Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”
So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.
This one is tough for me. I’m opposed to any distro being considered the “standard”. It feels so antithetical to what makes Linux great.
But it’s also probably what we need for better user adoption. I don’t know which I’d pick if I had to, but I know it wouldn’t be Ubuntu.
What we need it distro independent tooling. We already have flatpak and XDG portals to that’s a start