Best Buy Employee Has Never Heard of Linux?
1:57 am May 6th, 2008A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a new laptop. I did everything wrong, and I was aware of it; I didn’t research my hardware needs, I didn’t research driver compatibility, I didn’t comparison-shop on the internet, and I reneged on my promise to myself to vote with my dollars for manufacturers who offer pre-installed open systems as an option (sorry, Dell!). I just woke up knowing that after months without a functional laptop, essentially tethered to my desktop workstation, I wanted a laptop and I wanted it that day.
So I found myself at Best Buy. I asked an employee whether I could buy a computer that didn’t come with Windows or MacOS pre-installed, and predictably, he said no and seemed confused at the question. This was what I expected. But then, as I asked him to unlock a couple models so I could see how they felt, we had the following exchange:
Me: It looks like the specs on this one are a little better for the price.
Best Buy Dude: Yeah, and you’ll need that three gigs of RAM to run Vista.
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running Vista.
BBD [startled]: Oh! Uh… you know the success rate for installing a new operating system is basically zero, right? For people trying to put XP on these?
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running XP either. I’m going to be installing Ubuntu.
BBD: What?
Me: Ubuntu? Linux?
BBD: What’s that?
Me: It’s an operating system. You should look it up, it’s free.
BBD: So what is it, is it like, a word processor?
Me: … It’s an operating system. You should look it up!
BBD: Yeah, OK, maybe.
Yikes! I don’t expect salespeople at big box stores to be free software geeks by a long shot, but you’d think people who help people pick out computers for a living would at least have a vague grasp of what’s going on in the tech world. Or at least, you know, know what an operating system is.
