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Newegg: No, We'll Totally Take Returns After You Install Linux
- forkrulassail 14y agoWow, that flipped amazingly fast.
- ceejayoz 14y agoI'd imagine the intersection between "people who build their own computers" and "people who might install Linux" is pretty large.
- sliverstorm 14y agoA better choice in wording might be "comparatively large". (As a portion of people who build their own computers, it is probably still not anywhere near a majority)
- x1 14y ago(I posted this earlier... this is a little off topic) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook#Suspend https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook#Suspend http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1774661 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1774661 First off, I'm glad newegg will accept returns but we've got a HUGE problem in the linux community with these newer laptops. The problem isn't that newegg needs to accept our laptops but why these newer laptops are getting bricked by linux! I want an ultrabook. I want something solid, fast, long battery life, great keyboard, great screen, lightweight and FLAWLESSLY running Debian. I can't buy that, I have to buy a MacPro. Yeah, my MacPro is nice and all (insert appletax joke) but I'd trade it in a HEARTBEAT for the equivalent running my distro of choice.
- slurgfest 14y agoI don't think Ubuntu has ever claimed perfect support for those and I don't understand why Asus is not being held to the mat for not doing basic QA with at least one Linux distribution. Anyway, when you buy hardware, do not just buy whatever looks nice but buy something confirmed to work for your use cases. If that use case is running OS X, get something which supports OS X. And same for Linux, too.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 14y agoI don't understand why Asus is not being held to the mat for not doing basic QA with at least one Linux distribution. Because there's no money in it. A PC runs Windows. That's practically the definition of a PC. They're selling into a market that's like 90% Windows -- more like 99% if you filter out all the Macs. Their margins are razor thin. They can either do QA with Windows only at a certain cost x, or they can do QA with Windows and Linux at cost 2x and see almost no additional money for it.
- slurgfest 14y agoOK. It is open season for saying that Linux is bad because your laptop doesn't support it. But if consumers decide that laptop manufacturers only need to support Windows, it should not be a shock when brand new laptops are made without good Linux support. I can't even imagine how bad driver support would be in Windows or OS X if every single device driver had to be made by the same company selling the OS.
- bitwize 14y agoI can't even imagine how bad driver support would be in Windows or OS X if every single device driver had to be made by the same company selling the OS. I can. That situation happened with OS/2 back in the early nineties. That's one of the big reasons why you don't hear about OS/2 anymore.
- astine 14y agoThe whole point of the Ultrabook is to act as a viable Windows competitor to the Macbook Air. Linux doesn't even enter the picture.
- ineedtosleep 14y agoTo be fair, "FLAWLESSLY running Debian" is quite a tall order considering that Linux support for newer laptop drivers is typically pretty slow and even if the drivers exist, it's likely to have some wonkiness that kills the "FLAWLESSLY running Debian" qualifier. I'm not a MBP owner, however, an OS running off of a variation of Unix is probably a huge boon in terms of Linux compatibility when compared to the other laptops out there made to run Windows.
- yardie 14y agoIts also easier to support a distro that runs on 3 types of laptops of the same brand rather than 1000 variations of Wintel laptops.
- juliano_q 14y agoI am in this ship too. I was looking forward to change my old macbook white for an ultrabook running some distro, but the reported software problems and some other problems specific to the utrabooks I tested (bad trackpad, etc) made me buy a new macbook pro. It was hard to me to resist to a great hardware allied with a good unix-based os.
- wulczer 14y agoIt didn't work out of the box, but I have a UX31E and it works flawlessly now (meaning: it behaves exactly how I want it to, all peripherals work), with Debian testing. I tend to treat the effort of making a new laptop work perfectly with a Linux distro as a one-off cost. If you're using the machine 10 hours a day for two years, spending three days on making it work right is barely noticeable. In that vein, a friend of mine bought a Mac and spent a similar amount of time making it work flawlessly. That included buying software that minimises and tiles windows, figuring out that if you resume it with a large screen plugged it, the DPI will change and fonts on the laptop display will look weird and first googling and then working around this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3336420?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3336420?start=0&tst... I'm sure someone with a new Windows laptop would spend a similar amount of time to make it work just right. There are no silver bullets.
- x1 14y agoFair point. On reflection my biggest problem isn't just tinkering, I don't mind that, but the fact that now when it fails it can fail HARD. That or it just wont have something supported (multi-touch, graphics, webcam) It's good to know you got your zenbook working, I really like the keyboard and size on that laptop but the fact that I could brick it just makes me uncomfortable.
