Ultimately the consumer is responsible for making sure their purchase meets their needs. This woman has nobody to blame but herself.

The poster was reffering to the fact that you could get a much much cheaper laptop if all you were going to do was surf and write documents.

I see.  That's a better interpretation.

No one to blame but herself, if the classes required Internet and Microsoft Word, she should buy the computer with what she needed (Ubuntu works great with all Verizon's plans and Open Office is compatible with MS Word, but if she doesn't know that she should investigate from the beginning to know if Ubuntu could do that, and if not, buy Windows...

I remember what was like to make an ADSL-USB drive to work with Linux, especially Red Hat and Mandrake distros (my favorite ones back then), after i changed my ISP (it was crappy) i demanded with the next one devices with Ethernet connection... then Ubuntu came, and i was shocked to find out how easy was this OS to work with, if it wasn't for Adobe Creative Suite, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Visual Studio .NET, etc. (work stuff) and games, i'd even throw Windows out...

Sometimes connectivity is a pain, i remember i spent a while figuring out how to install and use a vpn over wireless in my dorm in Germany, specially since when you connected to the WIFI, you were redirected to a webpage with instructions and links to download vpn for windows (and also the keys and connections)
I agree, ubuntu was capable, it just wasn't supported by the dorm administrators, they knew nothing about it... i spent sometime on the internet (luckily i still had my old windows laptop) and figured it out... definitely not something someone without some extent of computer skills (that's what i study) could do...
If only the world was a better place and people understood that not everyone uses Windows and IE... so everything would be as simple as windows (IE sucks... wish i could get rid of it)

The problem is that Windows and Mac OSX take the 98% of the market, so most people don't bother, we have to rely in the Internet community...

ubuntu rlz :)

Doesn't the Dell website has a separate link to Ubuntu PCs? Their main laptops have Windows on it... You need to click on open source to get Linux on them. So how did she end up with an Ubuntu laptop?

Whatever we might wish were the realities, the real world  is what it is. Both Linux and Mac users are such vocal minorities that the size of their user bases are often over estimated. I manage several websites at a major university and part of my job is to monitor traffic. Our visitors include a large majority of .edu and .gov origins where both systems are more popular than in the general public. Here is the statistics for last month for 132,889 unique visitors ( a pretty fair sample).

As you can see 90% use some version of Windows, 5% use a Mac OS and only .5% are using Linux. Likewise despite what you might believe from the publicity 82% are using Internet Explorer to only 10% are using Firefox. These percentages are just about the same month after month.

Or the overzealous person on the phone who pushed linux to someone who obviously knew zip about computers.