On Wednesday in Beijing, Canonical and Dell announced the start of an exciting retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China.

The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.

For the consumer, Ubuntu is now an easy choice, with a clean, crisp elegant interface, an exceptional browsing experience and a fully-integrated software center for great applications and games (both free and paid for). It also includes leading services such as the Ubuntu music store and the Ubuntu One cloud storage service built-in.

With an actively growing base of over 20 million users this represents another significant endorsement from one of the world’s major PC vendors.