- astine 14y agoFor what it's worth, I have the same laptop running just fine with Linux (Ubuntu) as well. My one complaint is that the keyboard is horrible. The responsiveness is well below that of any other keyboard I've used.
- eeperson 14y agoYou can already get pretty close to this with a Thinkpad. I have a Thinkpad T420 and it runs Debian Wheezy flawlessly. Of course you will have to make some tradeoffs in the weight/battery life department because Linux isn't as good about battery life. However, I am able to get about 5hrs with an extended battery and it still feels lighter than a 13in Macbook Pro. You can also replace the CD/DVD drive with an extra battery if you want longer battery life without affecting weight much.
- kamechan 14y agoi have a t420 running arch, and am able to get 13 hours on idle and 10-12 doing work. posted something about how i did this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400
- eeperson 14y agoThanks for the tip. I always wondered what kind of battery life I could get if I tweaked things.
- streptomycin 14y agoYour first link looks like a pretty bad situation. But there were similarly bad problems in the past too. My Dell laptop from 5 years ago had a hard drive that would basically go nuts under Linux, something to do with the timer telling it when to go into "sleep" mode not working so it switched back and forth constantly. If I hadn't noticed it sounded weird sometimes and taken action to fix it, it would have worn itself out within a year. It took a couple versions of Ubuntu before that bug got fixed by default. And your second link basically seems to be "my somewhat nontypical graphics setup doesn't work in Linux", which is an age old problem.
- Karunamon 14y agoAnd it only took a huge outcry...
- TallGuyShort 14y agoIt doesn't mean they're devious. More likely, it means somebody with more authority and more intelligence simply didn't know about the problem until there was a public outcry.
- miahi 14y agoIt means that they don't have/follow clear procedures, so it's a matter of luck if your request is processed this or that way.
- praxulus 14y agoIt's a matter of luck, but given that I've literally never heard of anybody else having a poor experience with Newegg, they still compare favorably against most of the alternatives.
- jaylevitt 14y agoNow you've heard of anybody else. I didn't have a horrible, traumatic, life-scarring experience, but I did have a bad one: * They advertised an item as a SAS/SATA RAID cage; I paid rush overnight shipping, only to discover it was actually SATA-only * When I tried to return it, I was charged a $90 "restocking" fee for their mistake. Indeed, their invoices state "All refunds require a 15% restocking fee." That's not legal in Massachusetts. * I was also left responsible for paying my own return shipping (until I complained). Not legal either. * And the original shipping, for an item that's not as advertised. Probably not legal either. * When they corrected all this, they gave me the "one time exception" bit - which implies that their policy is to charge me shipping even if they send me the wrong item. Color me not very impressed - and in fact I've avoided buying from Newegg for over four years now. https://gist.github.com/2927900 https://gist.github.com/2927900
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- rfrey 14y agoIt's a remarkable (to me) number of comments to the OP saying they're glad Newegg refunded the money and apologized, but they would still never buy from them. Seems to me like Newegg acted quickly and unambiguously. The flip side of the "punish bad behaviour" coin is "reward correct behaviour". Maybe it was, as many commenters are suggesting, just the public shaming that got Newegg to act, but maybe not... in any event, it's not helpful to provide disincentives for companies to own up to mistakes.
- billswift 14y agoThere is a difference between "doing the right thing" because it is the right thing and doing it because the victim screamed loud enough. Some people will no doubt go back to using them, and more probably will if they are consistent about doing the right thing.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThere is. But sometimes it's infinitely more important that the right thing got done than that the right thing happened in exactly the way we wanted it to. Edit: we're not talking about romantic relationships here, we're just talking about corporations. Most of the time it's a-ok to coerce the correct behavior out of a corporation, they don't have to be our soul mates.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pcopley 14y agoDoing the wrong thing (completely ignoring Norma) < doing the right thing for the wrong reason (RMA because of the bad publicity) < doing the right thing for the right reason (RMA because someone at NE screwed up) < doing the right thing in the first place (RMA when it was originally asked for) Clearly Newegg is in one of the middle categories. Personally, I think as long as customers are taken care of it doesn't so much matter what the decision making behind it is.
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- qntmfred 14y agoI've never had anything but excellent experience with newegg. this whole things seems way overblown anyways.
- marshray 14y agoIt's not overblown if you're the one out the cash and still needing a new laptop.
- xxiao 14y agocould it be somehow the linux display driver damaged that screen? while I use linux but I do think newegg has a point. A policy is a policy and newegg can not verify all those 100+ linux distro on the market.
