I’m pretty sure (though I have no record of it) that I asked ASUS Australia through their online channels before I bought my current laptop six years ago, and they said no. I never tried following it up more closely. In truth at that stage I didn’t mind having a Windows license, it was convenient for testing certain things occasionally. But I haven’t booted into it for at least three years now other than a couple of times to verify that the keyboard problems are hardware, not software.
This is great. It tells you how many manufacturers make it easy and difficult to get refunds. ASUS is the most specific one, albeit their refund range is between 9 and 65 EUR. Great work.
Why do you assume that? I’m genuinely asking. I’m aware of big companies generally paying lower rates for things, but I believe that’s usually driven by the increased leverage a big buyer has, while Asus has absolutely no leverage, if they switch to Linux today they’ll be out of business tomorrow. It certainly costs MS less to deal with one professional org than a million flaky individuals, but price is determined by supply and demand, not cost. Maybe it’s limited by calculation of its effect on Asus’ wellbeing, preserving them as a major customer?
I mean, it's also in Microsoft'S business interest to keep a major computer manufacturer like Asus selling windows machines. That's one of the main reasons windows is the default OS for most people.
You can get a new Windows 11 laptop on Amazon for ~$200. If they're paying retail cost ($140) for the license, over half that is going to Microsoft. I think most people would much rather buy the equivalent Chromebook for $70. In fact, the equivalent Chromebook costs about the same.
I think some manufacturers offer the ability to buy hardware without software preinstalled and have the software as add-ons you can opt-in. That should be the way.
I think they should note that on the page, because it makes it look like Dell is a bad vendor but in practice they're one of the better ones, in this aspect.
Since one can get a lot of models with and without Windows, I would suggest to ask the seller to get a variant without windows.
This way availability sorts it self over time.
Vendors do not want to sell Windows Notebooks, seller just demand only windows notebooks.
OEM/ODM will however only test some linux distributions and very likely support none.
I finally found the time this year to replace my parents' old T-series Thinkpad Windows 8 with Linux Mint. I also upgraded the hard drive to an SSD. The result - a 15 years old machine i5 Dual Core with 6GB RAM now boots and works extremely fast as compared to before. Also with USB and wireless mouse support out of the box - I didn't have to touch anything.
Sorry, if this offends anyone, but Windows (non-Server editions) is a junk OS that I never ever want to see or use again.
I've had some experiences like that, mostly when Spectre/Meltdown were new. (or if I had a dGPU which didn't have good drivers - or.. if there's no hardware acceleration for smooth scroll for some other reason, like chrome on ARM for a long time).
I agree that it's a dealbreaker, and the circumstances in which it can happen are opaque and difficult to troubleshoot.
Luckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Linux still struggles a lot with JS runtimes on Skylake.
While I am throwing Linux under the bus a bit here, I am still perplexed that we use an exceptionally inefficient language as the major application delivery system of the modern day. We complain that it uses a lot of RAM and is slow, but if you consider what javascript is compared to how CPUs think about things, it's a miracle we get what we get... we managed to get a marvel of engineering and the response has been to shove millions of lines of code through it... At some point, yeah, it's slow.
A bog standard Linux distribution boots under 30 seconds with a good HDD, assuming hardware initializes fast.
SSD generally adds 3x to that speed due to access latency for small files.
I remember pressing power button and leaving my PC alone to get a tea or something when I was booting my Windows installation which I had around for gaming. Same with an SSD. Desktop arrives faster, CPU still choked to launch whatever services are needed, fans are doubling as hair dryers.
It shouldn't be offensive. The assessment is accurate. I used to think computers 'degraded' and got slower and worse over time. It always seemed weird to me since logically, the silicon is there. However, when you run a proper operating system, there's no degradation. It's a software problem in its entirety. Nixos has kept my laptop running for almost a decade at this point with no performance degradation. I am only considering upgrading due to fundamental hardware constraints, but the machine itself is fine and still snappy.
It's a fair point but capabilities do degrade relative to what is considered "ordinary every day use software" even if nothing is wrong with the OS.
For instance there's a fair number of old laptops which exist now that can't play full screen 1080p content from youtube inside a browser without extensively dropping frames (way below a smooth 30 fps) because the cpu/video hardware has no support for hardware acceleration of the codecs in use. Even if the laptop has a 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 screen. Additionally they will struggle heavily with 100% CPU load doing something like running any video conference webRTC app (generally equivalent to google meet) in a browser tab.
