Those of you who have been keeping up with me on my Linux travels know that I am a fan of Ubuntu authorized OEM(?), System76. Both its support and products have received rave reviews, however some minor issues could spell trouble for the company in the PR world as it continues to grow in popularity. Let me explain…

Take its Koala and Darter series PCs. Price arguments aside, it is clearly aiming to attract some of the Mac crowd with Mac mini and MacBook looking aesthetics. Very cool, love the idea. Just one problem, however. A wording mistake with the use of the following point:

First let’s debunk this format myth. You can listen to your music, watch your DVDs, open your Word document, Excel spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentation. You can do it all without Windows. There are excellent open formats for all of these things. Microsoft uses proprietary formats only because they want to lock you into buying their software. It has been a successful and profitable strategy; however, it is dying. Using Linux you can open and save Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. You can also create Adobe PDF’s from your word processor and many other applications. Open Office is the Microsoft Office equivalent on Linux. Open Office is a powerful, Open Source office suite and it’s free.

Now it nailed it with its view of MS Office, but as for viewing DVDs and listening to music, further explanation is needed and it should be aware of this. Unless the music is in OGG format and the DVDs are movies in Theora, stating that you can listen to music and watch DVDs needs to be followed by a clear disclaimer with link that you will need to apt-get the needed restricted (non-open) formats to use these features.

As a matter of fact, I would take it even one step further. Understanding that System76 is using Ubuntu as its OS of choice, why not simply create its own offshoot? Add in this utility until Feisty is released with its own utility in its place, and be done with it.

Now to those of you who have been telling me about Linux Mint, allow me to be clear – huge fan, not going to be something you can do commercially here in the States because of the pre-installed CODEC concerns from a legal standpoint. While I can happily use it myself on my own machine, using this in an OEM situation here in the US is a little more “sticky” than I would like.

So what do you think? Can and should System76 try any of these suggestions? Considering its target market includes non-Linux users looking to convert without compatibility headaches, I can’t see why it would turn any of this down? In my mind, it is doing what most have tried and failed at. I love its offerings and even if the price is a little higher, knowing that you are receiving a Linux-ready hardware config out-of-the-box is worth every penny to a busy Ubuntu user such as myself.

For those wishing to look elsewhere for Linux notebooks, I am confident with Linux Certified as well, should you need an alternative to compare with.

[tags]Ubuntu,Linux,system76,oem,Feisty[/tags]