Well, after all of the news about Michael Dell's personal Linux distribution of choice, there is at least one industry watcher who believes that Red Hat may actually have a chance of being Dell's choice for meeting customer demand for preinstalled Linux.

So let's review the situation: Dell is prepping Linux desktops. Red Hat is prepping potential desktop PC news. Hmmm. Coincidence, right? Could be... but I suspect otherwise. Red Hat's strong position on corporate servers makes it a natural option for administrator workstations from Dell. And it's possible to imagine Dell offering a mix of Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux on certain desktops and notebooks.

Where does that leave Novell (NOVL) SuSE Linux? I'm still digging around Dell's desktop and mobile businesses for the answer to that question.

Maybe Dell just doesn't want to pay the "Windows tax" at all anymore, not even through Novell SUSE.