Complexity of features and more computationally intensive things will still obsolete an old system even if it's running an 'optimal' non windows OS.
So after fighting windows for 30yr i also have started searching for linux os to switch to. Might feel weird initially but its a must now.
60% of my time spending on windows is wasted in refreshing/slowstartup/installing bloat and updates/.
Clicking next > next etc multiple time just to install one software.
Winget is not upto mark like apt and other unix package managers. As soon as i install chocolatey or 3rd party it starts to stall even more
Initially i formatted whole installed fresh no external or extra software just bare bone fresh win 10 install
Yet its slow as turtle. And windows standard installation iso is 5gb multi iso. So it waste a lot of my bandwidth. Plus it does'nt let iso download on desktop browser. And only with phone useragent you get downloadable link, and phone doesnt have much space to store 5gb file
Cherry on top even if i download 5gb file on phone i cannot transfer it to pc as standard usb is limited to 4GB per file. So i had to install additional ssh or feem or other software for wireless transfer. Or had to use non standard browser on phone to capture download link copy it to pc and downlod.
Even after that creating unattended installation is mess and require ntlite or other and hours of waste. And now newer isos despite adding ei.cfg and pid.txt the version selection menu does not appear it enforces installation of win10 home the native laptop was bought with. So hours wasting to upgrade it to pro.
So finally this year i decided to move to linux. Keeping window as secondary. But could noy decide due to myriad of varieties. Choice is majorly between Mint or Fedora
I’m really curious how many people run this kind of skin unironically. Unironically here means they’d actively seek out to make their desktop OS look… 30 years old?
No shade at all, just curios.
I def have all kinds of warm feelings towards the moment I first installed W ‘95 but wow I can’t imagine having that UX as my daily OS today.
A few years back I threw Mint plus this theme on my old Thinkpad T430s. My intent was to use it for one thing and one thing only: writing. The theme helped me trick myself into thinking the machine was unusable for anything else.
Dual boot off a second SSD with a Grub EFI loader (it will recognize the Windows boot-loader on the other drive), and leave your windows install untouched.
Still backup your TPM drive keys from windows before touching your bios settings, or you could lock yourself out of your account.
Everyone has an opinion on distros, but Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop is going to be easiest to migrate over use wise (looks like XP/win7.) Debian family of OS like Linux Mint or Ubuntu 26.04 LTS support most drivers like Brother network laser printers and scanners (check support before buying.)
For most users, Linux Mint will work with your hardware out of the box. Again, do a quick laptop model search to see what others say about your hardware drivers in a specific distro. Note, Ubuntu 26.04 with rtx 5070 ti needs a bit of driver customization, and quite a bit of patches to be pleasant. =3
I don't think Microsoft actually cares (or they consider it to be a good thing) because the default out of box experience on Windows 11 is to drive the average non tech home/consumer user towards a whole array of microsoft monthly recurring subscriptions for xbox live, office365 type products, onedrive, etc. In addition to driving traffic to Bing.
"Oh, you need more backup space! Take this special offer now for more storage, only $NN a month".
Completely true, that. Ive seen exactly as you said with 4 friends of mine when I helped them go over to Linux. On the Win11 side, they didnt even KNOW that they clicked a button to sync their files to some cloudshit account (Onedrive). There's no proof either way, but their files were exfil'd.
But with the horrendous performance and scam behavior, Ive heelped others to Linux to really good effect.
Just theres that 1 person who *needed* Windows and all the abusiv behaviors it inflicts. It was more akin to "Executives dont get fired for recommending IBM/Microsoft", and a utter refusal to try something better. Theyve been a friend for 2 decades, so I gave them the warning, but did help them.
I don't even know how I got Windows 11 at this point 900 reinstalls later. I build all my own pcs. I must have paid for a key at some point, potentially.
You could have bought Windows 7 or 8 then upgraded (free) to 10 then 11. If you ever logged in with a Microsoft account for a user, then the entitlement is tied to your Microsoft account.
> the vast majority of laptops are only sold with a specific proprietary operating system: Microsoft Windows. The vendors do not remove the Windows license, and you must pay the entire price, even if you do not want to use this system. This is unfair and we want to change it! Consumers should be able to buy laptops without any specific operating system, and should not have to pay the license price if they don't want to.
How about this: don't buy a product that you don't want.
If you don't want Windows, then buy a product that doesn't come with Windows. Buy from System 76 or another vendor that sells the product that you want.
