pain. Well, a quick google as usual revealed the solution: usplash was booting with a screen resolution of 1280×1024, which isn’t the native resolution of my widescreen laptop. (This is bug #150930.)

Changing the value in /etc/usplash.conf to 1280×800, and running ’sudo update-usplash-theme usplash-theme-ubuntu’ (as per instructions - will link when I find them) led to the immediate reappearance of the progressing orange bar, and unattended quick boots. Woo! Next step, try and reduce this further…

Following on from my post this morning about the non-cost of OpenOffice versus MS Office, what happens when you don’t have much money to buy a new computer? The ‘average’ consumer isn’t going to want to be scouring the shops for bargain parts, worry about static discharge and getting jumpers set right by either upgrading their computer or building one from scratch - especially if they need the mobility of a laptop (and 2008 could well be the year laptops overtake desktops in terms of sales). So, what to do?

[Note: I've started with the base models from Dell and tried to match specs as closely as possible.]

As an Ubuntu user, I would always recommend anyone to use it. I’d almost go so far as letting them take my laptop for a test-drive for a couple of days. (Almost.) I’m sure with a little gentle encouragement, a little guidance when they need it, they’d fall in love. Oh, and it’s free, I’d tell them. You can get it from Dell, I’d tell them. Wow, all this for free? I’ll get one of those, not one of those hideously expensive Vista machines then, they’d say.

Well, here’s the problem. Take the base models, the Inspiron 6400 and it’s Ubuntu counterpart, the 6400n. With the same specs (1.60GHz cpu, 80GB hard drive, one gigabyte of RAM, the same Intel graphics), the Ubuntu machine actually works out £10 more expensive than the Vista Basic machine. (The Ubuntu machine starts at 512MB memory, which would be enough, and is £20 cheaper overall, but in the interests of fairness…)

So what is that extra £10 doing there? It’s there because companies pay to have their software pre-installed on retail computers, which of course reduces the overall cost (and, in a way, locking you in) - remember all those ‘get your internet here’ icons on the desktop last time you bought a Windows computer? Ubuntu doesn’t do that - it wouldn’t fit with the philosophy, for a start, and you can’t make something free any cheaper.

One argument that says that the £10 doesn’t matter is that Ubuntu comes pre-installed with even more (useful) software than Windows does out of the (retail) box. Look at the GIMP, for instance. It’s not an equivalent to MS Paint. It’s an equivalent (for simplicity’s sake!) to Adobe Photoshop. Which costs over £500. And that’s with a 10% discount from the nice people at Amazon.co.uk. Look at it like this: that £10 pays for a whole lot more than it looks like it pays for. Think of it, perhaps, as a one-off registration fee for unrestricted access to the Ubuntu software repositories. To the community support network that exists. To complete customisability of and freedom over your computer. And £10 is less (to continue a theme from my last post) than ten pints of beer. So you’re only losing what, two nights (maybe even one!) of drinking? (Remember also that Dell is enabling multimedia out of the box, so the £10 probably covers some kind of license for that too.) Let’s also bear in mind that Vista Basic is, well, basic. Ubuntu comes in one form, like Mac OSX, which has all the features in it, not some myriad different forms that give you more as you pay more. So it probably isn’t a fair comparison to choose the Basic option anyway…but we’re going for a cheap computer here.

To return to the £10, it’s also a signal to send to companies like Dell that there is consumer demand for Ubuntu-based (or even GNU/Linux-based in general) computers, and that’s a signal that in my opinion is worth £10 to send.

The £10 ‘Linux tax’ on Dell computers is actually very good value for money, I would say. Just wish I had the other £330 to buy the damn computer with.