10
Jul

Linux to Hit Best Buy Shelves

Ubuntu logo

Most of us are accustomed to getting Linux for the same price as fresh air, but recently Ubuntu, the most used Linux distribution of all, is hitting store shelves at Best Buy and for a mere $20.

“Why should I pay for something I can get for free?” you may be asking yourself. There are two reasons: To start with, it comes with a printed documentation — and those are becoming hard to find these days, mainly because of the cost of printing and the ability to search electronic files have made physical files obsolete, or at least there getting there.

The best reason, though, is that you get sixty days of limitless tech support for free, courtesy of Canonical. Two months is a fair amount of time for a new user to get Ubuntu set up and running, and if they can’t quite pull it off there is always the Ubuntu forums, and the most recent version of Ubuntu (that would be Hardy Heron) comes with a nice array of tools for making migrating or dual- booting even easier than ever before.

As far as the price goes, it is about right. Last time I saw a boxed Linux distro in a Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), it was Suse, and it wasn’t cheap either, at a whopping $100. After a quick online search of Best Buy, they don’t even carry it anymore, which isn’t surprising. I would love not only if this became popular, but if Ubuntu got some competition in this area, maybe a Red Hat based distro, or maybe even Suse, but for a reasonable price. I can’t wait to see this take off and see where it goes.

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This entry was written by allan and posted on July 10, 2008 at 2:02 pm and filed under Linux. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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