The (still limited but better) choice exists now in large part because of many years of activism[1][2][3][4] similar to that in the linked article as a consequence of Microsoft actively abusing their market position to make it hard to avoid paying for Windows.
> How about this: don't buy a product that you don't want.
How about laptop manufacturers stop making shady deals with Microsoft to force its OS on everyone?
It’s crazy how many passes these companies get. A huge number of them are still selling high-end laptops with Intel chips because they signed agreements that effectively prohibit them from offering AMD variants.
Let's stop pretending like any of this is acceptable.
A big store chain in italy (mediaworld/mediamarkt) sells laptops without license as well, of course with a lower price than the equivalent with windows license
Given the very wide selection of x86-64 platform PC workstation hardware which is capable of running linux just fine, limiting yourself to only a few vendors just because you don't want it to have win11 out of the box is really doing things the hard way just because.
It's like going car shopping and having a choice of a dozen brands and 8 or 10 different types of subcompact, compact, sports cars, compact SUVs, full size SUVs, minivans, EVs from each manufacturer. But no, you can only buy this specific model of Toyota Camry or or maybe 3 different models of Hyundai. Oh, you wanted something else? So sorry
I mean, I bought a random Intel N150 with 12GB RAM, 256GB SSD mini PC on Amazon to run Home Assistant on, it came with windows 11 out of the box and immediately got wiped. If I'd gone buying only the equivalent hardware that came with no OS or linux on it I would have paid hundreds more for the exact same thing.
And this is what's wrong with hardware like Apple: it's sold as a general computing device and is able to run alternative operating systems, however Apple doesn't want you doing that. And so they've set this expectation with consumers that: hey we're an ecosystem play, we don't care if you like our hardware and not our software because they're a package deal. Consumers not caring about this is dangerous in the long term, because if we continue down this path the open compute market is going to dwindle and become less and less accessible. You're not a business that has a license to buy open hardware? Sorry buddy, you have two choices: Apple and Microsoft. Good luck! - is where I, personally, don't want to see this continue moving.
I’m pretty sure (though I have no record of it) that I asked ASUS Australia through their online channels before I bought my current laptop six years ago, and they said no. I never tried following it up more closely. In truth at that stage I didn’t mind having a Windows license, it was convenient for testing certain things occasionally. But I haven’t booted into it for at least three years now other than a couple of times to verify that the keyboard problems are hardware, not software.
Here's a few examples:
- https://www.dell.com/pt-br/shop/notebooks-dell/notebook-dell...
- https://www.dell.com/it-it/shop/notebook-dell/nuovo-notebook...
IANAL, but Windows is already installed, so IMO this wouldn't apply. OOBE is not installation, it's setup.
Judge's verdict seems solid though.
Sorry, if this offends anyone, but Windows (non-Server editions) is a junk OS that I never ever want to see or use again.
For document editing or code it’s pretty awesome but a sluggish web is a deal breaker for many these days.
I agree that it's a dealbreaker, and the circumstances in which it can happen are opaque and difficult to troubleshoot.
Luckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Linux still struggles a lot with JS runtimes on Skylake.
While I am throwing Linux under the bus a bit here, I am still perplexed that we use an exceptionally inefficient language as the major application delivery system of the modern day. We complain that it uses a lot of RAM and is slow, but if you consider what javascript is compared to how CPUs think about things, it's a miracle we get what we get... we managed to get a marvel of engineering and the response has been to shove millions of lines of code through it... At some point, yeah, it's slow.
Unless it’s a post-Intel Mac, and that’s all of them these days.
You mean Linux, probably, but thats because Chrome doesn't enable hardware acceleration pn ARM, so smooth scroll is disabled. Pretty rough.
SSD generally adds 3x to that speed due to access latency for small files.
I remember pressing power button and leaving my PC alone to get a tea or something when I was booting my Windows installation which I had around for gaming. Same with an SSD. Desktop arrives faster, CPU still choked to launch whatever services are needed, fans are doubling as hair dryers.
Both scenarios were on the same machine, BTW.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2. windows + ssd
3. linux + ssd
I know that Linux can greatly speed up startup, but more likely that ssd gave bigger impact.
Anything more than 3 seconds and less than 45 seconds is perceptibly the same, it's the same level of inconvenience unless you're in a rush.
.. but I can't honestly tell you the last time I booted my Macbook from cold.
Worthwhile suspend/resume is a much better goal for the modern computer user... Windows fucked us all with s2idle, including themselves.
