There are a lot of flavors of Linux on the market, each with its own unique features and quirks. Businesses are usually willing to pony up for one of the “Big Two”: Red Hat or Novell/Suse. Regular folks, on the other hand, are more likely to download one of the free alternatives.
Currently Dell only offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Suse Novell on Dell Server. Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell to make Ubuntu available preinstalled on servers. Ubuntu Desktop from Dell was the first preinstalled mainstream distro for end users. [...]