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Lenovo is joining Dell in the "OEM Linux Laptop" club:
It looks like Lenovo may upstage Dell as the big name in OEM Linux laptops—not counting specialty retailers like System76, of course. Red Hat and Lenovo are announcing pre-installed and factory-supported Fedora Workstation on several models of ThinkPad laptops at Red Hat Summit this week.
Dell's Linux support has generally been limited to one or two very specific laptops—first, the old Atom-powered netbooks and, more recently, the XPS 13 Developer Edition line. Lenovo is planning a significantly broader Linux footprint in its lineup.
Fedora Workstation will be a selectable option during purchase for the Thinkpad P1 Gen2, Thinkpad P53, and Thinkpad X1 Gen8 laptops—and Lenovo may offer even broader model support in the future. Lenovo Senior Linux Developer Mark Pearson, who will be the featured guest in the May 2020 Fedora Council Video Meeting, expresses the company's stance on forthcoming integration:
Lenovo is excited to become a part of the Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:30PM (9 children)
They are the world's largest personal computer vendor [wikipedia.org], and they already make Android and ChromeOS devices.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:34PM (8 children)
This means something else.
It means Lenovo thinks they are immune from pressure from Microsoft on Windows licenses.
A dozen years ago when Netbooks became "a thang", Microsoft managed to kill Netbooks by:
* resurrecting Windows XP, but only for Netbooks
* at a price (zero) that OEMs couldn't refuse
* with strings attached that limited how "good" the netbook hardware could be
* and something about limiting their Linux netbooks to the same crippled hardware
It would have been a natural thing for an OEM who ventured into the successful and cheap netbooks to gradually introduce higher end laptops with Linux.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:40PM (4 children)
No such thing.
Just because you have alternate markets does not mean that the M$ hegemony does not matter to your bottom line.
Now, the fact that Lenovo can market Chrome, Android and now Linux devices may indicate a weakening of Microsoft's bargaining position in the MS-Lenovo relationship, but immune? Far from it.
They're still pulling this shit with embedded windows 10 licenses, pay per core kind of stuff. The really raw deal in the net-top market was how the devices ran great on XP when they were delivered, but 3 years later XP was "updated" to make the net-top devices unusable (unless you went back to the original media and re-installed XP at the old version...) That's almost as shitty an episode as Apple tanking the iPad One with software updates - around about the same time, actually.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:10PM (3 children)
+1 Interesting
Good points.
Nonetheless, it's nice to see the weaking of Microsoft's power. OEMs once cowered in fear. That is why there never were any Linux desktops or laptops form mainstream players. The only way you could make Linux hardware (preloaded from factory) was to NOT make Windows (eg, System76, etc) or use Dell's trick of selling with an OS (eg, FreeDOS). Technically that is an OS. And is even interesting in some ways.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:15PM (2 children)
If it didn't happen, they deserved an AT&T style monopoly smackdown, not that it didn't take 40 years for AT&T to get theirs (I still can't get WKRP's Johnny Fever "phone cops" scene out of my head...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTPzTG1Lx60 [youtube.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:46PM (1 child)
IBM never did get their monopoly breakup.
The rise of Microcomputers ("PCs") made them lose a lot of their power. Even before the IBM PC, I remember stories about how a middle manager might need to wait six months for the mainframe people to install a terminal in his office, but it was within his own budget authority to go pick up an Apple II with VisiCalc. That had to hurt IBM. It is probably why they got the microcomputer religion. Then lost that market. Tried to steal it back with the PS/2 and MicroChannel -- while the rest of the industry just said No Thanks. We like our non-patented open interchangeable vendor neutral stuff just fine.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:22PM
They stumbled sufficiently to elicit sympathy.
I worked for a guy who thought he needed a supercomputer (turns out he just needed a C++ programmer to clean up his Matlab code but...) while still laboring under the delusion (2006), we entertained quotes from IBM for their current "value proposition" big iron systems. For our ersatz "needs" they didn't offer anything we couldn't get from a stack of contemporary MacPros for a similar price, but they did have a hellishly complicated "pay as needed" system that basically smoothed compute load costs to bill for actual usage and reassure everyone that "it will scale when needed, we're IBM we know what we're doing here." It didn't do anything for us because our load forecasting was very deterministic, but you could see how they were trying to appeal to the investment fueled startups who had no clue when, if ever, their big demand would hit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:48PM (2 children)
Netbooks killed themselves by using dead slow processors with minimal ram.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:49PM
True but misses the point.
The elephant in the room was the OEM price of a copy of Windows on a new laptop.
Netbooks showed that hardware was getting cheaper and cheaper. I remember in the Groklaw days, about 2007 ish, I wrote that in just a few years you would be able to get a tablet at Walmart, in a blister pack, on a peg for $99. Now you can get Android / Kindle / etc tablets for significantly less.
Hardware gets cheaper. Windows gets more expensive. Something was going to collide.
If Netbooks had slid under the radar, the next thing would be for the Netbook OEMs to start offering Linux in higher and higher priced laptops.
Now we have cheap disposable chromebooks. That run Linux.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday April 29 2020, @11:36PM
And the reason they did stuff like that is because if the processor was too good, or there was too much ram, the hardware didn't qualify for the cheap/free Windows XP license, and later, the cheap/free Windows 7 Starter license.
There were some premium netbooks with better specs. But between the cost of the improved hardware and now suddenly having to pay for a Windows Home Premium license, they were getting into low-end laptop territory pretty quick.