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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

This is great but I'd still just format the drives and load from an image I put onto a thumb drive. Who knows what new glassfish-esq malware they have integrated into the factory OS.

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Reinstalling doesn’t necessarily help - coincidentally (or not), Lenovo has been caught in the past embedding crap into the firmware so it persists through reinstalls.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

To quote a cousin comment[1]:

That's relying on a Windows misfeature. Ubuntu is not going to pull crap from the firmware after a clean reinstall, but Windows does just that.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22191786

If I remember correctly they could only do this because of a Windows feature.

The point is if they are offering it preinstalled it means they are putting more effort and support behind making it work well on their hardware. Linux hardware support has come a long ways but there are still occasional rough patches. At this point in my life I take zero joy in trouble shooting them so official Linux support is a big deal

You don't make Linux work on the hardware at the Desktop level so much as you choose hardware with chipsets that don't flout spec or have else have (open) active support from their vendors.

In my experience, very little troubleshooting on Linux is due to Linux being problematic and more oddities and quirks with hardware whose drivers were written only with a particular Windows version in mind.

To test, just boot a "problem" distro in a VM. If you don't encounter the same issues, it's the hardware.

Same here. I still remember that fiasco wih Lenovo malware reinstalling itself even after a clean Windows reinstall. How does a company expect not to lose all trust with a stunt like that?

That's relying on a Windows misfeature. Ubuntu is not going to pull crap from the firmware after a clean reinstall, but Windows does just that.

The issue here is that Lenovo has a history of unethical behavior towards its customers, not that a specific unethical behavior only targeted Windows.

I'm a huge thinkpad fan, but I won't be buying another one due to privacy and security concerns, and simply not trusting Lenovo.

I think it would be more fair to say that Lenovo's IdeaPad division had this unethical behavior. ThinkPad is a separate division that never did this.

I don't have any inside knowledge, but based on how it played out, Superfish and its ilk must have been a bright idea that came from the IdeaPad division, not something dictated by corporate.

I'm also a big ThinkPad fan, and I keep buying them regardless of what happened with IdeaPad. Of course you may choose differently.

I think you meant Superfish, glassfish is a Java EE Server (that I wish to never have to touch again)

I was slightly confused lmao. Was wondering why on earth Lenovo was trying to push web servers

Agreed. Unfortunately, I'd probably show up as a "Windows user" in the statistics because I'd buy one for the cheap Windows license, boot into Windows once to pull the stock key code, and use that in a VM later. Even if I was going to use it as a purely Windows machine, I'd want to perform a fresh installation...

Oh not glassfish, sorry I did some migration work on that a while back. I meant superfish. :D

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