[ Thanks to Caitlyn Martin for this link.
]
“I was doing some cleaning around the room that serves
as my home office, going through a bunch of paperwork. I am a bit
of a pack rat and I often save things for far too long, as in way
past when they would have any value. One of the things I ran across
was a receipt dated December, 2009 for the purchase of my current
desktop computer. I bought a low-end, small footprint desktop: an
eMachines EL-1300G. The cost at a local big box retailer was $159.
A friend of mine was so impressed she went to the store right
before Christmas to buy one as a gift for her sister. The price had
dropped to $149. Of course, the systems came preloaded with
Windows. Linux was not an option.“The first thing I did with my system when I got it home was
make sure that it powered up and seemed to work. The second thing I
did was wipe the hard drive and load Linux on it: a 64-bit build of
SalixOS. Installation was absolutely straightforward and everything
just worked. There is no technical reason this system couldn’t be
offered preloaded with Linux. (Note: I did not try the old
fashioned dial-up modem. I guess some people with low end systems
still use dial-up, or did in 2009.)”