For instance there's a fair number of old laptops which exist now that can't play full screen 1080p content from youtube inside a browser without extensively dropping frames (way below a smooth 30 fps) because the cpu/video hardware has no support for hardware acceleration of the codecs in use. Even if the laptop has a 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 screen. Additionally they will struggle heavily with 100% CPU load doing something like running any video conference webRTC app (generally equivalent to google meet) in a browser tab.
Complexity of features and more computationally intensive things will still obsolete an old system even if it's running an 'optimal' non windows OS.
Some people realized this 25 years ago
60% of my time spending on windows is wasted in refreshing/slowstartup/installing bloat and updates/.
Clicking next > next etc multiple time just to install one software.
Winget is not upto mark like apt and other unix package managers. As soon as i install chocolatey or 3rd party it starts to stall even more
Initially i formatted whole installed fresh no external or extra software just bare bone fresh win 10 install
Yet its slow as turtle. And windows standard installation iso is 5gb multi iso. So it waste a lot of my bandwidth. Plus it does'nt let iso download on desktop browser. And only with phone useragent you get downloadable link, and phone doesnt have much space to store 5gb file Cherry on top even if i download 5gb file on phone i cannot transfer it to pc as standard usb is limited to 4GB per file. So i had to install additional ssh or feem or other software for wireless transfer. Or had to use non standard browser on phone to capture download link copy it to pc and downlod.
Even after that creating unattended installation is mess and require ntlite or other and hours of waste. And now newer isos despite adding ei.cfg and pid.txt the version selection menu does not appear it enforces installation of win10 home the native laptop was bought with. So hours wasting to upgrade it to pro.
So finally this year i decided to move to linux. Keeping window as secondary. But could noy decide due to myriad of varieties. Choice is majorly between Mint or Fedora
I def have all kinds of warm feelings towards the moment I first installed W ‘95 but wow I can’t imagine having that UX as my daily OS today.
Everyone has an opinion on distros, but Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop is going to be easiest to migrate over use wise (looks like XP/win7.) Debian family of OS like Linux Mint or Ubuntu 26.04 LTS support most drivers like Brother network laser printers and scanners (check support before buying.)
For most users, Linux Mint will work with your hardware out of the box. Again, do a quick laptop model search to see what others say about your hardware drivers in a specific distro. Note, Ubuntu 26.04 with rtx 5070 ti needs a bit of driver customization, and quite a bit of patches to be pleasant. =3
The few times I needed a key, it worked the first time. And for a friend who needed Win11, the upgrade from 10 Pro to 11 worked first time.
I'd never pay more than $5 per Windows key. But I prefer Linux instead.
"Oh, you need more backup space! Take this special offer now for more storage, only $NN a month".
But with the horrendous performance and scam behavior, Ive heelped others to Linux to really good effect.
Just theres that 1 person who *needed* Windows and all the abusiv behaviors it inflicts. It was more akin to "Executives dont get fired for recommending IBM/Microsoft", and a utter refusal to try something better. Theyve been a friend for 2 decades, so I gave them the warning, but did help them.
How about this: don't buy a product that you don't want.
If you don't want Windows, then buy a product that doesn't come with Windows. Buy from System 76 or another vendor that sells the product that you want.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Refund_Day
[2] https://www.wired.com/1999/01/the-non-refundable-refund/
[3] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/...
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/279926.stm
How about laptop manufacturers stop making shady deals with Microsoft to force its OS on everyone?
It’s crazy how many passes these companies get. A huge number of them are still selling high-end laptops with Intel chips because they signed agreements that effectively prohibit them from offering AMD variants.
Let's stop pretending like any of this is acceptable.
> Want to buy a licence-free PC directly? Search for your nearest Linux-friendly shop on LinuxSi! (Italian-only).
It's like going car shopping and having a choice of a dozen brands and 8 or 10 different types of subcompact, compact, sports cars, compact SUVs, full size SUVs, minivans, EVs from each manufacturer. But no, you can only buy this specific model of Toyota Camry or or maybe 3 different models of Hyundai. Oh, you wanted something else? So sorry
I mean, I bought a random Intel N150 with 12GB RAM, 256GB SSD mini PC on Amazon to run Home Assistant on, it came with windows 11 out of the box and immediately got wiped. If I'd gone buying only the equivalent hardware that came with no OS or linux on it I would have paid hundreds more for the exact same thing.