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Comment by vaishaksuresh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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