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