Why laptops with linux mostly use unknown distros?
The average person dont like linux, and if they buy a linux laptop the reason is because its cheaper than the windows one. So why manufacturers still use unknown distros (like lenovo with endlessos) and not something like ubuntu or mint?
Most of the Laptops I see with Linux are Ubuntu, some Ubuntu based distro like Tuxedo, Pop_OS, or Linux mint, and very Rarely Fedora (I’m not sure, but I think I saw one ship with Fedora).
Apologies if i wasnt clear there, but the point I intended to convey was indeed that you should only use an OS that you yourself have installed, to ensure that it hasnt been shipped with any bloatware or backdoors.
Hardware manufacturers have been doing it for years with modified windows installs, and I see no reason to beleieve they aren’t trying the same thing with Linux installs.
if the manufacturer of the device itself isnt trustworthy everything you do to try and make the device “trustworthy” is futile because OEMs could not just implement backdoors at the software level, but firmware or even hardware level.
That’s true. It only protects you against a manufacturer who half-asses it by including bloatware/malware that isn’t automatically reinstalled after you reinstall the OS. My own desktop PC has an Asus motherboard that installs Asus software into Windows automatically. I don’t like this trend, but I’d be surprised if they do the same for Linux.
Companies love to install backdoors and proprietary software for drivers that act suspiciously like spyware, it’s their favorite past time. So while the OS may be trustworthy the additional software they install is not.
Ubuntu is highly commercialized and trademarked so vendors that offer it make deals with canonical. Dell, Lenovo, and System76 have all offered Ubuntu in the past.
One thing that vendors do sometimes is they offer an official image that includes drivers for that particular laptop and they never make it into mainline. I think that’s part of the draw for offering your own weird OS - you basically get to control hardware support and your own release cycle.
Control has other benefits as well. You get to do some branding, which bean counters love, so you get to deliver “the Lenovo experience” or whatever. I think System76 actually cared about this for good reasons and that’s why Pop!OS (terrible name) is actually pretty good. Ubuntu kept screwing up their offering so they just did their own thing instead.
My uneducated guess is that Endless OS pays manufacturers to have their OS installed as it has what appears to be privacy-conscious telemetry. It won't be anywhere close to what Microsoft/Apple, but in the Linux telemetry world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and so it'll still have valuable data.
Some of the areas that are unlike most other distros I've come across:
Their website for Endless OS does a lot of tracking and has a policy that is more 'business-orientated' than many distros
Privacy policy for the OS is not available online, only when downloading program
They use dark patterns to have the default for telemetry as 'opt-in' which might be the opposite for FOSS IIRC
To me, it's akin to the free third party apps that come packaged with many Android mobile devices. Less intrusive since it's anonymized, but also feels more intrusive because it's the entire OS being monitored. I believe I came across a headline that Fedora is attempting to use the same tracking software in the link above
This review shares a more judgmental view of their practices
To my knowledge the few laptops from the more famous brands I saw being released with Linux out of the box were coming with Ubuntu, can you make a few more examples?
Also Endless OS isn’t really unknown, it’s just that it’s not suggested at all in most communities because its focus is more on making a kid friendly distribution, which is amazing, but it’s not really what most people will be looking for
Yup, I couldn’t find much info on it, only an official page in Portuguese, that one is very weird, I wonder if they made it just so they could put spyware on it
It makes sense for a hardware vendor to have their own distro. That’s the only way they can make sure that everything works seamlessly. Just think, if you put Ubuntu on your laptops and then Canonical do something that breaks your compatibility. It would be a major support nightmare.
I’ve never seen anything else than just Ubuntu or customized Ubuntu preinstalled on laptops.
Endless OS sounds like an actually good distribution, though. It’s based on Debian, it’s immutable, they publish their software as FOSS and they submit upstream patches.
The UI (which is a modified Gnome desktop) looks beginner friendly and easy to use.
Because every OS they ship with they need to support. Lenovo already has a viable, cost effective, support model for endlessos because they ship and support it for educational customers.
It’s not commercially viable for them support other OS that there is near no demand for relative to their overall sales.
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