Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptarch | Hacker News Reader

I would not recommend their services at all, although I own one of their products.

Leah is extremely unresponsive, when I ordered mine it took over 2 months for it to be shipped with no prior indication of this (it should've taken at most 3 weeks to arrive at my home), and any email response from Minifree took at least 3 weeks.

Oh, and Leah billed me UK taxes instead of Dutch taxes as per the EU webshop rules, so that was a lot of fun when I had to file my taxes.

The shittiest customer experience I've had in years.

View on HN

I've read the "PayPal" [1] section of the website (linked at the top as "Screw PayPal" and got the impression that its a work of individuals with childlike tantrum prone personality and not someone you'd do business with professionally.

Your description of the experience only nodded in the same direction.

[1] https://minifree.org/paypal/

Regarding the taxes (referring to the EU only), Minifree didn't do anything wrong: If you buy hardware as an end-consumer, you're being billed the taxes of the originating country (in this case, the UK).

That's different for most services, e.g. if you ship a laptop to Minifree and they just flash it and send it back, they have to bill the taxes of your country. If they do any of it differently, they're doing a mistake.

There are other companies that can provide you with Libreboot, blob-free coreboot or other libre boot solutions on your Thinkpad if you're unhappy with their service (according to your experience that seems to be an appropriate response).

Minifree doesn't stand for the quality standard for the whole "libre community" as Albert Heijn (a supermarket chain) doesn't set the gold standards for the whole supermarket industry.

I thought most mainboards let you flash your own BIOS/UEFI using USB. Why ship a laptop?

These laptops require a dedicated programmer, and they're the most up-to-date laptop models that come without remote manufacturer backdoor ("Management Engine").

I won't have the time to set this up myself soon, so I went ahead and bought one. It's my rainy day laptop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com