Dear Dell,

I know that in the past you have offered a handful of paltry Ubuntu options, though I confess I don’t understand why you bothered at all.

With the exception of your two netbook offerings, I have yet to have seen you offer anything else that indicates to me that you have any intentions to make Ubuntu a real option for your customers.

As mentioned in part one of this series, despite the legendary pace of development in the Open Source community, it can be difficult to keep tabs on what is being worked on. Arguably, multimedia is just a subdivision of hardware support, another area where Free operating systems have suffered.

The GNOME desktop is alive and well. Despite rumors that everyone and everything is moving to the browser, the desktop is here to stay.

Does this mean that Red Hat will be getting back into the Linux desktop business? That's the question I posed to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, in a phone call after the Red Hat/KVM press conference, and he told me that, "Yes. Red Hat will indeed be pushing the Linux desktop again."

"The company Los Alamos Computers is now offering systems preinstalled with gNewSense, the fully free GNU/Linux operating system distribution..."

Opinion -- Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue...

[The desktop] has served us well, and old-timers like me will remember it with fond affection for many years to come, but we will have our work cut out trying to explain to the next generation why anyone would bother to go to a clunky box on a desk in a particular room room whenever they needed computer power.