This article over at The Guardian makes a pretty decent case why Dell Inc.'s(NASDAQ:DELL) possible planned foray into selling Linux PCs may not ever work like some folks think it will. I agree with the author in that Michael Dell did not build his company by not listening to what customers wanted. So the question is, do most customers really want Linux on a new Dell PC? In terms of the consumer market at large, it's highly doubtful.

Most of the general PC buyer market (consumer market, anyway) only knows Windows from Microsoft. Sure, it has a huge share of problems, but trying to change the "comfort zone" of the average PC consumer from Windows to any flavor of Linux would be a massive undertaking. It's very true that the various distributions of Linux nowadays are very, very good operating systems. Ubuntu Linux 6, for example, is incredibly slick (I use it myself). It's also free -- while Windows is not. But does the normal customer even realize this when the only thing he or she cares about (insofar as price) is the total cost of the machine?

Can Dell make that cost proposition relevant to the burgeoning consumer market that it so desperately needs to grow? Probably not. The expertise to support all the various distributions of Linux and all the associated baggage to hand hold customers who need higher levels of support may possibly make the company charge more for Linux PCs than for Windows PCs. The open source community is the best support organization out there (and by far the brightest). But will normal customers care if the actual computers are more expensive? That's one for the ages.