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Lenovo To Shun Linux
dominique_cimafranca writes "CRN reports that Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs. Lenovo is positioning itself as an exclusive partner of Microsoft, several weeks after the companies announced they were 'reaffirming' global market development and cooperation agreements." From the article: "A Lenovo spokesman later said the non-Linux strategy is also applicable for the company's Thinkpad brand of notebooks, although Lenovo will provide advice to customers who insist on deploying desktop Linux systems in some fashion. While Lenovo and Microsoft have had a long OEM relationship that pre-dates Lenovo's takeover last year of the former IBM PC Co., IBM had been supportive of Linux throughout its product line -- including preloading it on Thinkpads -- before the sale to Lenovo."
Read the article you link to. Lenovo is based in the PRC (mainland China) while the Linux requirement was mandated by the ROC (Taiwan). Two totally different countries, even if the rest of the world does'nt have the balls to acknowledge Taiwan.
I do not see how Lenovo, or any computer seller could possibly support Linux the way it is done with Windows: these companies do not manufacture all of the computers themselves. They assemble components from other hardware vendors. The problem is - there is no stable, working way how these hardware components are supported. Hardware vendors do not provide opensource drivers and Linux does not want closed-source drivers. If 3rd parties provide opensource drivers they often are buggy and lag behind current hardware.
But in order for a computer seller to "support" Linux, these things should just work at least to some acceptable degree. Which is not the case really.
Do you know of any other laptop where *all* hardware components work under Linux as they are supposed to?
As long as Linux will continue its "opensource only" policy for drivers, this situation will continue. Simply because Linux does not have the market power to enforce anything (as MS does have). It is quite easy for harware manufacturers to simply ignore Linux. Developing good drivers for Linux would cost more money than they would gain by additional sells.
As somebody who uses Linux 100% of the time, I am not happy about this, but unfortunately, these are the sad facts. Given the current move of Linux advocates against closed source drivers and DRM the situation will get worse in the future. I do not see how it will be possible to play HD/BR-DVDs on a Linux machine or how to handle encrypted HDTV signals.
Unless there is a drastic change of who Linux is getting developed the gap between Linux and Windows will widen -- no matter how crappy, buggy, or insecure Vista will turn out to be (probably not that much, given the effort that was invested in it).
The reason I don't run a Linux machine is BECAUSE no vendor (known to me) sells hardware that will be guaranteed to run Linux with 100% hardware working.
You really have to look around a bit more: there are thousands of vendors that sell Linux pre-installed and guarantee that it's working, including same-day hardware and software support.
The lack of Linux adoption is really first and foremost a hardware issue
There is no "lack of Linux adoption"; at this point, Linux is the most common OS after Windows, with OS X trailing a distant third on servers and a closer third on desktops. Linux supports far more hardware than OS X, and far more hardware out of the box than Windows.
The only area where there is any practically significant difficulty with Linux and hardware these days is on laptops and with 3D cards--both of those are real problems, but they don't matter that much to Linux's core market, and they will get fixed sooner or later. It's a shame Lenovo didn't take this opportunity to help address these issues, but it's ultimately their loss.
For servers and workstations, you can go with companies like Penguin Computing (there are many more of them) that put together machines out of Linux-compatible components, integrate it, preinstall everything, and ship it.
For laptops, there are actually plenty of Linux compatible laptops, but there is no single recognizable brand that is consistently Linux compatible, making the problem one of selection, not availability. Fortunately, a number of companies like Emperor Linux do the legwork for you.
With hardware virtualization on the new Intel mobile chips, using Windows or OS X as a "bootstrap loader and device driver" for Linux is another reasonable choice. That way, you get all the goodness of a Linux desktop environment on your hardware, but installation is trivial and you can strip down the host OS to its bare minimum.
I've had both a T42 (IBM) and T43 (Lenovo). Both are solidly built.and both are excellent Linux machines.