- Symmetry 14y agoGenerally speaking you don't want a screen to break no matter what signals you put into it. It would really suck if a virus could actually destroy your computer.
- eropple 14y agoTrue, but hardware failures are known to happen due to Linux misbehavior (yes, even today--it might happen with mainstream OSes but I've never heard about it). I agree that ideally the hardware should be robust about it, but from a practical perspective it's a lot easier for a niche OS to fix their bugs than to get manufacturers to test those corner cases.
- beagle3 14y ago> True, but hardware failures are known to happen due to Linux misbehavior [citation needed] In the past, Linux was blamed for memory failure because it exposed bad memory when trying to make use of it, and Windows on the same machine didn't. But it was not Linux's fault.
- eropple 14y agoLook elsewhere in this thread re: the Zenbook issues. They're mostly fixed now (maybe even entirely), but at one point it was possible to damage them with certain combinations of settings.
- beagle3 14y agoThe Zenbook issue described in this thread does not damage the hardware; A proper reset (which unfortunately due to Zenbook construction requires disconnecting the battery, which is nontrivial) solves everything.
- ck2 14y agoNewegg has always treated me right, even paid to ship a defective monitor back and shipped me a new one, zero hassle. They may not be amazon-level customer service but they are up there. If you get the wrong customer service person on the wrong day, anyone can have a bad experience.
- sourc3 14y agoI had a similar experience with Newegg. I bought one of these shiny 13" uber-thin laptops from them about a year ago. The wireless card on that machine is useless (due to aluminum casing apparently). Exchanging with another model was almost impossible and I had to literally argue with a bunch of people on the phone to get the RMA. Not sure if I ever would buy anything from them again. Amazon on the other hand has been the best experience for me so far. Prime + Amazon, and the only thing I buy in person are groceries.
- prezjordan 14y agoFreshdirect!
- kijin 14y agoDifficulty of getting exchanges/refunds is a common feature of virtually all discount electronics stores. Their prices are low because they don't need to absorb as many unconditional returns as big-box stores do. (RMA? What's an RMA? Just return it within 30 days if you don't like the shape of the shift key or something.)
- Semaphor 14y agoCan someone clear this up for me? I'll quickly write what I understood: A single person had Problems with an RMA because of Linux while everyone else is wondering why they never have problems getting and RMA after installing Linux. Signs lead to believe that it is a couple of bad apples at Newegg that are simply stupid/malicious. Newegg says of course we do RMA for Linux and people talk about how Newegg changed their stance. Now I can see how Consumerist maybe helped Norma. Maybe escalating it up the chain to the the point where you got an actual thinking human being might have worked as well, maybe that's hard to do, I don't know. But does't this whole thing seem to be totally blown out of proportions?
- dpifke 14y agoThis story somewhat mirrors a similar RMA experience I had with Newegg a year or two ago. I bought several high-end Cisco access points. One needed to be RMA'd, so I boxed it up and sent it back. The problem was that I inadvertently used the box from one of the working APs. The remaining boxes were discarded. Newegg refused to take the RMA because the serial number on the box's label didn't match the serial number of the unit inside. All of the original parts were there, still sealed in the original plastic. The RMA'd unit's serial number was on the original invoice. The sticker on the box bore the same part number and was in every way identical to the three others that were shipped to me, but the box's serial number was apparently worth $600 and the RMA could not be processed without it. I escalated my issue through several levels of management, all of whom were insistent that there was nothing they could do. I posted about my experience on a couple of reviews sites, and within 24 hours Newegg relented and agreed to accept the RMA, conditional on me removing my negative reviews.
- binarycrusader 14y agoIn fairness, some manufacturers actually have the serial number requirement. Nintendo was notably one of them in the past and so were some video card manufacturers. Newegg didn't want to eat the cost of the return; and who can blame them? When I handled returns for the electronics retailer I used to work for, if we didn't follow all of the procedures and meet all of the requirements for the return exactly, the manufacturer often wouldn't credit us for the return and would send it back. On the other hand, sometimes we did eat the cost because the customer followed all the rules we told them about...
- wtracy 14y agoIn my experience, Cisco generally isn't that kind of manufacturer.
- quattrofan 14y agoNice, but am I the only one who is tired of the phrase "reaching out"... only thing worse being "curate".
- dpres 14y agoHmm... I have 31 purchases from newegg and returned 25 of those purchases with 0 problems. That's 80% return rate with 100% satisfaction. I'm glad we hold companies accountable as consumers, but why do we focus on one employee's action without forgiveness? The issue was resolved, get over it. I'm tired of rant articles being posted to HN.