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- cross-posted to:
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Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”
So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.
If you want it to stop being a standard, help your distro do a better job at marketing. Ubuntu is one of the few that do some actual market research and dedicate resources to getting the OS into the hands of people by getting them interested in it. It’s one of the things we are looking forwards to doing better in Fedora.
Ubuntu got to be most popular because they focused on making it easy to setup and use by non-technical people. Even now they, for example, patch gnome to make it usable.
They patch GNOME to maintain the look and feel similar to Unity, which became their signature look.