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Comment by paulintrognon | Hacker News Reader

The worst part is the reaction from Lenovo in my opinion. They just locked the thread reporting the issue on their forum, not saying anything about the problem itself but instead threatened the community to turn the pre-approval option on. This really makes me angry and makes me want to boycott their products. I really hope this issue will spread so that Lenovo learn that they made a bad move on this one.

It also made me realize how important it is to have a community on which one can rely to spread problems like this one. Several people on their own can't do much against big companies, but a big tech commnity can.

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> It also made me realize how important it is to have a community on which one can rely to spread problems like this one. Several people on their own can't do much against big companies, but a big tech commnity can.

I never think that a support forum should be owned by the company.

There is a clear conflict of interest. The company does not want you calling them out on product flaws or their behaviour, on a site that they own and that reflects on their brand and products.

It's a shame that fora frequently are not financially viable, as they do need to exist to provide a centralised place for consumers to gather, share problems, diagnose and solve them.

Companies shouldn't run their support forums. Instead, companies should offer a better level of support by default.

No company runs its own support forum ... as far as I'm aware Stack Overflow is ad supported right? ;)

This. Also companies that delete embarrassing threads are shitty companies, I wouldn't buy anything there. Support forums are everywhere, from Reddit to SO anyway

>Companies shouldn't run their support forums. Instead, companies should offer a better level of support by default.

To clarify, by "run" do you mean "have one" (that they therefore by definition operate) or do you mean exercise moderator power over?

They shouldn't operate the servers, and they shouldn't have moderator power over them. It's fine to have reps answer questions on unaffiliated third-party sites, as long as it doesn't turn into sponsorship or some other COI.

So if there is no forum then no company employee should create one? (because then it wouldn't be unaffiliated.)

> fora

Off-topic, but for future reference:

fora = forums, viri = viruses, indices = indexes, formulae = formulas,

etc.

Big difference between indexes and indices. Indexes are entire systems of indices.

Even more off topic, but have you got a source for that? :)

This is true, but the linguistic difference is too subtle and too technical to be safely relied upon in normal usage. (In this context, indexes are better thought of as sets of "entries" or "references" rather than "indices".)

Meaning is the same for 'fora' and 'forums', but both are fine and 'forums' is in fact more commonly used: http://grammarist.com/usage/fora-forums/

I suspect same is true for viri/viruses and formulae/formulas but I'm not even worried enough about to check. Me saying 'viri' or 'formulae' would be me being a person I don't want to be.

He's trolling. It's a useless tangential argument about something that does not affect intended conveyance.

He may be forum sliding, creating crufty noise, to dilute communication.

It would make you an ignoramus in all things Latin, I assume? Given that "viri" means "(a plurality of) human males"...

You are, of course, correct - unlike those people who write 'viri' or, even more often, 'virii' instead of the correct Latin 'vira' - which, as it happens, is not part of common English use.

> This really makes me angry and makes me want to boycott their products.

After SuperFish, Omniture, and whatever their third malware scandal was, you still need a reason not to buy Lenovo?

The problem I have is: What's the alternative? I've yet to see a decent linux-capable computer. I'm hoping someone can point me to one

I run Debian and XMonad on a Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory. Nice machine. I guess it would still dual boot to OSX, but I haven't tried for more than a year.

Pay out the ass for 4 year old hardware?

So you would rather pay out the ass for the latest hardware... even if it does not allow you to install Linux?

How about older hardware without the Apple tax, that does run Linux?

No, not really. When my purchase was made, the Macbook Pro had the nicest screen and form factor with 16GB of memory.

I debated the Carbon X1 at the time, but I recall it was limited to 8GB of memory. I regularly work with Java-based ETL tools and datasets that spill out of 8GB, so having 16GB was important. I could have gotten more memory if I wanted a bigger form factor but I really didn't want to lug a "workstation replacement" around.

A couple of years ago I said if the Macbook lasted as long as my Thinkpad X200 did (4-5 years), it would be a reasonable purchase.

