Canonical has announced that Dell will sell personal computers pre-installed with Feisty Fawn, Ubuntu 7.04. Financial details, such as what license fee if any is being paid by Dell to Canonical, which sponsors Ubuntu, were not disclosed. Dell will offer optional paid support from Canonical, maintaining Canonical’s support revenue model; some Dell customers are willing to pay for support. Three desktops and a laptop model will be introduced, possibly followed by other models.

We believe that the market is there and ready for the offering. This success of this deal, then, will hinge on two key aspects. First is Canonical’s ability to scale its end-user tech support. Second is how Canonical will react when customers, for the first time since the launch of Ubuntu, are pissed off at it.

Linux on the Desktop
Desktop Linux has struggled primarily because of installation challenges and a perception of Linux as anything but mainstream, either second-rate cheap stuff used as a Windows substitute for pikers (I’m afraid that Linspire at WalMart and Elektra perpetuates this) or first rate rocket science that’s just for geeks (Gentoo, says Gentoo, has made installation easier).

Now, Canonical and Ubuntu are not just about making money. The amount of pure goodwill in the project, with sponsorships of educational and localized versions designed to bring the power of Linux and free and open source software to the developing world, is laudable.

Ironically, this beneficent approach has resulted in a slicker, more professional and richer user experience than any other distro, even those which charge for every copy: The Ubuntu user experience today stands proudly and rightfully next to those of commercial operating systems. The Dell OEM is not about a cheap substitute for Windows, it’s about pre-loaded Linux on Dell hardware, something we believe has a small immediate market and, we believe, a much larger one long term. Canonical says it already has deals with OEM partners in Asia that sell 200,000 pre-installed Ubuntu machines each year.

The growth of Mac in the past three years has come from sexy hardware, sexy software and a wicked cool OS. But it comes with a price, which we aver slows adoption by Windows users who might be unhappy but don’t want to invest in all new hardware. Even users buying Ubuntu pre-installed on Dell can still, if they think the whole Ubuntu thing is rubbish, go pick up a copy of Windows, install it and be done with it – far less risk. Additionally, a barrier to Linux desktop adoption has been getting the thing installed and all the hardware to work. People don’t want to futz around with drivers and wrappers, they want to shred tracks, play tunes and videos and surf the web. Ubuntu, more than any other free distro to date, makes this possible. Pre-installed, we’d say, this stuff will stack up against the best of Linspire from a user experience perspective any day of the week (in fact, Ubuntu users can subscribe to CNR if they install the client – a one-command operation – and pay the fees).

Support is everything
Neither side will disclose whether Dell pays any money for the Ubuntu OS. Canonical points to its long-stated revenue model of a commercial support offering, and it’s true: Dell and Microsoft customers have demonstrated a willingness to pay for commercial support. That in and of itself shows the Dell deal has huge upside revenue potential for Canonical.

The Dell deal, though, lives and dies by support. Canonical must scale its support offering or face user wrath (Dell is not renowned for great support; several sites are dedicated to bitching about it and a recent peasant revolt resulted in a total overhaul that’s, uh, ongoing). Here’s Mark Shuttleworth on the subject:

This is certainly the question that has the full attention of Canonical and Dell. We are of course already selling and servicing desktop support, but we are aware of the challenge of rapidly scaling an operation that depends on highly skilled and trained staff. The team in Montreal is closely involved in the planning, so we’re quietly confident that nobody will be caught unawares. That said, we do not know what to expect, as nobody else has tried this approach before. Will be happy to give you more feedback in a quarter.

So can Canonical ramp up its commercial support infrastructure to deal with an avalanche of utter newbies? These are newbies, by the way, of a totally new ilk. This third generation of Newbie will have had to do no research, no homework and taken no time to learn about the OS. It is the generation which simply bought it. And you know what? They want their CDs to play, their web experience to be the same as it is on their work computers, their PowerPoint animations to work, their bullet points to look as sexy. Apt-get what? Did you say sudo?

When I first installed Linux in 1997, I was just such a newbie, and it was ghastly nightmare. I needed long-lost manuals to determine hardware settings. It took me like three days to get the thing up to a command line, let alone X.

In the next generation, wizard- and script-based installers took away much of the pain away and more users showed up; newbies found it easier to experiment because setup no longer necessitated psychotherapy.

Ubuntu made this process more democratic still. Today’s announcement that Dell would ship four computers with pre-installed Ubuntu Linux opens the floodgates. Now what?

Consider this from a Feisty bug report this week:

…I’d never had this problem with Windows XP Pro or XP Media Center Edition. I also don’t remember this problem with Ubuntu Edgy. The network was just re-detected immediately. Feisty risks being perceived as not environmentally-friendly if it cannot handle Hibernate/Suspend properly…Thanks in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.

This is, of course, a user relatively new to open source thinking that he’s writing a note to customer service as opposed to filing post number 21 on Bug 45696 – a bug, we add, with a non-Ubuntu element (NetworkManager) – addressing a list of those in the community who are pitching in to help. The poster is a well-intentioned person, who also gave some useful technical information about his hardware.

Imagine, now, the legions of newbies attracted by the promise of reliable, easy to use software calling up to say that they can’t get something to work. Something, you understand, that they’ve paid for.

This kind of support will comprise a fair bit of really basic stuff, stuff the Linux community has typically not been very good at.

Linspire sells cheap-a-rooni PCs at places like WalMart and Elektra in Mexico. That WalMart became interested tells us that people can move honkin’ boatloads of Linux boxes so long as they’re truly good to go. The Ubuntu-Dell announcement makes this mainstream. For Canonical, which has seen utterly phenomenal takeup, it is reach beyond any it has enjoyed to date.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing – it is in fact a great thing. My comments are not similar to those concerned about the impact of AOLers turned loose on the public Internet in the mid-1990s, but rather about the sustainability and scalability of the Canonical support model. So far, the Ubuntu community led by Canonical has been truly wonderful about getting very basic information out to those seeking it. But that is just it: those users to date have sought it. They were there because they’d done some research and managed to get the flippin’ thing installed.

Now Canonical is entering the, “My printer doesn’t work. What kind? A white one” business, it will have to live up to a fairly high standard.