Comment by pjmlp
4 days ago
The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
Window 7 was the apex of Windows as an OS. Its been downhill since then.
Windows 8.1 was pretty solid, if short lived. New task manager, overhauled file copy, better SSD support & HiDPI scaling/multi-monitor support was hugely improved over 7, 8.1 also improved the window snapping and fixed the horrible table UI for it from 8.0
8.1 also ran faster than 7 on a lot of machines, they did a lot of work to optimize it for the crappy tablets which translated well to desktop.
Also the last version of Windows that you could opt-out of telemetry with (until Microsoft backported 10's telemetry engine to 7 and 8.1 via optional update)
Big PC OEMs offer models with various distros preinstalled. Examples: Lenovo [1], Dell [2]
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/configurator/cto/?bundleId=21NS...
[2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-9350-inte...
The point is getting folks that aren't on HN, mainstream adoption.
Simple. Legally mandate 'empty' devices at time of sale. With fully open specs, so whomever actually wants to, 'can' support that crap. OFC the same for file-formats and general interoperability (of services).
Why do you need linux preinstalled on a new computer?
Take a user friendly distro, boot up the installer, accept the defaults on the few questions it asks... done.
It's no more difficult than the first-time configuration MacOS or Windows will walk you through on a new system.
I precisely excluded HN crowd exactly because of comments like this.
First of all that hardly works flawlessly in 2026 laptops, still.
Secondly, this is about regular consumers, not Linux nerds.
Do you make such a fuss when riding a rental or otherwise 'new to you' car, which diverges from the haptics of the one you were used to use?