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> There are a couple companies that do that for the Linux ecosystem, and I suspect it would make Linux easier to use if more were out there (but I don't know if

> There are a couple companies that do that for the Linux ecosystem, and I suspect it would make Linux easier to use if more were out there (but I don't know if the market would support them). Even then those Linux systems are only supported with whatever distro the vendor ships. If you try to run a different distro that has license restrictions for closed binary blobs that "Linux machine" still may not work right.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Yeah, and that might be as much a marketing problem as a technology problem. We may need to be considering another major category of desktop / laptop OS experience besides Windows, MacOSX, Chromebook, and "Linux (pick your distro)": "Linux (vendor)." Like Linux (pick your distro) but more likely to be working out-of-the-box and more likely to break under exotic manipulations than Linux (pick your distro). I have a great ThinkPad X1 that I just tried to switch the window manager it shipped with for xmonad. Everything broke. It's not particularly intuitive that the list of things depending on the window manager config involves wifi, audio control, Bluetooth control, power management (machine no longer sleeps when the screen is shut), screen auto-configuration when a monitor is plugged in or unplugged, and what happens when you plug a USB drive in... But they do. From an adoption standpoint, there might be meat on the bones of the messaging "Linux on the desktop is great if you buy from a vendor; just don't assume that any old hack you do to the default install is going to just work." Then widen the set of "blessed" hacks that do work from that base template of well-verified default configuration.