Lenovo Denies Claims It Plotted With Microsoft To Block Linux Installs (theregister.co.uk)

Reader kruug writes: Several users noted certain new Lenovo machines' SSDs are locked in a RAID mode, with AHCI removed from the BIOS. Windows is able to see the SSD while in RAID mode due to a proprietary driver, but the SSD is hidden from Linux installations -- for which such a driver is unavailable. Speaking to The Register today, a Lenovo spokesperson claimed the Chinese giant "does not intentionally block customers using other operating systems on its devices and is fully committed to providing Linux certifications and installation guidance on a wide range of products."
Complaints on Lenovo's forums suggest that users have been unable to install GNU/Linux operating systems on models from the Yoga 900S to the Ideapad 710S, with one 19-page thread going into detail about the BIOS issue and users' attempts to work around it.

Comments

Re:Paranoia amongst the minority.

[meerling]

Jumping to conspiracy concepts is a bit much.
Does microsoft care if you put linux on that box?
Probably not, you are probably a ms hater that wouldn't even pay them for office, and they already got paid by the company when they licensed the os, so they don't give a rodents donkey what you do with it.

Does lenovo care that you want to put linux on it's laptop?
Again, probably not. Most of their customers don't, and as lenovo won't support a box running a different os, they don't have to worry about you sucking up more support resources since you voluntarily want to step out of coverage to put linux on it. Reduce their workload and expenditure of resources, so why would they care?

But linux won't load on it!!!!
So you're saying that despite technology changing and different things being tried, two companies that don't care at all about linux didn't go out of their way to ensure compatibility with your essentially niche desire to install an unsupported os on their machines is somehow a conspiracy against you?
Well I have more than a few things to say about that, and they aren't nice.

I guess the short version is this. Linux may be great, but that's not what they're selling, so don't expect them to bend over backwards to make you happy.

I'm sure some smart person that's not being paid will eventually design a way to install linux on those boxes, of course, that may be decades in the future, so it that's something important to you, return those units and get ones you can install linux on. After all it was an unadvertised and non-standard limitation that prevents it from fulfilling it's system requirements that it was purchased for, which makes it sold under false pretenses. (ianal, but there are consumer protection laws to cya in these types of situations.) But stop with the conspiracy theories. Devs have enough trying to deal with requirements and feature creep than to work on pointless no-profit conspiracy stuff.