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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe it. They said the same thing more than a year ago, it is still announced in their website for the P models (the choice for ubuntu or fedora), but yet they are impossible to buy. I have harassed the lenovo sales people for months and I have given up in buying a P laptop with linux installed. I do not understand why do they play this kind of stupid games. The only thing that they offer is to buy the laptop with windows, then renounce the windows licence, then follow an online guide to install linux. Honestly, to buy a few laptops for 4000 EUR each, it is fairly insulting to be told that.

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If you consider that one of the major reasons for them to provide linux is:

1. To "show" that you can nicely run Linux on their hardware.

2. Have a better position wrt. deals with Microsoft. As they always could start promoting Linux on their systems much more widely.

3. Good publicity.

Ironically all of this can be archived with "selling" the product officially but then not putting much work/care into the actual sells. ;=)

Just hope this gets better.

#1 is very important: if you actually want to run Linux on the laptop, quite likely the one you want and not the pre-installed one, you want to be sure that drivers for all hardware exist and are tested by the manufacturer.

When buying a laptop to run Linux, it's nice to not have a Windows license (and the cost of that license) included.

Even though I would just reformat and install my preferred distro right away, it's nice to have something to boot into within a few seconds to double check my new laptop is functional.

Good publicity?

Are there so many people buying laptops with Linux as a “requirement” that this is a thing?

Iirc, Sputh Korea dumped government use of Windows, so I could see a reason for a mfg to support Linux like that but in terms of just “publicity”?

Of course it is. Devs, sysadmins, etc using Linux and such don't like it when they have to fiddle around because they need to fiddle to get bluetooth working because some producer was an ass or whatnot. These are also the people that get turned to when the uncle or friend needs a recomendation for a new laptop, etc. It's uncommon enough among major vendors that it's good publicity (and it's uncommon because of shady anticompetitive Microsoft deals)

exactly, buying a PC and putting Linux on it is one thing, but laptops nowadays are very locked down and hard to modify. if you want a laptop with Linux, you better hope the hardware works out if the box because otherwise you are in for days of pain and suffering trying to fix it, at least in my experience as a non Linux expert. personally I look for laptops with Linux either preinstalled or commonly installed. if I'm looking at laptops and I see that they offer Fedora out of the box that's a major point even if I don't run Fedora because I know the support is there.

>> Are there so many people buying laptops with Linux as a “requirement” that this is a thing?

That's an interesting question. Linux laptops are a small segment of the market. But if you openly support it, you stand to capture a lot of that segment. 1 to 2 percent of the entire laptop market is a big beal to a company that only has say 10 percent of the laptop market. Just example numbers I have no idea that the real numbers are.

For a car example I use the PT Cruiser from Chrysler. I didnt like it, not my thing. But I loved that they made it. It had some very retro design element that were nothing like any other vehicle on the market. I'm sure they grabbed 100 percent of the buyers who were into that look.

Ok, fair points! It’s a small market but they can grab more of it for basically very little work.

On the PT, I was at Chrysler before the launch of that thing (visiting). It was originally marketed to teens exclusively. It was supposed to replace Neon that was directed at teens but was moving to lower income adults. It failed specularly at teens. But became super popular with older drivers. A success, but completely wrong initial target. The Chevy HHR later looks nearly identical and in fact is designed by the same guy.

Scion had the same problems

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/scion-xb-built-for-teens-...

I bet any governments or large corporations install their-own-flavored distro, and won't accept a distro from a laptop vendor, just for reasons of unification.

Truth, but as someone else said it’s a least an indication on compatibility. Lenovo doesn’t need to use the Realtek audio that isn’t supported in Linux if they also have an option that is supported. It’s an implication not a guarantee.

#2 is pretty trivial without very good sales figures.

It's the company equivalent of calling your cable company annually and "threatening" to leave. Some small performative effort to keep getting the standard discount.

