If you're not in a great hurry, delay the purchase and keep checking for deals... they often throw that in without additional cost. (Personally, I think charging for "XP downgrade" after having paid for a more expensive Vista is rather a hose... overly opportunistic on Dell's part... still, you can't be having difficulty with your rig when trying to trade with Vista..) Basically Dell is having customers pay for Vista but installing XP. Microsoft is OK with that, so it may continue for quite a while.
Most people do not wish to spend hours recompiling kernels or finding that new diff patch Ãn order to make their printer work. Linux is and always will be a geek system which is great for 16 year old l33t haxx0r kids but nothing most casual computer users would ever use at home on their desktop.
I've installed Ubuntu 8.04 on an Acer Aspire laptop. Well, HP printer/scanner combo connected with by USB works just fine and didn't require even a second of setting it up! Connecting Bluetooth GSM phone (both for mobile internet and sending/receiving files) works! And it didn't work so well under XP as it does under Ubuntu. Connecting a 3G CDMA mobile phone (for same purposes) works! Connecting photo/video camera works (and even tries to automatically import files to images managing s/w). All kinds of removable media (USB flash drives etc crap) work too... All h/w of laptop itself (Bluetooth, card reader, WiFi etc. etc.) also works! And don't forget, it all works RIGHT FROM THE START as soon as OS is installed, I didn't install a single driver to make any of my h/w work! No, wait, I did! The only driver I installed was proprietary driver for ATI video card to make hardware acceleration work at full force. But that's all. Seriously. And wasn't any harder than installing any driver on an XP machine. So when people start complaining, I am confused, either it's me being so lucky with Linux or maybe someone does something wrong...
I spent much more time (and money) then expected trying to get Linux going on a trading system. It did not work. I gave up. I probably spent 70 hours and $200 and gave up.
We have machines running Vista and Fedora. Both seem to run without any real problems. One Vista box runs a trading application and we have measured the data in to orders out latency of this at 760us which is pretty fair. Initial versions had a problem with HD hotswapping but that is now fixed. We have also seen a problem with using multiple NICs that may still exist. It's also worth turning all the GUI effects off as this slows it down. Biggest problem with Windows vs Linux is lack of high resolution timestamping. It also needs multiple desktops adding. However, both OS work and can make you money.
Righto... 1. It's not worth the effort to try to run Linux for most of us, and 2. It's not worth the cost savings.. besides, one can mitigate the cost of XP "down to almost nothing", with minimal effort. Linux is mostly for geeks who want to proudly boast, "I run Linux!"... That and $5 will get you a Starbucks.
LOL! Gnome speaks the truth. fwiw, not for trading or trading related, I use Linux Mint when I have an urge for a latte, Starbucks is closing it's store in my neighborhood.