Dell and desktop Linux: We were never leant on by Microsoft

Michael Dell and other executives at the hardware company he runs have claimed Microsoft never pressurised them to drop the Linux operating system from Dell PCs.

Dell is pleased with sales of servers it offers that run the open source OS, supplied to it by Red Hat, often to run high-end business applications from vendors such as Oracle or SAP, but some have accused the company of being afraid of upsetting Microsoft, arguably its most important partner.

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell last week told silicon.com: "One of the challenges is that demand for Linux [on the desktop] is growing but it's not huge. Therefore if you think about all the products we have, for us to validate Linux on every single one, the number we'd sell by unit doesn't make a lot of sense."

Last March, in a written statement in the Microsoft anti-trust hearings, Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann said Dell backed out of a 2000 agreement to ship desktop Linux because it didn't want to hurt its Microsoft relationship, and some users have expressed similar concerns.

One silicon.com reader from a leading university recently asked: "Has the other OS manufacturer whose wares they pre-install sat on them?"

As Dell increasingly becomes an enterprise vendor, it is backing what it calls high-performance computer clustering (HPCC), a way of combining the power of lots of Intel-based machines working in tandem as opposed to users buying a few large and expensive computers, often featuring dozens of processors each.

Kevin Rollins, Dell president and COO, said HPCC customers are "looking to move off of Unix and onto Linux - and we’re very supportive of that". Dell, unlike rivals such as HP, IBM and Sun, does not have a Unix version of its own, traditionally shipping Windows with its PCs and servers.

But for desktop Linux, he added: "We offered it for a while but had no customers buy it. There were no applications. We haven't had any pressure put on. We've always said we will offer what a customer wants - and most desktop and client customers want Microsoft."

Dell does ship a version of its Precision workstation with Linux. It sells for around $1,000.