14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu fans have dug up a report from a local news channel in the US called 27 News, which presented the story of a girl who bought a laptop from Dell and was forced to drop out of college because she received Ubuntu 7.10 with the computer.
This is at least the gist of it or the idea that is being disseminated by the media coverage. The story is in fact much simpler and straightforward. The girl in question bought a Dell laptop and it arrived with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed.
Canonical has a long-standing relationship with Dell, so this is a normal thing to happen. Apparently, she wanted to buy the laptop in order to follow the online courses of a local community college.
Five years ago, back in 2009, she had Verizon as her Internet provider and it required users to install an application that was only compatible with Windows. Therefore, she wasn't able to connect to the Internet. She tried to get a better deal from Dell, but apparently, she couldn't and somehow this got to the local news station.
This old news report was dug up by a user on Reddit and it still made a lot of people angry, despite the fact that it's actually quite an old video. The new anchors vilified Ubuntu as a sort of cheap copy of Windows that promises to do the same tasks, but it can't.
This might have been the end of it, but the news channel got a follow-up report after the Ubuntu and Linux communities launched an attack on the news anchors and even apparently “harassed” the girl on her Facebook page.
She ended up with a better deal from Dell and the community college said that it would still accept her, no matter the operating system she used.
It's interesting too seen how such an old video can still get people riled up and some users have even suggested that this was a report paid by Microsoft to smear a Linux distribution.
In any case, today's ecosystem is very different, as Linux is much more present in our daily lives, Ubuntu is now the most used Linux operating system in the world, and Verizon doesn't distribute CDs to connect to the Internet.
If you have any old news about Linux, Ubuntu, of any other operating system, don't be shy and leave a comment below.
