Dell today introduced its first line of Linux-based desktop computers in Europe through its partnership with Questar. Each computer will be shipped by Dell, pre- installed with the English or Italian version of Linspire 4.5 operating system and include Dell's gold technical support.

It'll be interesting to see just how this washes. If the majority are Windows users, it'll be a learning curve but if this is geared mainly to business users it should save them a bundle.

It's more expensive to purchase a machine from Dell with Linux then XP Home.

LOL....YES! Make Linux mainstream, so all the hacker punks can have something else to play with.

Everyone thinks that Linux is so much more secure....just wait. The more popular Linux gets, then the more Hacker attention that it will receive.

According to the database at work, Dell has offered Linux on some models of workstations, and servers for quite some time, at least to large corporation and government customers. I should also note that it shows as being RedHat.
When I start seeing portables shipping with Linux, I'll be impressed.

Dell has never really had problems with shipping Linux on servers.

Workstations & Desktop machines was a bit more delicate though. The first move away from MS was when they decided to ship their machines with the Sun Java virtual machine installed by default & a few months later they decided to sell some machines without an OS.

Now you can order workstations with RHE but like I said, asking XP Home instead would cost about €25 less.

I don't know what's the pricing point for desktop machines though.

It could also turn out to be a move to get better prices from MS. Whenever Dell announces that they are testing some AMD chips in their labs, it's generally to squeeze a better price out of Chipzilla (Intel for people not in the know), not because they're gonna start selling machines with AMD chips.