LinuxQuestions.org founder Jeremy Garcia has reportedly received an e-mail from a Dell employee that says the company is planning to launch Ubuntu "on the E520, 1505 and XPS 410 starting next Thursday, 5/24. We expect these systems to be less than 1% of our OS mix for the entire year which is ~20,000 systems annually. The goal of launching Linux is to continue to give our customers more choices to customize their new Dell." Garcia also claims the Dell representative noted Dell will officially have employees available for "discussing the desktop Linux situation with customers". On March 13, an entry appeared on the Direct2Dell blog about Dell offering Linux and allowing potential customers to do a survey about what they are interested in. If the above is correct, Dell has acted very rapidly in response to its customer"s requests, although speculation about such a move has been in the air since the beginning of the year. This is a huge step for Linux, will other companies follow Dell?