Ubuntu users are pathetic.

[jzuena]

Ubuntu is not for a person that doesn't even know what it is in the first place.

Having frequently Dell's site many times, I find it hard to believe that she could have accidently ordered a laptop with Ubuntu installed as the OS.

Of course it wasn't accidental. My guess is that she kept changing the configuration to get the lowest possible price, not knowing that would mean changing Windows for Linux. It was a mistake but it was not an accident.

Looks like a marketing opportunity for Apple to me. They should give her a Macbook and record her amazement at how easy it is to get it up and going versus what she experience with either Ubuntu or Dell.

Perhaps this was the girl's cunning plan all along. Get a Macbook for the price of a Dell and her dignity.

 

[daflake]

Interesting thread...

I'm curious... Why didn't she call her school (clearly required for it) tech support to talk to them. This is her fault unless they screwed the order up (that happens). Even if the tech talked her into keeping it with Ubuntu she should have known what was required for the courses she was taking. Most schools make that very clear. Lastly, why not just buy XP and install it to resolve the problem. If she was in school, she could have obtained a college copy cheap and even gotten the schools IT department to install it.

Sounds like she is looking for a reason to blame someone else.

 

[Demosthenes X]

Interesting thread...

I'm curious... Why didn't she call her school (clearly required for it) tech support to talk to them. This is her fault unless they screwed the order up (that happens). Even if the tech talked her into keeping it with Ubuntu she should have known what was required for the courses she was taking. Most schools make that very clear. Lastly, why not just buy XP and install it to resolve the problem. If she was in school, she could have obtained a college copy cheap and even gotten the schools IT department to install it.

Sounds like she is looking for a reason to blame someone else.

Your advice for someone who turns on a computer and can't tell Ubuntu apart from Windows is "just buy a copy of Windows and install it"? Stop thinking like a computer geek and put yourself in her shoes for a minute - I think installing a new OS is beyond the abilities of this sort of user.

I take my car to a mechanic when something goes wrong. If I bought a car with the wrong engine in it, I certainly wouldn't be happy to just "go and buy a new engine and install it". There are some people out there that could do that... I'm not one of them. So please don't expect everyone in the world to be a computer genius and be able to handle that sort of task.

Yeah, the girl should have just sent the computer back. But the Dell tech guy didn't help, either: he told her she should keep it, and he told her that it would be compatible (which, to be fair, it is...).

I'm guessing that Dell screwed up and sent her the wrong computer, and she for some reason decided to keep it. That was her big mistake. Calling the news... that seems a bit odd to me, but there you go.

 

[Ozzymandos]

A slight tangent here

As a long time *Nix and Windows user, and a recent convert to the MAC, I was shocked when I discovered that much of my college's website was literally off limits to me without some contortions, because it was written for IE and IE only. Blackboard was bad enough; with some care I can use FF. The worst offender so far has been MathLab, with it's insistance that I run IE 6.0 to access my course materials. I can't even imagine a browser more bug prone and full of security holes, but there it is.*

*Not a slam against MS by the way. I actually like the new IE, and think Win 7 is a great update to Vista.

 

[drichards]

Third world Dell tech support is one of the concessions you make when you buy that Dell. This whole situation should have never come to light, but its out there. A girl on a tight budget ordered a low end laptop and saved a few bucks on the OS, gets it setup and doesn't see anything familiar. Awful Dell support doesn't help her, though she likely refused to pay additional costs for Windows. She continues living a customer service nightmare and feels like the news team will help her and maybe she'll get a little famous. So she does and the notoriously unfriendly linux community jumps all over it. Where is the help for her, the intro to linux tutorial, the good support?

 

[daflake]

Your advice for someone who turns on a computer and can't tell Ubuntu apart from Windows is "just buy a copy of Windows and install it"? Stop thinking like a computer geek and put yourself in her shoes for a minute - I think installing a new OS is beyond the abilities of this sort of user.

No, I'm thinking like a college student. If the requirement is to have Windows installed and it is not then I would call the FREE tech support that all schools offer and find out what I am looking at (after the Dell failure). Add to that I would find a friend that had more knowledge on computers. She went to the news and that leads me to believe that she was stalling because she wanted to drop those classes and needed someone to pin it on. That being said, most school IT departments would have been happy to help her do whatever install she needed.

I don't doubt that there are people out there in the USA that don't know what Windows looks like, but her story just doesn't line up for me. Either way, she got a semester off.