Dell did make a serious Ubuntu effort in 2007. They had a fair selection of Ubuntu machines, but they didn't make any money. Other OEMs dropped their plans to sell Ubuntu, and all you can get with Ubuntu from Dell now is a few netbooks.
I bought one when they were brand new (in fact, I'm using it right now). It was not ready for prime time - there were suspend/hibernate problems, among other issues. I could not have recommended it.
That with Dapper Drake. Karmic works a lot better, but it's so bloated that I can barely use it. I had to get rid of GNOME and run fluxbox, and I don't use Firefox anymore because it takes fully half of my RAM (not that that's Ubuntu's fault). But I think regular Ubuntu would be ready for prime time on a faster machine. The only thing really holding it back now is inertia and software compatibility.
But I expect that it will be awhile before OEMs want to try again. Canonical shouldn't have pushed it to OEMs before it was ready.
Don't blame Ubuntu for the suspend/resume or other hardware compatibility problems. Dell sold you a system with hardware and software that conflict. Suspend, hibernate, et al work fine on almost all properly configured combinations of hardware under Linux. If Dell chose to sell you a system with an incomplete configuration or unsupported hardware, that's their fault, not Ubuntu's.
I don't know that I'm entirely convinced that Dell's program was on the level for Ubuntu, or that it's a fair representation of what would happen with a serious Ubuntu OEM.
A assure you it's not. My Acer Aspire One netbook worked almost flawlessly with Linux right out of the box without any significant effort from the manufacturer (it came with Windows).
The only problem I experience is when I set the desktop to exactly 2048 pixels while using Compiz. It will probably be solved by the next release.
Selling a box with Linux that doesn't work properly with Linux sounds like an excellent way to get a rebate on the OEM prices of Windows licenses.
Dell shouldn't have sold the system like that, but it should work when you do a fresh install of Ubuntu. If it doesn't, then the system is only good until you reinstall the OS, even if Dell did some post-vanilla install configuration.
It didn't work after reinstalling the OS. It does with Karmic, which shows that it's not a hardware problem.
I stand by my statement. But Dell is also not blameless, and my next computer was not a Dell (and won't be).
I bought one when they were brand new (in fact, I'm using it right now). It was not ready for prime time - there were suspend/hibernate problems, among other issues. I could not have recommended it.
That with Dapper Drake. Karmic works a lot better, but it's so bloated that I can barely use it. I had to get rid of GNOME and run fluxbox, and I don't use Firefox anymore because it takes fully half of my RAM (not that that's Ubuntu's fault). But I think regular Ubuntu would be ready for prime time on a faster machine. The only thing really holding it back now is inertia and software compatibility.
But I expect that it will be awhile before OEMs want to try again. Canonical shouldn't have pushed it to OEMs before it was ready.