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Comment by tinalumfoil | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a single person that has an extra $40,000 to spend on a car because they want to not support the oil industry. Also, stopping at the gas station once a week isn't a big deal, but having to send your only car into the shop for days while it's repaired could be a huge problem.

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We all value things differently. I'm not saying you're wrong. To me, owning a car is more than just fuel + service costs.

We are talking about taxi drivers.

I spend twice as much money on Linux laptops so I don't support Apple, Microsoft, or much of the commercial software industry. I'm sure my counterpart in the automobile market is out there somewhere.

Why? Can you not buy the Microsoft laptop at half the price, wipe out windows and install Linux?

My understanding is that yes, he could, but then Microsoft is paid for the Windows license which he does not want and will not use, so they lose out on the profit from that license by him paying more for an exclusively Linux laptop.

AFAIK, you can buy the same laptop without windows installed from manufacturers like Dell. They actually reduce the cost if you choose to not have the OS. I don't know who sells linux only laptop for twice the price, given that linux is free. How is twice the price justified if you're actually not paying for the OS?

Twice the price was an exaggeration. However, as some one driving a XPS 13 dev edition (the original) right now they are definitely not priced as "cheap" notebooks. Someone has to write the drivers (or source components with good drivers) and make sure they work properly as configured. In the case of the XPS 13 dev edition Dell absolutely puts resources into at least trying to get that right. The laptop runs really well on Linux and many many laptops today do not because of driver issues. This is not news to anyone who has been using Linux longer than 5 minutes on real consumer PC hardware. In the old days, if you complained about hardware compat people would tell you to hack on the driver!

I'll say Linux handles the XPS 13 well when dragging a window from a hidpi screen to a 3440x1440 screen isn't completely broken (so far even Gnome on Wayland can't do that right)

Edit: and 3440x1440 is just my case, it's broken for dragging windows onto anything except another hidpi monitor that uses the same scale factor as the main one.

Wayland should allow for that to work well. Give it some time, it's not early stages but it's still not a production-ready environment unless you're living on the extreme bleeding edge, with a knife sticking out your head and all.

That makes sense to me. I personally moved to a Mac for the exact same reason. I would end up spending more time configuring the machine and getting things to work than doing actual work. That has drastically improves since I switched. Anytime I need linux, I just run a VM.

This sounds like you spent $80K on Linux laptops.

I've spent at least twice that for linux-based laptop deployments in my corporation.

Well that's awesome!

Well they solve that problem the same way any other repair shop does by loaning you another car.

But to get back to your original point, I honestly think you are just plain wrong. If I look around at the street here I see huge amounts of people that have spent 40 grand extra (and often much more) for essentially vanity, a marketing illusion whereby an expensive car confers elevated social status to whoever is driving it. Their transport needs could be perfectly served by an economical, reliable car (frankly, for a huge number of people out there, lots of their transport needs could be solved by a fricken bike) yet they didn't buy that.

You should talk to more Tesla owners then, lack of emissions is a big selling point.

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