this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
829 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
57418 readers
3272 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Can't really buy a computer without Windows pre-installed"? Weird, that's not my experience. The stores allow filtering by "no OS" and you can see quite a lot of options.
Which retail store have you ever walked into that had a PC on display with no OS?
I don't know if the people walking into a brick-and-mortar for a prebuilt PC are making decisions beyond "what's available" and "what's in my budget".
There are absolutely online stores that do that, but they're usually gamer-focused, so there's three issues;
Note: I'm taking about laptops, because it's all I've bought for the last decade or more;
The non-gamer focused stores rarely (if ever) have the option (Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft, etc).
The gamer focused stores usually sell hardware that runs Linux like shit because the hardware needs extremely specific drivers (which isn't necessarily an issue for Linux, but if it doesn't exist yet, you're either building them yourself, or waiting for someone else to do so).
The gamer focused stores are usually patroned by people who are all in on Windows gaming, because they don't do much else with the system, so they don't experience the kinds of annoyances that power users would gripe about (which is why the above point doesn't compel those sellers to do anything different).
As for desktops, I really couldn't say. Haven't been paying attention for years. It's possible that you could buy a system without a hard drive, never mind an OS.