Dell is definitely weird about this; I had the same experience. Perfectly satisfied with my laptop (an XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it bought a few years ago), but Dell's online store is just bonkers.

I Googled XPS 13 and go to configure it but can’t find an option to choose Ubuntu, only downgrade to Windows 11 Home. It is weird.

I see nothing weird here, Microsoft has been punishing OEM manufacturers for bundling Linux (or, more precisely, for not bundling a MS system on the computers they are selling) since at least 1983.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows

I had to search "developer edition"

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-13-plus-dev...

IIRC with the current XPS range only the "pro" variants offer you the choice of a Linux install.

Used to be dell.com/linux

I suspect this happened because when DELL first launched laptops with Linux, it gave them some surprising bad press. Certainly the most famous being the woman who apparently was dropping out of college as a result of accidentally ordering a Ubuntu DELL laptop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI

This probably seems like a weird one-off, but this story went pretty viral, of course it went viral on the internet for other reasons, but I'm sure the blame being placed squarely on DELL probably did lead to them being a bit spooked about consumer confusion.

The fact that nobody at DELL or elsewhere could just tell her that she can in fact, pretty easily install Windows on the machine is... well, a little frustrating to say the least. The college's IT department was aware enough of Linux to be able to say they can handle it, but not enough to say "Y'know, just for what it's worth... You can just buy and install Windows."

I have no evidence for this but you can imagine someone at Microsoft saying "Dell has started selling laptops without Windows! We need to run an 'information campaign' to tell people why they should not use Ubuntu! Let's cough 'find' a college student who lost everything because of this operating system and then feed it to a local news channel."

I can't say if this happened, but the whole story sounds like a dark PR campaign to spread fear about Dell's choice and try to take some steam out of their rollout. Microsoft obviously had a lot of money on the line if Dell found success with Ubuntu.

Microsoft did an anti-Linux retail PR campaign around the Windows 7 launch, as netbooks with vendor-specific Linux distributions were starting to gain traction. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/09/micro...

This absolutely REEKS of earlier-time corpo PR skullduggery.

Yep, gotta have windows so you can have access to WSL so you can use all of those unix-only tools that academia has been amassing for the last 60 years. Anything else would be too complex.

The problem with this bullshit is that no one would blame Apple if someone bought a Mac and couldn't install their Windows software on it.

Someone who dropped out of college because they bought a Mac and couldn't run their Black Friday copy Office would just get mocked.

I also bought an XPS13 around 2012, and paid for the Ubuntu version. The receipt even said Ubuntu on it. But they shipped me the Windows one! Returned and refunded based on their phone support, they said installing Linux on it would void the warranty. Never tried again, too much hassle.