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Comment by jayflux | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve.

I don’t understand this comment. What are you expecting Apple, Microsoft to do? They’re not charities, they make competing OS’s for profit. Why would anyone be waiting for them to bring Linux?

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I am referring to the ability for consumers who purchase a hardware product with these Corporation's operating system installed to be able to dual boot, or replace the OS with a Linux distribution.

I believe this is both in line with free-market enterprise as well as core values such as individual liberty and property ownership. Anti-competitive and predatory practices should not be justified by people such as yourself under the guise of "competing for profit".

You can run and boot Linux on both macs[0] and pc's[1] and have been able to do so continuously for more than a decade.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+mac+into+linux

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+pc+into+linux

Not really on macs. Sure, the system boots, but due to lack of documentation, hardware support has to be reverse engineered. For wifi, the recent Intel MBP boards have broken firmware which just does not work with Linux - it's officially a wont-fix upstream since Apple doesn't care.

Not on these new ARM Macs

This might have gotten fixed recently, but last time I checked, there hasn't been a working Linux wifi driver for Macbooks starting with the first Touchbar model, which is a non-starter for most practical purposes.

We had this with Netbooks - remember those? You could choose between a barely running Windows XP or a well running Linux back then. People mostly bought the Windows version because that's what they knew and where the illegal copy of software X from their neighbour ran.

A similar thing happened with the city of Munich trying to convert their systems to Linux. The workers complained that OpenOffice/LibreOffice didn't work like their (most probably illegal) copies of Word and Excel at home and thus they couldn't work with it. When that didn't help, they complained about "missing software" and other strange reasons about why they absolutely couldn't work with Linux. So they rolled back to Windows and Office and started sending our tax money to Microsoft again. [1] (Also Microsoft promised to move their German HQ to Munich to bring wealth into town. But that's toooootally unrelated.)

At least, they're trying again... [2]

Point is, as long as 90% of all jobs and schools have you work in Windows, why should people start buying Linux PCs for themselves?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

I think that is changing, though. G-Suite and the online versions of Office (Office365, I think?) are gaining a lot of traction in the business world. Live collaboration with other people is a huge benefit, and being a webapp saves the IT department many headaches.

Although that's less "Linux as a viable OS" and more "Google Chrome as a viable OS".

Lenovo and Dell both sell laptops with Linux installed. Dell ships XPS "developer edition" machines with Ubuntu and Lenovo offers Fedora on a bunch of machines.

However, I don't think selling such machines to the general public will happen soon, because there's not much of a market for it. Most users hate it when the interface of a single application changes; switching operating systems is probably a non-starter.

Well, exactly that. As soon as there is some sort of economic advantage, they do support alternatives. Economic advantage may not mean additional direct sales, but it may mean introducing a different customer base to their product or encouraging active development. I mean, MS has now released its second iteration of 'subsystem for linux' on Windows 10.

A lot of times they aren't competing but making competing hard with lock-in (that's anti-competitive).

They don't need to do much - just document things, and make it possible to disable secure boot.

Apple does allow you to disable secure boot, yes even on the M1 Macs, and that's not even Microsoft's job.

> and that's not even Microsoft's job.

Since they're the ones who required NT-on-ARM device vendors to disable user control of secure boot, yes it is their job.

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