> I don't believe it. They said the same thing more than a year ago

On the flip side... Does it really matter?

I just checked and I could get a $100 off my ThinkPad of choice by selecting “no OS”. To me that’s more than sufficient.

I’ll setup my Linux the way I want it anyway, and you better believe that’s going to be from scratch.

Edit: from scratch with a vanilla installer. Nothing zealous or crazy.

Edit 2: I also found out my (Lenovo) work-computer is seamlessly receiving BIOS- and other FW-updates seamlessly via fwupdmgr in Linux. I have no reason ever to boot Windows on that thing.

All in all, happy Linux-using Lenovo-customer checking in.

I also enjoy to install linux from scratch. But having a laptop available with linux installed is a big plus. That way, I am sure that all hardware problems (correct throttling, hybernating, etc.) are my fault and not lack of hardware support. I also have an example install with working drivers. Then, I do the installation from scratch, if it is for me. Or if it is for a new postdoc that just needs a linux laptop I can leave it as it is.

I hope you mean Linux from scratch in the generic sense and not http://www.linuxfromscratch.org. Though I suppose it's to each his/her own.

LOL, I meant installing a regular distro such as debian on a new laptop.

(I also did the linuxfromscratch.org tutorial on a virtual machine several years ago, and it was an enjoyable learning experience, but this is not what we were talking about.)

> and you better believe that’s going to be from scratch

Unless you're doing it for the education, this sounds like a form of self-harm.

Depends on exactly what "from scratch" means. It could just mean "I don't trust what the manufacturer pre-installs and intend to reinstall immediately", which seems to be good advice on Windows and reasonable advice on Linux distros. Like... I wouldn't necessarily advise hand-configuring everything starting from a netinstall shell, but I do set up my systems by running a vanilla installer to lay down the base OS and then running my ansible playbooks against the system to make it fully functional; does that not count as "from scratch"?

Knowing whats on it, configuring it the way you like, selecting a different distro you prefer, certainty that if you needed to you actually could deviate from the OEM install... There are plenty of good reasons to load your own OS on your own hardware, that aren't purely for the exercise.

As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible. Coincidentally I have become friends with a guy at a large reseller near me, so every time I want a new laptop, I call him up, tell him which ones I've set my eyes on, then I go with a live USB to see which one works out of the box.

Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.

What really rises my eyebrow is the "fedora" part here. I haven't used Fedora since 2015 and for the time being I don't intend to switch to anything new/old. I can't recall a single time I've seen a linux-out-of-the-box laptop that has anything other than Ubuntu(which I truly hate). It would be nice to see someone putting something else and shipping it like that for a change.

> As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible.

For you, maybe?

I can go on Dell's website and buy a laptop with Ubuntu on it right now. I'm looking at it in my cart as we speak.

System76 is a reputable company that _only_ ships systems (including laptops) with Linux on them. I don't own one but most reviews that I've read are quite positive. (Both regarding the hardware and the System76 Ubuntu-based OS.)

Here are at least a couple dozen more: https://linuxpreloaded.com/

System76 does exist and they're laptops are good (I'm using one as my personal/development machine). I used there tech support for a desktop and they're quite responsive.

They're at little pricey (they're oem laptops with linux) but I would buy another, because I know the OS will work with the hardware with no fiddling. (They sell ubuntu but I'm using their POP-OS. ubuntu variant).

One of the Reasons I got it was because it wouldn't have games, but Black Mesa runs well on this notebook as it has a nvidia graphics.

I've had very bad experiences with Dell's in the past so I'm staying away from them. My previous laptop was a Dell and it caused me more problems than all other laptops I've owned combined. And they are a tad... Overpriced imo. I mean an xps is around 25-30% more expensive than an equivalent zenbook for instance as a direct competitor. Currently I'm on a zenbook and it's been incredibly reliable. I intend to switch laptop soon and I'm between one of the newer zenbooks(yes, I'm aware of the bullcrap that is the screenpad, though apparently now it even works on linux out of the box) or an hp envy x360 which also apparently works out of the box.

