5 ms·
> Therefore the main blocker wasn't the bad advocacy or anything of the sort, but the old and crooked stranglehold of MS on manufacturers. The only way to serio
by scholia 10y ago
> Therefore the main blocker wasn't the bad advocacy or anything of the sort, but the old and crooked stranglehold of MS on manufacturers. The only way to seriously increase Linux desktop adoption is for availability of Linux pre-installed computers to significantly rise.
Plenty of companies have tried offering Linux pre-installed and almost all of them have failed for various reasons. The main reason is that people don't buy them. Either they are perceived as being too hard to use, or they don't easily run the business software or games that users typically want, or buyers are confused by Linux having 157 variants, or they are happy with Windows, or whatever.
The other reason is that manufacturers can make money selling Windows PCs but can't make money selling Linux machines, partly because of the extra costs of hardware qualification, drivers, increased stock control, accounting, book-keeping and advertising costs, and massively increased support costs... unless support is either denied or sold separately as an ongoing cost.
Of course, Linux is getting a free ride on the back of Microsoft's compatibility work. If you are using Linux then you are benefiting hugely from the cost of parts being driven down by Windows PC sales. (Apple switched to Intel partly to gain the same benefits.)
> MS use their heavy leverage of Windows pricing to prevent that.
One of the settlement terms in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft was not allowed to do deals on Windows pricing, so that all the leading OEMs were on a level playing field.
This settlement ran for roughly a decade. Did you see a huge rise in Linux PC shipments? No. The only real difference was that it pushed up the average price of Windows and made Microsoft more profitable.
- shmerl 10y agoAnti-trust case revealed, that MS threatened manufacturers to raise Windows price, if they'd sell computers without an OS. That's another indicator of such blackmail. I don't think the court did anything about that. If all would have been clean deals wise, there wouldn't have been such a mess of Windows tax and never ending tying problem.
- scholia 10y agoYes, it did. The DoJ fixed the price of Windows for all the major OEMs, and all sales had to be made via the same OEM-only website. I don't appear to have a record of how many OEMs that applied to (or else I can't find it), but the number I remember is 40. This had the very amusing effect of increasing the price that IBM paid for Windows. IBM went to court to complain that Microsoft had tripled its price, but as far as I recall, that price increase was from $9 to $27. Either way, nothing stops anybody from setting up a company to sell Linux PCs -- you could do it yourself. Is there really nobody in America who can sell Linux PCs at a profit, when the OS is free? Since that's evidently the case, blaming Microsoft just looks like a fig-leaf for some more fundamental failure(s).
- progman 10y ago> Is there really nobody in America who can sell Linux PCs at a profit, when the OS is free? Dell sells the XPS 13 Ultrabook with Linux pre-installed pretty successfully. Tuxedo is another Linux HW vendor. At lot more devices are listed at http://linuxgizmos.com http://linuxgizmos.com
- ghaff 10y agoNote though that Dell's Linux offerings are commercially supported distros--so Linux is not "free (as in beer)." And I can't really imagine that selling a laptop with upstream bits and saying we won't take your call for support would go over well when selling a laptop.
- progman 10y ago> Note though that Dell's Linux offerings are commercially supported distros What's the problem with that? Why should I use a different distro if the installed one works perfectly with all HW components? If I really needed another distro I could user docker or the like on that same device.
- ghaff 10y agoNo problem at all. But the question was about Linux being free. And it's a good bet that a hardware manufacturer probably isn't going to ship with a community-supported distro with no support.
- scholia 10y agoIn the UK, RM Ltd launched the original 7in Asus netbook into the education market with two options. (1) Windows XP with normal support. (2) Linux with no support except "reset to factory condition". Dell UK tried offering Linux with no support, but with the option to buy third-party support from Canonical. The cost of support more or less excluded home and education buyers.
- 10y ago