Been to a developer conference or meetup recently? If you have, you might have noticed something odd. A large portion of the attendees using Macs. Now if that conference was an iOS or OS X developer event, then it probably makes a lot of sense, but what about web and backend developers? Is there are reason for all those Macs? Well, that’s a question that Dell has set out to answer with their Project Sputnik.
Sputnik is an initiative to design a custom spin of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the Dell XPS 13. If you don’t know the XPS 13 is one of Dell’s ultrabooks. Dell wants to address the web developer market that is so fond of Apple.
I am really excited about this. Ubuntu was at one time my dev OS of choice thanks to apt-get. Currently, dell is not offering a pre-configured machine with the 12.04 image, but you can download it here and they claim that if there is enough interest they may start offering XPS’s preconfigured with Ubuntu, so if you are interested in one of these machines or just a Linux fan, let them know.
