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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

If the conclusions drawn by this paper are true, this is a massive business opportunity. They practically go so far as to imply that close to 10% of the laptop market is up for grabs if only the pesky retail oligopoly would stop sabotaging their own financial interests.

Does anyone believe this to be the case? I'll be frank : if I did, I would be investing in a new venture instead of writing this.

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I don't know how big the opportunity is, but from the interest in my Linux laptop store so far [1], it appears a lot of people do want these machines. Dell's entry into the market is a surprising and welcome change too.

It feels a bit weird to be entering into the laptop market just as the world is moving to tablets. Linux on the desktop is perhaps the most tragic case of too little too late.

But, as a hacker I want to try and push the world in a direction I like and not just accept the status quo.

[1] If you're interested in buying a machine, please sign up here - http://giniji.com. We're currently trying to cut a deal with Lenovo, so things are moving a bit slowly, but we should have it sorted soon.

Hmm, just looking at your homepage there I can't say I'm entirely sure what you do. What do I gain by buying a Thinkpad from you instead of buying it from Lenovo and installing my own distro? Do I save money by not having to pay for a Windows license?

> instead of buying it from Lenovo and installing my own distro?

I would buy from him over Lenovo precisely to avoid having to install my own distro. I want a laptop that just works, not a new project.

Picking a linux/bsd distro is such a personal decision, though. Unless this service let's me pick from about 20 different distros (and it might), I'm probably going to wind up installing what I want anyways.

We'll offer some choice of distros, and also a no-OS option.

You gain:

1. A better price on an equally specced machine because we buy in bulk.

2. Save time installing and much more importantly testing and making sure everything works out of the box. If you like playing with drivers, then maybe this is not for you (although we might want to hire you!).

3. Get to work faster - choose your distro and software packages on the site when you place your order. A fully customised machine is delivered, so that you can get to work the first time you boot it.

This is exactly why I bought a preconfigured Linux laptop. I ended up paying a few hundred bucks over retail to Emperor Linux for a Thinkpad x220 tablet because I didn't have time to screw around with drivers and didn't want to take the risk of having the machine not work at all due to some issue with unsupported hardware.

Sadly, they didn't live up to the promises; their support has been terrible. But I think the idea has a lot of merit, and I hope your business goes well!

If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

They did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC - and those things sold out. Repeatedly. In multiple locations. Then all of a sudden, Microsoft backpedaled on Vista and binning XP, stripped down XP a bit (including the price tag), and most importantly, strong armed the vendors. Lo and behold, you can't get a netbook with Linux anymore.

Let's face it: the demand is there. Linux has worked just fine on the desktop for well over a decade. The market failed, and the legal system (in the form of patents and copyrights) isn't helping. This is why monopolies, overreaching copyright and software patents are bad things.

> If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

One possibility is that the market is too fragmented.

Yes, many of you want a pre-installed linux laptop. However, there are two variables in that "want", the software (which distribution) and the hardware (the amount of memory, the processors, the screen, the pointing device, battery life, etc).

With retail MS or Apple laptops, hardware is the only variable.

So, you've got a significantly smaller market, consisting mainly of folks who are reasonably happy doing it themselves, and it's more fragmented.

What I understand from this article is that brand image and recognition is too strong and pervasive, retailers rely on those brand images and their marketing investments/incentives to support their side of the bussiness. So unless a new or current player invest massive amout of ressources to build a "linux" brand, retailers aren't going to support any new/different tech (aka linux).

I may have misread the article though.

https://www.system76.com/

I bought my laptop from System76 and my experience with them has been sub-par. I don't know that I'd recommend them over just buying a widespread commodity model; if it's been out long enough for another kernel release to hit, everything usually works fine.

That's unfortunate. :( - I almost went with them, but decided I didn't want a Clevo built system. My T420 has served me well, at least until a current odd bug that has me in Windows again until I can figure it out.

I doubt their reasons but not necessarily their conclusions. Breaking in to the laptop market seems fiendishly hard, at least due to economies of scale. Sure, 10% might be willing to buy a Linux laptop, but at what markup? When do you just say sod it and buy a Windows laptop to re-install. And from what I gather, Windows is so highly subsidized for OEM vendors that the cost is really negligible.

Further, it seems like the 10% savvy enough to want Linux won't be a perfect subset of the people buying laptops from brick and mortar retailers any way. Breaking in to the market would require a lot of other stuff, not necessarily retail (e.g. an efficient supply chain, direct sales to corporate, quality laptop builds, ...).

At the retail level, it has nothing to do with economies of scale. It's all about margin.

Assuming it takes the same resources to sell a Linux box as it does to sell a Windows box (which is probably a bad assumption), then the lower price of the Linux box means less profit at a given margin.

It's not Microsoft that's preventing reseller's from offering discounts for Linux, it's basic retailing economics. There's probably only ten or twenty dollars difference at retail when it comes to Linux v. windows when all the factors are considered. It's not as if Linux machines are cheaper in logistics or take up less display space.

I doubt there's a strong demand for Linux laptops[1], but there's a fair bit of demand for cheap laptops, so a free OS should have an advantage there.

[1] I'm using one now, but even most of my nerdy friends just use Apple laptops.

I assume, as soon as people understand, how much they pay for a Windows licence, linux on a laptop would become more popular. I tried to find a notebook a while ago, without windows. Thats really impossible. IBM used to offer Thinkpads with linux for a while, but that seems to be over now.

As I understand it, manufacturers receive fees for packaging bloatware on Windows machines, and so there's little to no savings to be had with preinstalled Linux, at least until there's bloatware to package with Linux...

Eventually Ubuntu or some company like that will take on it, I'm guessing. There are low budget efforts but obviously they cannot compete with the big guns. Very, very deep pockets will be necessary, which is why it's way out of startup territory.

This report says essentially nothing concrete.

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