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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: 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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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]