This is correct. There’s nothing technical preventing us from offering a pre-built bring your own OS system, but we figured there’s high overlap between that audience and those who want to assemble a kit themselves. This reduces the amount of pre-built inventory we need to hold.
I get the business case of universal pre-built inventory, but offering a Linux version out of the box signals that all hardware is compatible and fully functional... supported at a first-party level.
More and more developers in big tech companies using Linux just expect it to work and aren’t interested in monkeying around with drivers and configs.. not to say they can’t, but why increase friction for your dev setup?
This is one of the reasons why the XPS 13 Developer edition exists. Guaranteed first party support for Linux.. you know the next kernel or major revision won’t Bork your setup... you can just focus on working within the env.
Offering a preinstalled Linux variant captures the market referenced above, and signals to tinkerers that this is a good platform to build on since all hardware is supported without jenky workarounds.
Alternatively, if you can’t make offering dedicated Linux installs an economically feasible thing, then perhaps offer a mirror or set of instructions to set up latest LTS builds of various Linux flavors, to indicate full compatibility? Because that is the real selling point. Knowing all of your hardware is supported as a first party product. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I chose an XPS this time around, and considered a System76 machine as well.
Great feedback. We will definitely at minimum post guides and compatibility test results for the most popular distros and ensure that at least Ubuntu LTS has a straightforward path to full hardware functionality.
Good man. I bought my XPS 13 explicitly because of dells 'developer edition'. I don't need my OS pre-installed, but I do want it fully validated and working. Make a 14" and I just might give this laptop to my parents and buy yours.
Seconded.
I don't really need Linux pre-installed, but when I make a buying decision I would be much more likely to buy a laptop that is (a) guaranteed to be fully compatible with Linux out of the box, and that (b) the manufacturer will honor their warranty no matter which OS I choose to run.
That said, I think offering Linux pre-installed would be very nice as a signaling function to attract technical-minded users.
> There’s nothing technical preventing us from offering a pre-built bring your own OS system, but we figured there’s high overlap between that audience and those who want to assemble a kit themselves.
This may be projecting myself onto others but I wonder if that's actually true, and I would indicate the Dell and Lenovo Linux options as evidence.
I personally run Linux on my laptop to reduce pain and time spent doing unnecessary maintenance - I run Fedora on a Lenovo and it works seamlessly. If I bought a Framework, it would be for upgradability and maintainability rather than for customisation.
Nothing stopping just installing linux on the preassembled one when you get I though, I assume. Although I guess you may have to pay for a Windows license in that case...
Yes, and that's the issue with most computers today: there's no way to opt out to Windows.
Whether you like it or not, licensing cost is blended into the computer and even if you don't use Windows you're somehow supporting a company that you might not want to support.
I undertand in 99.9% of cases people just want to buy a laptop, turn it on and have it working. But I also think there should be an easy way to opt out of Windows enforced by law so that MS don't bang up numbers due to shady commercial practices.
In many cases, the cost of the license to the OEM is negative. That's because the cost of the Windows license is more than outweighed by the payments they get for crapware, adware, and 30-day trials, they get paid to pre-install (and the crapware requires Windows). It would actually cost them more to ship with no OS.
That's been true historically in a lot of cases, but isn't the whole point of the Framework to do things in a different and better way? It would be very disappointing if a laptop like this was shipping with that kind of junkware installed as standard even on a Windows pre-install. In fact, it would instantly reverse my position having just heard about these guys from something like "I wish you luck, this is a much healthier direction to push the industry in, and by the way let me know when it's available in the UK because I am definitely a potential customer" to something I won't repeat here that involves not wanting anything to do with them or their products.
My understanding is that companies are worried about being perceived as tacitly supporting piracy if they ship with no OS. I know, for example, HP will not sell you a laptop with no OS, but they will sell you one with FreeDOS.
Yep. I love Linux but hate having to futz around to get basic stuff working. I'm ready to mess with some things like display orientation on non-standard hardware like a GPD Pocket to some extent, since you can't really expect full out of the box support there, but when it comes to a proper laptop I'm averse to OS-level tinkering just to make stuff work (as opposed to tinkering in order to customize to my preferences).