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Comment by anonymous_i | Hacker News Reader

I am oblivious to some or many aspects of Tech. business. It is probably going to cringe a lot of people, but the question in my mind is, Why cant Dell or other OEM's pay for developing or customizing Linux to their specs, so it is more reliable. That way they don't have to depend on Microsoft for OS and can optimize their hardware performance, just like Apple does with OSX? I know it sounds like a dumb question, but I don't know any other place on internet that provides a better answer than here.

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They do already and have been for a couple decades. Dell in particular has had a long history of doing so. Personally, I have worked for a couple companies that have done just that. Now when you look at certain classes of machines for specific workloads you will see engineering specifically for Linux. But when most people look at MSFT & Apple they are thinking about the desktop. And if you look in certain corporate environments, you will find Linux thin clients, but those tend to be very specific highly regulated environments.

I don't think that's at all impossible for Dell or the other OEMs to do (and I think some of that might already be happening a bit) but overall I don't think they particularly mind using Windows for their computers. There's a whole class of customer support issues that another company has to deal with for them, they avoid the "why can't I install this program that my daughter sent me?" type problems and overall they just give their "learned about computers in the 90's"-business segment exactly what they expect.

They do pay for drivers and other engineering work. I don’t know how it is now but Canonical was in that business.

As for why OEMs don’t do it more, or why they don’t do it instead of paying for Windows licences: custom dev, testing and certification for each model variant is a significant cost. Even if the OEM saves that money of Windows licences, the market mostly demands Windows.

System76 is a company that produces laptops and desktops with their own custom Ubuntu variant, if you want to see an example of one company going the full Linux route.

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