SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The whole juggernaut that is now Linux on Dell started as the brainchild of two core individuals, Barton George (Senior Principal Engineer) and Jared Dominguez (OS Architect and Linux Engineer).
It was their vision that began it all back in 2012. It was long hours, uncertain futures and sheer belief that people really did want Linux laptops that sustained them. Here is the untold story of how Dell gained the top spot in preinstalled Linux on laptops.
[...] This first attempt at Linux on laptops failed mainly because most non-technical users were blinded by the cheap price and didn't understand what they were actually buying.
[...] This time the duo had the right initial market. It was big, commercial web-scale operators and their developers who were crying out for a fully supported Linux laptop.
People who do technical work, like Linux. People who don't, don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:04PM (4 children)
> even buying a license for a full clean copy is cheaper than 2 days of your time
Haven't tried this with a Dell laptop, but did try it with a ThinkPad (Win XP years). No go, something(s) were missing and installing WinXP Pro from a Microsoft optical disk would not boot into Windows. Didn't go further, but maybe Lenovo added some drivers or something?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday November 17 2017, @07:38PM (2 children)
Now that you mention it, that was a big problem with Windows for a long time: you couldn't just install a clean copy, because you had to get a bunch of driver discs or download drivers from the manufacturer's website(s), and then go through a bunch of rebooting cycles to get all the drivers installed and the OS installed.
I thought new versions of Windows had mostly built in drivers for most common hardware so this wasn't so much of a problem as it was, but I haven't messed with Windows installation in a very long time so I don't really know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @08:37PM
Most hardware now comes with drivers distributed through windows update and it's been this way for some time. This usually works fine (though reboot cycles are still a thing).
It has also been possible for a long time to add drivers to the installation medium (this was very important if you wanted to install Windows 2000 on a SATA drive and didn't feel like digging out a 3.5" floppy disk to load your disk controller driver).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday November 17 2017, @08:52PM
Worked in Microsoft or mixed shops for years, clean installs were a problem with NT and 2000 but from XP onwards were typically straightforward, particularly once the "slipstream" tools were available (not sure they were out with XP at the start, but certainly used with XP) to merge drivers and updates into install images. For many years first job for anyone on the team getting a new machine (and they were typically Dells) was to reinstall clean windows, less technical teams (sales, marketing, etc.) tended to live with the Dell install or beg a dev to do it for them.
Dells as I recall came (maybe still do) with a drivers folder on the root disk, if not a drivers CD, worth copying that before you reformat the disk - although they can usually be downloaded from Dell direct it's a bit of a pain if the driver you need is networking...
Having MSDN or Technet available possibly helped, but since Win 7 I am pretty sure downloadable releases were available to anyone. Then you just need the licence key, typically stuck on the machine somewhere. On Dell laptops the sticker may be under the battery, worth noting it before you start the install.
Clean installs are no big deal, as long as you have done a few and have relatively recent practice (reformat and reinstall every year is good practice anyway, reminds you to organise your data properly separable from the OS, which isn't always obvious in windows, and can be used to test your backups) unless you haven't done them for ages, or ever, in which case there is a big fear factor - but no different to Linux in that, or restoring from backup!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @11:31PM
With closed-source proprietary stuff, you don't actually -own- anything.
The word "buy" is inappropriate in those cases.
I prefer the term "pay for".
...and it would be M$ getting the money. 8-(
.
quickbooks and Office Libre
Heh. They were half-way to dumping Windoze.
My question WRT payware apps is always, "Are you actually -using- features that are -only- available in those?"
...or would a gratis and libre app do all that you need?
I'm wondering how long ago that experience was.
(FOSS) FrontAccounting [google.com] has been around for a bunch of years.
Jack Wallen was praising it going back to 2011. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]