OneAndOneIs2

I've seen a few mutterings that Dell is deliberately trying to make selling Linux fail by only putting it on low-spec machines: If you've got blisteringly-good Vista performance and Linux that just grinds along, they say, how is it possible to compete?

Well... Let's face it, nobody has yet encountered the mythical beast that is "fast Vista" . But XP can run pretty well, and Dell are still offering that, so the point still stands.

Or does it?

No.

Allow me to explain: As I have (notoriously) said before, Linux is not Windows - and neither are its hardware requirements.

I have a laptop. It's an HP nc4000. This is a rather old model, it has a 1.6GHz Pentium CPU and low-end integrated ATI 340M graphics. It arrived pre-installed with Windows XP, and it was painful to use. Slow performance, and the hard drive never stopped paging. Ever.

Dell is apparently going to offer Linux on the Inspiron notebooks. The cheapest of which is the 1501, and the lowest-spec of which is a 1.8GHz 64-bit AMD with ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 256MB graphics.

I imagine this will struggle a bit to run Vista with its aero interface, and may not be all that fast with even XP. And this is going to run Ubuntu?

Yes. It is. Because my crappy old laptop, despite being the lowest-powered computer in the house, is running Ubuntu Feisty right now, with absolutely no problems. It has an occasional hiccup with the 3D desktop, admittedly, but other than that its performance would be considered perfectly adequate by any modern PC user.

A faster, newer, 64-bit CPU? It'll run like blazes!

Dell is putting Ubuntu on low-end machines because they CAN. Vista is the resource hog, the "Spend thousands or watch it crawl" OS. Ubuntu is Linux: It doesn't need high-end hardware, so why bother selling it on high-end hardware?

Why not instead say "Buy a $600 laptop with Ubuntu and get the same performance as a $2000 laptop with Vista" and see how many people suddenly decide that maybe that Linux thing is worth a try after all?