Lenovo Cuts the Windows Tax and offers Cheaper Laptops with Linux Pre-installed
Lenovo Cuts the Windows Tax and offers Cheaper Laptops with Linux Pre-installed
nothing new. here in brazil many manufacturers, dell included, would ship laptops with linux and then people would shove a pirated windows copy on it.
The price difference does make sense, it's the cost to cover therapy for the employee that was forced to preinstall Windows on a computer for the thousandth time
in brazil, we used to have a law forcing this to be a thing. back in the laptop days, it used to be reasonably common for people to buy one without with linux, and pirate windows later to save money. or because it was plain cheaper.
it turns out brazil fomented a big userbase for linux for a while there. free market my ass, microsoft is an oligopoly. if this ever gets widespread i'm pretty sure adoption will grow for the simple fact people will at least get to fucking try it. microsoft wouldnt take it kindly though.
oligopoly
That's a way to misspell monopoly, alright.
An oligopoly is a market in which pricing control lies in the hands of a few sellers. As a result of their significant market power, firms in oligopolistic markets can influence prices through manipulating the supply function.
I'm considering Macs and Chromebooks to be competitors. Maybe they aren't since those systems are very locked down, but eh, still shitty and not much practical difference IMO.
Currently in France No OS is -€60 and with Fedora or Ubuntu it's -€30
Don't ask. Different markets, pricing irrelevant to actual costs
The cost is what Canonical wants.
And redhat. But only in Europe.
SteamOS is next.
Wow, I didn't realize the windows tax was that high. I thought the bulk OEM licensing was significantly cheaper than the retail price.
It's kind of absurd. When you buy a TV, the bloated adware at least helps lower the price. Imagine paying extra for it.
sssssshhhhhhhhhhh don't type this out loud
For TVs the manufacturers are the ones who control the bloated adware and make money off of it while on notebooks and laptops it is Micro$oft. Except maybe for TVs coming with Android TV OS, but I think even that can be modified to promote their services.
Why would it lower the price? Don't ads only exist to generate a bit of extra revenue?
Finally!
Windows is free for anyone to use indefinitely... If you're OK with a persistent watermark.
Why even add a premium to the laptop? Let the user decide to use windows as-is, pay a license, or switch to Linux. 🤭
In practice. Technically, were M$ to go sue users left and right (or send those ISP-style "gotcha", now pay up) emails.
Luckiy, M$ knows well enough that 90% of that userbase wouldn't have too many qualms jumping ship if they got slapped with a huge fine, so M$ lets them be.
They value the high userbase more than a quick payout (and rightly so). However, there's no guarantee that can't change overnight (just look at Unity and before that, Adobe).
This is only for Thinkpads which are offered as customized units and have a longer shipping time.
incorrect. currently sporting an ideapad pro that i bought directly from lenovo last year and it came without windows pre-installed.
Which country?
It's HAPPENING!
Didn’t RTA. What distro?
Fedora or Ubuntu. But I'd say the important part is that they probably provide all necessary drivers.
Usually enabling Ubuntu’s third party / proprietary repo covers all necessary drivers.
I remember having lots of driver issues on fedora but that was like two decades ago. I’d imagine they have that sorted now.
Anyway this is good news. Grow the user base.
These seem to be the two most commonly supported distros by laptop manufacturers. Framework officially support these two distros, too (they have unofficial guides for a bunch of other distros though)