Pete Travis <lists <at> petetravis.com> writes:
Yes, my experience is that buying user devices like laptops and desktops
(servers are a different story) > are not cheaper without Windows preinstalled. That wasn't the case ~10 years ago when I
started asking, and it wasn't the case recently when deploying ~100
machines for $dayjob that
were immediately reimaged using our Windows site licence without ever
booting the OEM install.
Yes, if anything I've found that no-OS machines are if anything more expensive, due to the lack of the "crapware discount". And there are utilities you can use to backup up the existing activation, and then do a clean install, getting rid of the crapware. And on occasion Windows is necessary for doing things (like updating firmware) that aren't supported on Linux, and you don't need to devote a lot of disk space to it just to have it around.