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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @12:22PM
OEM activation. Bit more to it than the marker in the BIOS (do a search for SLIC table) - you also need an MS-signed OEM certificate installed in the OS for the auto-activation to work this way. So of course, changing the motherboard breaks activation since you changed or lost one part. Unless you know how to and have the tools to add the correct marker to the new motherboard's BIOS, or it's already present in the new BIOS, plus you have a matching OEM certificate, you need to activate via another method or use a different licence. There are tools to extract the certificate part from existing working machines.
For Win7, there is no online part of the OEM activation, so as long as you have both the BIOS markers and the certificate matching, and use an OEM licence key in Windows for whichever edition you feel like using, it will activate regardless of hardware config. For virtual machines, the BIOS marker injection is easily done for some hypervisors like Xen or Virtualbox, so means unlimited activated Win7 copies in these environments. I'd expect KVM to be similarly easy. I've also heard it's possible to do this on VMWare/ESX/ESXi, but never done that myself. Also note the OEM licence key you put in Windows is not the same as what you find on stickers stuck to cases - the stickers are NOT OEM keys.
(Un)fortunately for Win8 and later, yes it all gets tied to hardware config and stored online on MS servers, so the above trick no longer works reliably if at all.