The other part that really bugs me is that I cannot buy laptops without Windows from a lot of vendors. First thing I do is wipe any Windows/Recovery partition

The other part that really bugs me is that I cannot buy laptops without Windows from a lot of vendors. First thing I do is wipe any Windows/Recovery partition from the drive and install Linux. Yet, I know that Microsoft got their cut and there is nothing I can do about it. How this passes any reasonable antitrust test is beyond my comprehension; on the other hand what we call capitalism these days has not much to do with actual capitalism, so maybe I should not be surprised.