wanted: performance laptop, no windoze tax

[Pete Travis]

On Jul 16, 2014 5:41 PM, "Temlakos" <temlakos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/16/2014 04:17 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Jul 16, 2014 9:07 AM, "Neal Becker" <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
>
> --
>

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.

The speculation about business models and enterprise practices is even more
OT than the rest of this thread, and probably more appropriate somewhere
else.

--Pete
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