wanted: performance laptop, no windoze tax

Temlakos temlakos at gmail.com
Wed Jul 16 23:41:21 UTC 2014


On 07/16/2014 04:17 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
>
>
> On Jul 16, 2014 9:07 AM, "Neal Becker" <ndbecker2 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ndbecker2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, I know this subject has been written about before.  But 
> google shows
> > mostly 5 year old info.
> >
> > What are some recommendations for a relatively high performance 
> laptop that
> > works well on linux, and without paying windoze tax?
> >
> > --
> >
>
> You're aware that in a lot of (most? All?) cases, it's actually 
> *Microsoft* that pays the "windoze tax", right? They want to get their 
> product in front of users and want their latest and geatest, like 
> win8, to be popular. They might actually provide incentives to the OEM 
> ranging from license discounts to free licences and then some.
>
> My advice is to pick a machine based on your needs and budget and 
> don't worry too much about keeping your cash out of Microsoft's 
> pocket.  With Fedora you won't be getting MS news or bing results in 
> the shell or using their app store; that pretty much does the job 
> these days.
>
> I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, a flagship Windows8 convertible 
> ultrabook.  It works great, and I have never booted Windows on it.
>
> --Pete
>
>
>
So what you're saying is, Microsoft makes no money, or even loses money, 
on OEM installations, and hopes to make all their money on those who 
upgrade existing hardware from one version of Windows to another. Or 
maybe on advertising through the Bing search engine.

If that's true, then I suggest Richard Stallman was correct and the 
business model of a proprietary operating system was never tenable 
long-range, and has come to the end of the road. Because I'm sure 
everyone knows that no enterprise, that has any true sense of TCO, 
upgrades existing hardware from one version of Windows to the next. Each 
succeeding version of Windows is a worse resource hog than the last, and 
also breaks at least one application the enterprise uses regularly. So 
what they do instead is wait until their version of Windows is 
approaching EOL, then upgrade hardware and software together. (I 
recently bought a new machine, moved all my apps onto it, then ended up 
erasing them all because the new Windows had to go through a full system 
refresh just to install a "vital update.")

And let's see if I further have you straight: nobody's going to get a 
significant discount, or indeed even an insignificant discount, by 
buying a "bare" machine with no OS installed.

Temlakos
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