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Comment by digler999 | Hacker News Reader

> I love my Surface Pro 4,

I'd love one if I could put linux on it. or if I could buy an OEM pc without an OS (and yes I know there are some vendors that "allow" (just that word makes me cringe) you to do it, but it should be a right). If, by their own definition, it's "intellectual" (and not material) property, then if I dont use it I shouldn't have to pay for it.

If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it ? If it's so awesome, surely people would want to use it, right ? If the proverbial destination is so great, why do they need to lock their guests inside ?

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> I'd love one if I could put linux on it

You can.

https://ramsdenj.com/2016/08/29/arch-linux-on-the-surface-pr...

"Something that sets the Surface apart from other popular tablets, is that it doesn’t artificially limit your capabilities. If you want to use it as a laptop, or install alternate operating systems on it, you are free to do so. I think the Surface is going to make a great Linux laptop, and I look forward to spending some time playing with it."

thank you for the clarification. I was aware that linux was great on surface 1,2 models, and last I had checked, either v3 or 4 were completely locked.

You're not their target demographic. 99% of people don't want to put linux on it.

back in the 90's, 99% of people didn't want linux either, and MS did just fine without "physically" locking you out of their competition.

I'm curious if you have a conception of exactly how much money creating, testing, and deploying a SKU of a product actually runs. Now multiply it by the number of permutations of the product. You should get a reasonably large number with six or seven zeroes at the end. Be honest: are they going to even break even off of the micropopulation that cares?

I dont follow your point. I'm not asking MS to sell me a linux version of their tablet. I"m saying they shouldn't use UEFI or other proprietary bootloader tricks to keep me from wiping windows off and installing my own software on it. That would be cheaper for them to do than spending extra development time to keep me out.

But...you can do that. Right now. The Surface Pro 4 has no "bootloader tricks"; it has Secure Boot, which you can disable from the UEFI menu. No x86 Surface ever has ever had any "physical" methods of "locking you out of their competition".

So either you want something that already exists or you want something new, and I'm very confused as to your initial post.

Just goes to show how damaging FUD actually is. Someone made up this fear and people still believe it even when the proof is literally everywhere. They just don't want to look, repeating a lie is easier.

It's more nuanced than just FUD. I admit I may have been wrong and that the surface 4 might work on linux. but its disingenuous to call my position FUD.

at least according to this [1] article, MS requires secure boot in win 10. and the criticisms about UEFI and how it makes linux much more difficult to install (which I have experienced firsthand) are documented on wikipedia [2]. I'm going to enjoy my friday evening and not try to make a solid case, but of course microsoft denies that they ever intended to use UEFI to block competition (because they've never done that before :) ).

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/201722-linuxs-worst-case...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

It really isn't disingenuous to call it FUD. A simple Google search would've clued you in. You don't have to mean to spread FUD to spread FUD, and you should own it and stop.

Microsoft did not sell computers in the 90s...

Beyond that, I find those that want to run Linux on a Surface often put it in Hyper-V and use putty + WinSCP + $TEXT_EDITOR_OF_CHOICE wired up to WinSCP. Heck, now there's the Windows subsystem for Linux.

X11 and VNC help if you want a Linux desktop, but that's admittedly a less than ideal experience.

Of course, virtualization generally precludes USB peripheral access, so my suggestions are a pure software and web development solution.

It appears that you can, it's just hard: https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/4t64zt/gettin...

It looks like most of the linux issues are due to MS doing some weird architectural things (touch calculations on the GPU, etc), but that's just what I was able to find out with 2 minutes on the first thing google popped up.

I could buy an OEM pc without an OS

I don't know about "without an OS", but Dell is selling a laptop right now that comes with Ubuntu Linux out of the box: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_n....

And, like others have pointed out, the Surface isn't "locked". Yes, it has SecureBoot and UEFI... just like literally every desktop motherboard shipped within the last 5 years. You can go into UEFI, turn off SecureBoot, wipe Windows and replace it with whatever you want. It may not work very well, but it's totally doable.

If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it?

Because the software is part of the product. Apple has shown us that customers do not consider hardware and software to be separate entities. They consider both to be an integrated whole.

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