{"id":248,"date":"2007-09-13T10:52:03","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T08:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=248"},"modified":"2007-09-13T10:52:03","modified_gmt":"2007-09-13T08:52:03","slug":"which-distribution-on-thinkpads-really-the-good-question-to-ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"Which distribution on Thinkpads: really the good question to ask?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After Dell, Lenovo decided to <a href=\"http:\/\/lenovoblogs.com\/insidethebox\/?p=98\">ask users which Linux distribution they should put on Thinkpads<\/a>. Seriously, who cares? If I buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre-installed, my first step would be to reinstall it from scratch, exactly like with a laptop with Windows pre-installed. Because the choices that were made wouldn&#8217;t match mine (think of partitioning, etc). Or simply because I wouldn&#8217;t totally trust the hardware manufacturer.<\/p>\n<p>So, what would make me happier about a laptop?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>That installing any recent enough mainstream Linux distribution works without requiring tricks<\/li>\n<li>That it&#8217;s possible to buy it without an operating system, with no additional charge (and no, I don&#8217;t buy the &#8220;we need the OS installed to do some quality tests before we ship&#8221; argument. USB keys and CDROMs have been bootable for years.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t care less about which distribution comes preinstalled. If Lenovo wants to make me happy, there are two ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Talk to free software developers: kernel developers, etc. Not distribution developers. And get the required changes merged in, so they will land in my favorite distribution after some time.<\/li>\n<li>If they prefer to play on their own, they could create an open &#8220;Linux on Lenovo laptops&#8221; task force, where they would provide the needed drivers in a way that makes it dead easy to integrate them in Linux distros and to report problems.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not _that_ hard: some manufacturers got it right, at least for some of their products. There are many manufacturers contributing code directly to the Linux kernel, for network drivers for example.<\/p>\n<p>But maybe this is just about marketing and communication, not about results? Because after all, Dell and Lenovo will look nice to the random user. While playing-by-the-rules manufacturers are hidden deep in the Linux changelog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After Dell, Lenovo decided to ask users which Linux distribution they should put on Thinkpads. Seriously, who cares? If I buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre-installed, my first step would be to reinstall it from scratch, exactly like with a laptop with Windows pre-installed. Because the choices that were made wouldn&#8217;t match mine [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,13,14,12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debianubuntu","category-jabber","category-planetdebian","category-planetgnomefr","category-planetubuntu","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}