If I was buying today, I might just buy some type of large screen Chromebook and do everything on some cloud VM instance with even more memory.

I do admit this is a fairly viable system, but I don't want to pay a ton of money, nor do I want to support apple.

Someone pointed me to the Dell XPS 15 yesterday (i7, 32GB, 1TB SSD, 4K touch screen).

Dell's business practices were a big contributor to the current situation, but I'm getting close to overlooking that.

I've had a few people I know/trust use those and they were far from happy with them. A lot of video/battery/driver issues unfortunately

That's valuable feedback, thanks. I was really considering it.

Recent XPS related topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289479

I get all my systems from [ThinkPenguin](https://www.thinkpenguin.com/), and have been very happy with them. Those folks are dedicated to free software.

Interesting. I don't think I've heard of them, thanks!

The version of linux he used does not have the right drivers! simple.

There seems to be a lot of hurt and over-excitement about this!

It's not even possible to re-install Windows on this machine let alone Linux.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/forums/forumtopicprintpage/boar...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And why would Microsoft be behind blocking Linux and windows installs, and reinstalls ...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not convinced but your argument doesn't really pan out. Microsoft own Lenovo wrt what OS installs are made: by preventing any OS install except the factory one they can guarantee such devices will start at Win10 and only change if MS deem it. If they allowed reinstalls then users might be able to install Win7 or another OS.

Microsoft: "You can't change the operating system on the computer you bought. But we can." (ref Win 10 forced installs)

afaik, there are no divers for this yet. anyways, the problem is not the drivers, its the fact that lenovo blocks BIOS options to allow discs to be accessible from non windows10 system.

You're missing the point. The mode of operation is defined in the BIOS, and these parts have been deliberately disabled. Whilst in theory it's true that Debian could potentially release a version in the future at present due to delibrate crippling in the BIOS (changed firmware to disable features) one can not even workaround this.

Acer used to do something somewhat similar on some Aspire models (disabling option to enable Vx at BIOS) so using VirtualBox was a no starting, but with some creativity and long winded efi vars mounting and fiddling you could get it working or break your system, not soldering though :)

I'd be interested to see how it pans out Lenovo community admins are worse than Acer community. At least with Dell I find a few engineer on Twitter and ping them..

Disabling the vx toggle in the bios bit me a couple times... it's just weird that a vendor would do that in the first place. Fortunately, at home I've always built my own, but laptops are so much more limited in terms of freedom.

> not saying anything about the problem

That's incorrect. Someone from Lenovo had already posted in the thread saying that it had been escalated.

I was talking about the last post, sorry if that wasn't clear. My point was, if other people have the same problem and find the thread, they will not read 19 pages and rather go to the last one to see where's the issue at. And there they will find nothing that answers their question. Lenovo staff could have at least have said "it is a known issue" / "it is a driver issue" / "We have an agreement with Microsoft"... Whatever the reason is.

The last post links to the post from a mod saying the issue has been escalated.

That last post also makes it clear that the thread isn't locked, but that you can't use Lenovo forums to call for a boycott of Lenovo products or to coordinate lawsuits against Lenovo. That doesn't seem particularly outrageous to me.

> That's incorrect. Someone from Lenovo had already posted in the thread saying that it had been escalated.

Well, it had been escalated two months ago and not only there's no fix but not even an explanation why somebody made the deliberate effort to disable standard AHCI mode.

It's not some weird and difficult bug which should take months to track down, but an obvious intentional kludge. All they have to do is say why they did it and either revert this BIOS patch or explain why they can't.

I won't do business with Lenovo after running into multiple BIOS soft locks. The first, I was attempting to install a WiMaX card into some random laptop, and the last Thinkpad I had was BIOS locked to only be able to accept the 80GB HDD that it came with. It would have been so snappy with an SSD! It has been three years now that I refuse to purchase any products from the company and six years since I ran into their first BIOS soft lock. I was yelling about it back then, but nobody gave a shit.

swings a lit lantern around the marketplace at noon

BIOS IS DEAD! AND YOU HAVE KILLED IT!

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