I hope more hardware manufactures offer to ship without a windows license. It is cheaper for everyone and people have less hassle installing an OS of their choice on the device.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I'm pretty sure that Microsoft pays OEMs for having Windows pre installed just like any other adware.
That would be wasting their market position.
If vendors can expect say 10% of people to choose a non-windows option it would suffice for microsoft to offer a 20% discount in return for the vendor not offering such an option.
10% might actually be a bit low, there are a lot of people willing to install windows themselves and use one of the comically easy unlock methods.
Wasting their market position? That's literally how this works in the first place.
And you overestimate the percentage of people that are willing to not have a pleasant ootb experience.
If the operating system is FOSS, I'd be willing to pay 50% the cost of a Windows license but to the FOSS maintainers and the upstream distros they rely on. Gotta close the causal loop.
Yeah, I'd do this if it shipped "ready to play."
I'm more than capable of setting up my own system but it'd need to be plug and play to be realistic.
I saved around 100β¬ on my laptop by requesting the FreeDOS model, the option still exists
Thatβs super-interesting! Could you share some details?
Some retailers give the option to have no OS installed and with a Windows key, I bought the device when I started switching to Linux and installed a windows partition without activation key. Eventually, I deleted the windows partition as I didn't use it
Bro, you're being asked where, not how.
In the terminal obviously ;)
What laptop?
HP OMEN 16
oh, how times have changed, I remember nearly every budget to mid-range laptop being offered with DOS as a cost-saving measure
fdisk is definitely not leaving anything to the imagination.
fucking-disk
Yeah, the poor thing won't load even once before it gets nuked from orbit.
I just leave that up to anaconda.
"Use whole disk"