Jerry Feldman wrote:
It all comes down to demand and volume. HP used to sell some systems with Linux loaded, but the demand was very low. Dell, HP(and Compaq), Gateway, Lenovo are all high volume operations selling millions of consumer PCs. While the popularity of Linux is growing, it is not yet at the level where most of the vendors are going to put Linux on. (Although we saw the Slashdot article that Lenovo is preloading SLED10 on the T60P Thinkpad).
I think you will see more companies preloading enterprise Linux on some of the higher end business desktops and laptops, but not on the consumer systems yet (at least in the US).
One of the main reasons is: what linux distro do the companies install on their systems (SuSe, RedHat, Mandriva,etc....). For the windows side it is easy, there is only one, Windows XP (or whatever the current Windows version is at the time. Mike