Dell Offers Ubuntu Flavor Laptop. What?

[Geek-9pm]

This is based on an article  post By Gabe Carey — February 3, 2016

2015 was a wonderful year for computers, especially for Dell, whose XPS 13 laptop we recognized as the best of the year. And fortunately, the company is back for seconds with the “Project Sputnik” Developer Edition of the beloved notebook lineup — this time featuring the cult favorite Ubuntu Linux-based operating system.
...  it will be the only compact Linux laptop using a Skylake chip from the top five PC makers.

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/dell-ubunto-skylake-xps-13/#ixzz3zFo4mwXD

My question is:
 How does one 'Flavor' a chip with a Linux  Distro?   

[camerongray]

They have offered laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled for quite some time.  The only real advantage I see for it though is that Dell will officially provide support for the OS.  Beyond that I tend not to bother them - The price saving is minimal to non-existent and having a Windows licence on a machine is good to have even if you don't plan on using it - I tend to rotate laptops regularly selling the old one, while I run Linux on mine full time, trying to sell a laptop without a Windows licence is a lot harder and you'd often have to take a hit on the price.  Nowadays it's not like you need to buy a specific Linux laptop for it to work properly - As long as you are relatively careful and stick with hardware that is known to be reliable under Linux (sticking with Intel networking for example) it'll most likely be fine.

[DaveLembke]

My question is:
 How does one 'Flavor' a chip with a Linux  Distro?

I'd prefer a system with a Boot ROM with a GUI OS on it that references to a hard drive or SSD for programs and personal data if thats what your asking... similar to how the Playstation 3 is with its Boot ROM that allows for you to perform a hard drive upgrade by simply removing the smaller drive and installing a larger drive and on boot the Boot ROM detects the change and fact that the hard drive needs to be formatted and it formats it and then its ready to use. When connected to playstation network your able to download games you already purchased etc.

A protected Boot ROM requiring a jumper or switch to be set on the motherboard would be the best. This way its read only until jumper or switch is changed and so no malware or hackers can target to overwrite or alter the Boot ROM.

A Boot ROM with Linux using a Live Distro with scripts on it to detect and target prior installation of programs and data would work well. However, one of the key strengths of Linux is that its always evolving and patched for problems, whereas a BootROM would lock that system down to possibly never ever being updated for its OS ever again and so an exploit would require a re-flash of the BootROM etc.

For now I have been using Linux Mint 17.2 installed to USB Sticks. It works well and isnt that bad for boot time and lag when launching applications. I have 4 laptops running off of some 4GB USB Flash Sticks running Linux Mint 17.2 and used for processing number crunching on the laptops for BOINC. I have also tested use of a Linux system to go without SSD or HDD and only USB Flash and even some games ported for Linux run quite well on it. So when I travel I bring the DVD discs to rebuild my laptop if it has a problem now as well as I bring a 16GB USB stick with we so that if the hard drive crashed I wouldnt be without a computer when away from home. Simply insert the stick and boot the system and it boots to Linux mint and everything works perfectly fine even if the internal hard drive is shot. Wifi and all with no problems and if I really wanted to get creative I can even run Windows based software or games through WINE.