Woman blaims Ubuntu & Dell for dropping out of college

16 January 2009 by Gunthy
Filed under Linux

An American woman is claiming Dell and Ubuntu are the reasons why she wasn’t able to attend her college education. This is quite shocking, so what happened here?

Well, this person ordered a laptop with Dell as having such a machine was a requirement to start her education. Apparently the machine she ordered came with Ubuntu pre-installed. Once it arrived, of course she couldn’t find MS Word, couldn’t launch her Windows-only DSL install CD, etc. This lead her to believe that she had to drop out of college as she couldn’t do the work she needed to do on the laptop.

Now how the hell she happend to order a Dell laptop with Ubuntu and not notice all the warnings is beyond me. As a matter of fact, I’m seriously wondering if this person is even capable to attend the classes she wants to take, as she’s signing up for a Technical College. Also the fact that you have to put a quite the effort in searching Dell’s site to even be able to get your laptop ordered with Ubuntu seems a bit strange to me.

As a matter of fact, I think this story is very sad, and shows just how ignorant people are, not even willing to make an effort in researching a bit.  If she would have done that, she would’ve found out that the installed OpenOffice was more than capable of replacing her MS Word, and that calling her ISP helpdesk, or trying to run the CD with Wine would have solved the Windows-only problem.

The general public is too conditioned to Microsoft software. But you can hardly blame them. Schools are taking little to no effort in finding out more about Windows alternatives, but rather stick with it as that’s what people are used to anyway. Of course you don’t hear Microsoft complain, as for them this is the perfect situation to keep their lock-in scenario playing out as much as possible. Educational institutions, and governements in general, should do more effort in promoting Free Software, because let’s face it, that’s the only way Linux is ever going to be widely accepted by the general public.

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