• unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          Fair. Although, I consider Microsoft’s market “Most laptops” since Apple kind of does its own thing and Chromebooks are ultra-low end laptops. Thus Microsoft gets ~95% of the market for themselves.

          Personally, I’d say that’s a clear case of monopoly since MS controls this entire segment of “non-Apple, non-ultra low power laptop, PCs”, but you’re right - there are other players. The thing is, they have relatively tiny niches in which they thrive and in fact pose no threat to the monopolist.

          But I now I see how you see it as an oligopoly, which is quite valid.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    Wow, I didn’t realize the windows tax was that high. I thought the bulk OEM licensing was significantly cheaper than the retail price.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    The price difference does make sense, it’s the cost to cover therapy for the employee that was forced to preinstall Windows on a computer for the thousandth time

  • ReallyZen@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Currently in France No OS is -€60 and with Fedora or Ubuntu it’s -€30

    Don’t ask. Different markets, pricing irrelevant to actual costs

  • vfreire85@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    nothing new. here in brazil many manufacturers, dell included, would ship laptops with linux and then people would shove a pirated windows copy on it.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Windows is free for anyone to use indefinitely… If you’re OK with a persistent watermark.

    Why even add a premium to the laptop? Let the user decide to use windows as-is, pay a license, or switch to Linux. 🤭

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      In practice. Technically, were M$ to go sue users left and right (or send those ISP-style “gotcha”, now pay up) emails.

      Luckiy, M$ knows well enough that 90% of that userbase wouldn’t have too many qualms jumping ship if they got slapped with a huge fine, so M$ lets them be.

      They value the high userbase more than a quick payout (and rightly so). However, there’s no guarantee that can’t change overnight (just look at Unity and before that, Adobe).

    • The Menemen@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Fedora or Ubuntu. But I’d say the important part is that they probably provide all necessary drivers.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        Usually enabling Ubuntu’s third party / proprietary repo covers all necessary drivers.

        I remember having lots of driver issues on fedora but that was like two decades ago. I’d imagine they have that sorted now.

        Anyway this is good news. Grow the user base.

        • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 month ago

          I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        1 month ago

        These seem to be the two most commonly supported distros by laptop manufacturers. Framework officially support these two distros, too (they have unofficial guides for a bunch of other distros though)