I'm aware of System76 but I want to avoid buying a product that isn't that mainstream outside the US market. I can't recall even seeing one out in the wild anywhere. If something goes wrong with it, I'd need to ship it half way across the world to get it fixed. Not a very solid plan on my end.

I generally need a smaller form-factor laptop, otherwise I'd even consider something like cadnetwork because they too claim to have full linux support and even though they are a small manufacturer, in normal conditions(covid-19 aside), Cologne is a 3 hour, 40-50 euro flight away from me.

It sounds like our experiences and locations are very different.

In the US, it's very hard to beat Dell on price. The only ones who can are budget manufacturers and rebadged Chinese products, which usually gets you underwhelming design and longevity.

Dell's lower-end consumer line products can be just as bad. I bought a cheap Inspiron once that was the bane of my existence. But my last two business-class laptops (a Latitude and now a Precision) have been pretty much flawless despite heavy use and rough handling. I run Ubuntu on them both.

In the US, when you buy a business or enterprise product, my understanding is that Dell will send a repair technician to your location. Sometimes you can get them to just send you a replacement part, if you are very persistent.

I have a 2019 xps 13 that was delivered with ubuntu which worked well. Recently I've switched to Arch and everything has worked as expected.

Not sure what specific problems you had, but installing the base, sway and firefox had touch scrolling, webcam, mic, hdpi and everything else I expect working, which seems like a win to me.

I'd prefer a librem with the same form factor and specs, but this is working without issues and that's a lot more than I can say for the HP elitebook I had to use at the last job.

I'm in Europe and didn't want to go with a US company so I bought a laptop from https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ which is a German company which in theory does the same as System76 by shipping OEM laptops with Linux but the one I got was such low quality it basically broke down after only one year even if it cost around $1000. I even sent it in 2 times for repairs. I lost a couple of the screws at the bottom and the glue for the plastic around the border of the screen went bad and the plastic was only half glued and was hanging down. After a year it started to hang in both Windows and Linux so you would need to do a hard reboot every hour so I gave up on it.

At work I got a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu (switched it to Arch) and have no problems at all, everything works even now after two years of heavy usage.

My work got me a system76 gazelle that was fully loaded and I love it. popOS is a great distro as well, plus they already think about problems that eat up devs time like managing tensorflow, cuda, and cudnn versions. They also provide a utility tool for using tensorflow docker images.

Can confirm System 76 and their customer support are terrific. Yes, I paid a little more, but worth it to me.

which system 76 laptop do you have?

Their meerkat mini NUC fully loaded. The fan hardly ever comes on.

I use Fedora as my daily driver, since I primarily work with RHEL/CentOS at my job. The main problem I have with Fedora is their 6-month release cycle, without having periodic LTS versions. The support a version for 1 year, so that means once a year I have to go through the dance of upgrading, and seeing what is different. Fortunately the differences that cause a learning curve are getting fewer with each update.

Of course, since RHEL / CentOS is derived from a frozen version of a given release of Fedora, then CentOS can count as an "LTS" release -- it just goes too long between releases (but is great when a new one comes out).

I believe the lack of Fedora LTS is maily to increase the sales of RHEL Workstation

No -- lack of Fedora LTS is because doing LTS with actual _S_ is a huge amount of work, and our volunteer community is not super-excited about doing that work.

I've done a lot of Fedora upgrades, and only a couple have failed.

I have been amazed by how stable Fedora manages to be. I think I had a problem maybe once every couple of releases that needed a fix, and the community is always there to help. The Fedora bug-reporting process is terrific. There's a lot of engagement with the users and a genuine desire to help.

You can think that RHEL/CentOS is Fedora LTS

As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.

The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.

I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.

