Just caught this article as I was reading technology news this morning.  Apparently, Best Buy will soon be selling Ubuntu Linux 8.04 in a retail box, with manual, quick start guide, and 2 months of support, all for $19.99.  It certainly beats the pants off of the pricing for Vista.

Ubuntu has made some excellent progress as a Linux distro and the development team has worked very hard to bring down the barriers to entry for non-geeks, especially with regard to drivers, software packages, and X Windows.  For example, Ubuntu releases rely less and less on editing of the X Windows configuration file for simple display changes.

This is promising, though the author of the article has an interesting thought:

Yes, it brings Ubuntu to a whole new audience, but I wonder whether the audience that needs to have Ubuntu sold to them on a CD is actually ready for Linux.

Maybe Ubuntu is ready and maybe it isn’t, but I find it admirable that they’re willing to go this far.  And if Ubuntu still isn’t ready for the average end-user desktop, I can imagine it will be in the very near future.  In the best case, sales of Linux in retail could cause a reaction from software vendors and hardware manufacturers and we’ll (finally) see a lot more ubiquitous support for Linux in the computing marketplace.  I, for one, am hopeful.

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