Delving into the Dingly Dell

Interviews are a great way to get the background to important areas, but too often they concentrate on the big names (and I'm guiltier than most). So it's refreshing to come across somebody unknown but with an interesting perspective on things - in this case, Dell's embrace of GNU/Linux for ordinary users, seen through eyes of John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team there:

Ubuntu is already a great Linux distribution, so we try to only make changes where we can add value. Our primary focus is to get all necessary hardware support and bug fixes into the distribution itself, so that we don't have to make any changes to the shipping code. For those important bugs or hardware support that don't make the distribution, we'll make modifications to the factory-installed image as necessary. We add driver packages and scripts on top of the standard operating system to make sure our the customer experience is as nice as possible. Up to this point we have tried to minimize the changes we have made.