Dell is reaching out to it's user community with the Dell IdeaStorm for ideas and feedback.  The top requests so far are all about providing open source, free, or lower cost alternatives, to Microsoft products that can, as one member points out, "shave hundreds of dollars of off the price of a new PC."

The top  requests are:

• Pre-Installed Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE)
  
• Pre-Installed OpenOffice
  
• No extra software option
  
• Linux laptop
  
• No OS Preloaded
  
• Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser
  
• Build computers not loaded with extra software

Other request have to do with similar items, such as improved driver support for Linux.  It will be interesting to see how Dell responds.  Running a Microsoft free environment is becoming more popular.  I personally haven't used Microsoft Office since May 2000, and I rarely boot up my Windows partition on my Toshiba laptop anymore.  I have a few friends, non-technical, I should add, that have switched over to Ubuntu Linux and seem quite happy with it.