Lenovo beats Dell to the punch

Ars technica, among other tech news outlets, reported Monday that Lenovo will begin selling their Thinkpad T Series notebooks preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in the fourth quarter of this year. While Dell was the first tier-one vendor to offer a pre-loaded Linux distribution on mainstream products, computers running Ubuntu (Dell's Linux OS of choice) are only available to consumers.

In contrast, Lenovo is targeting these machines at the enterprise and singled out education and government purchasers according to the Ars article:

Lenovo says that the decision to offer Linux on its laptops comes as the result of pressure from enterprise customers. "We have seen more customers utilizing and requesting open source notebook solutions in education, government, and the enterprise since our ThinkPad T60p Linux announcement, and today's announcement expands upon our efforts by offering customers more Linux options," said Lenovo VP Sam Dusi in a statement.

As the article also points out, while this level of choice and competition is good in and of itself, regardless of the OS you choose for your enterprise, partnerships between the Linux community and major vendors will have a ripple effect throughout the industry. Increasing availability of solid Linux drivers, especially on laptops, can only help the OSS movement and spur Microsoft and Apple to increasing levels of innovation.