If you can find Flatpacks for most of your software, or if you don't often install new packages, silverblue is truly awesome. If you are installing an RPM tho you have to reboot to use it. If you are like me and have long-lived tmux sessions that you hate starting over with, the reboot is super annoying.

That said I may switch to Silverblue anyway at some point, because it really is amazing in many ways.

I have a laptop with an encrypted LVM drive that has a separate /home partition with very little space left for user files. I installed some Flatpaks and got a disk-space warning.

I'm not surprised, but Flatpaks install everything in the user's home directory. So if you know you're going to be using Flatpak apps, make /home bigger.

The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.

The worse part is, what feels like the daily 30 or so packages that need updates. They should really separate the critical security ones out, and batch the normal updates on a two week schedule.

I've been using silverblue as my daily driver for the past few months, installing rpm's into the 'toolbox' is the recommended way, I have a few rpms related to power management that I layer onto the ostree, but other than that everything runs in a container. It's a wonderful OS.

I tend to do that when I'm going to sleep. It usually finishes well before I wake up.

> Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.

Tell me about it, I just fought a whole afternoon against Dell EFI/Legacy BIOS's take on nvme drive management and... well... anything standard I can read on EFI or BIOS is useless because each hardware vendor seems to add special cases.

I have Fedora on my small-and-light laptop (100% boring low-end Intel stuff) and it works perfectly. My daughter is using it now for homeschooling right now. I'd even go as far as arguing it's easier to keep happy than my Ubuntu one.

I switched over to Fedora in 2015 from Ubuntu. Very nice experience.

System76 is a well developed hardware supplier with Linux. Dell as well.

@axegon

Why do you hate Ubuntu ?

Three and a half years ago I looked into buying a Thinkpad with Linux. After not finding it on the web site I called the number listed there. It was a weekend. The person said Linux laptops are under commercial sales and gave me a number to call Monday during business hours. I never did and bought a Dell mobile workstation without Linux because it was a deal on the Dell Outlet. Don’t know if it’s still the case that Linux laptops are via commercial sales.

Today, I would just buy a Thinkpad and install Linux if I wanted a Thinkpad with Linux to the point I was ready to spend. It’s a simple problem to solve with little or no money depending on whether a Linux Thinkpad is cheaper. I’d rather spend a few minutes installing Linux than hours of shopping over multiple days. Or to put it another way, Google search doesn’t turn up a lot of pages with Linux on Thinkpad installation horror stories. At worst it will just be the usual Linux on a laptop friction.

They do make them extremely difficult to buy on their website and the linux offerings are generally more expensive when you do find them. Maybe that makes sense in some spreadsheet somewhere that takes long term support into account but when I look at a the same laptop, on with windows and one with linux. When the one with linux is $400 more, it's pretty clear that what the company wants to sell.

In some corporate environments $400 for preinstalled Linux might be a bargain given the logistics of receiving, unpacking, reconfiguring, testing, repacking, and shipping laptops out across the organization. At the consumer end, I can only imagine what it can be like to support a customer who fears installing Linux on a Thinkpad. It’s not a customer I would pursue with discounts.

If I could buy a Windows laptop, and be absolutely sure that it's the exact same hardware used in the corresponding Linux model, then sure, I'd save those 400 USD. As it is with laptops, the Windows version might have a Linux-unfriendly network card or something silly and the fun begins. That's why I chose a Dell with Linux pre-installed. Besides, it comes with support, including automatic BIOS upgrades.

My comments are about Thinkpads. And I am assuming Fedora or another stability motivated distro just to be clear.

Dell is also an option. Historically, I’ve seen discounts for selecting Linux. But it’s also been an older version based on when I’ve shopped. That probably varies relative to model introduction and distro release cycles.

This is likely something that you have to go through a distribution partner for. A lot of their products are specifically for enterprise customers - they may not bother stocking them for direct retail.

System76 exists. I don't know what your requirements are, and I haven't used them so I won't swear by them.

