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Used to have? Not anymore?
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Wouldn’t be surprised if Bolsonaro had gotten pocketed a kickback from MS to quietly remove that law’s teeth.
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oligopoly
That’s a way to misspell monopoly, alright.
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Fair. Although, I consider Microsoft’s market “Most laptops” since Apple kind of does its own thing and Chromebooks are ultra-low end laptops. Thus Microsoft gets ~95% of the market for themselves.
Personally, I’d say that’s a clear case of monopoly since MS controls this entire segment of “non-Apple, non-ultra low power laptop, PCs”, but you’re right - there are other players. The thing is, they have relatively tiny niches in which they thrive and in fact pose no threat to the monopolist.
But I now I see how you see it as an oligopoly, which is quite valid.
Wow, I didn’t realize the windows tax was that high. I thought the bulk OEM licensing was significantly cheaper than the retail price.
It’s kind of absurd. When you buy a TV, the bloated adware at least helps lower the price. Imagine paying extra for it.
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Why would it lower the price? Don’t ads only exist to generate a bit of extra revenue?
Lower the price of the TV
For TVs the manufacturers are the ones who control the bloated adware and make money off of it while on notebooks and laptops it is Micro$oft. Except maybe for TVs coming with Android TV OS, but I think even that can be modified to promote their services.
I thought it was as much as the $10-$20 keys from key resellers.
The price difference does make sense, it’s the cost to cover therapy for the employee that was forced to preinstall Windows on a computer for the thousandth time
This is only for Thinkpads which are offered as customized units and have a longer shipping time.
incorrect. currently sporting an ideapad pro that i bought directly from lenovo last year and it came without windows pre-installed.
Which country?
Currently in France No OS is -€60 and with Fedora or Ubuntu it’s -€30
Don’t ask. Different markets, pricing irrelevant to actual costs
The cost is what Canonical wants.
And redhat. But only in Europe.
nothing new. here in brazil many manufacturers, dell included, would ship laptops with linux and then people would shove a pirated windows copy on it.
It’s HAPPENING!
SteamOS is next.
Finally!
Didn’t RTA. What distro?
Fedora or Ubuntu. But I’d say the important part is that they probably provide all necessary drivers.
Usually enabling Ubuntu’s third party / proprietary repo covers all necessary drivers.
I remember having lots of driver issues on fedora but that was like two decades ago. I’d imagine they have that sorted now.
Anyway this is good news. Grow the user base.
I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.
Debian was interesting with their back port / forward port repos for drivers on newer hardware. I had to grab a wifi driver and put it on a USB stick, then figure out the dir to put it in so I didn’t have to manually modprobe or whatever to manually load the driver.
20 years ago on fedora I had to manually mod probe like three different drivers to get my PCMCIA Broadcom wifi card to work. I’m sure fedora is better by now, but damn I still have bad memories about that.
On a notebook it still can be troublesome. I know from very recent Asus TUF experience…
These seem to be the two most commonly supported distros by laptop manufacturers. Framework officially support these two distros, too (they have unofficial guides for a bunch of other distros though)
Windows is free for anyone to use indefinitely… If you’re OK with a persistent watermark.
Why even add a premium to the laptop? Let the user decide to use windows as-is, pay a license, or switch to Linux. 🤭
In practice. Technically, were M$ to go sue users left and right (or send those ISP-style “gotcha”, now pay up) emails.
Luckiy, M$ knows well enough that 90% of that userbase wouldn’t have too many qualms jumping ship if they got slapped with a huge fine, so M$ lets them be.
They value the high userbase more than a quick payout (and rightly so). However, there’s no guarantee that can’t change overnight (just look at Unity and before that, Adobe).