Were I in the market for a new laptop, I would want their Lemur Pro. Open firmware, good specs, decent price. They have a variety of laptops and desktops as well.

I've got a P53 for work and I can think of a thousand reasons why this didn't pan out yet. One major problem is still updating your firmwares. While you can update your BIOS and "embedded controller" (https://fwupd.org/lvfs/search?value=p53), you miss out on firmware updates for your WWAN adapter, your Thunderbolt 3 docking station and several smaller things too. I suppose Lenovo's sales or whoever is in charge listens when the engineers tell them "you will have the following problems immediately, which we are not ready to solve yet". Would be nice if they actually delivered instead of promising, but I'm not mad at them for not rushing it.

The Lenovo engineers I spoke with are concerned about firmware updates for these things too, and will be working with their vendors to make sure they're in the LVFS.

I bought the Dell XPS developer edition last time I had a chance. I don't care how good Lenovo hardware may be so long as they pull this kind of stunt.

Vote with your dollars. Buy from a vendor who supports Linux.

That's only because you're in a less valuable market. You can purchase pretty much every single option they have with Linux in America. It's still unfortunate, but it's not like they don't sell many devices with Linux pre-installed.

Which is funny because I believe Linux marketshare is higher in Europe than US (well based on statcounter and other sources).

Market-share might be higher, but the market is much smaller, and it's still a minority. Selling to a minority in the US is much more profitable than selling to a minority in Europe, solely because of scale.

> the market is much smaller

How so? The population of Europe is about double the population of the USA. Even if you narrow it down to the european union, it is still larger than the USA. Why should the market for laptops be smaller in Europe? Are you sure?

I'm absolutely sure, yes, especially if we're talking about the EU alone (but I'd prefer to argue for Europe as a whole), that the market for high-end laptops is significantly smaller. Eastern Europe is an order of magnitude poorer, and is the reason Europe's population is higher than the USA's (that said, there is a reason I initiated with "America"; these customizations are also offered in Canada, and North America is conventionally considered a single market).

Especially when considering localizations that have to be made, and that the most valuable European countries require you get physical technical goods certified per-country (mainly looking at Germany here), and that they're getting taxed more, the margin that you can get from Europe is much smaller already than in America. It doesn't make sense to offer the same extent of customization (which, too, lessens margin) as in America.

US plus Canada is just 23% larger than EU by GDP [1]. Based on PPP it's 20% [2]. Considering we are talking about ~20 trillion in GDP and very similar PPP, that hardly seems to be a large enough difference to give your "absolute sure" statement merit.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

Look at median household income to get a better picture of the market for high-end laptops; what your customers have to spend is a better way to figure out how big your market is than raw bodies or statistics that can be heavily-influenced by single entities. Buying a laptop that's 3% of your household's yearly income is a ridiculous financial decision, and given that most of Lenovo's business laptops start at near that range for your average person in significant amounts of countries in the EU, I'd wager that the market is smaller.

You make a good point though in that my mention of GDP elsewhere in this thread was mostly irrelevant, though; thanks for helping me refine this argument.

You're making a lot of assumptions based on arbitrarily chosen and only tangentially relevant criteria, and superficial analysis.

I'm absolutely sure you have no reason to be absolutely sure the second you implied the numbers I linked to must be wrong but your back of the napkin calculation must be correct.

One more data point: Apple has a 30% higher market share in NA than in Europe. ChromeOS has a ~5 times higher market share in NA. This goes out of everyone else's market share.

Most of your comments in this thread have been dull and poorly-conceived strawmanning with ad hominem interlaced. If you don't see how "income of population" relates to "What citizens will spend money on," you're surely joking.

I'm going to respond to you entirely here, because I dislike responding to the same person making variations of the same comment in multiple places. Here's the important bit of your other comment:

You brought up population, GDP, average income, etc. None of these explicitly support your claim, half of them actually work against it.

Here's the entire comment, just for fairness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970804

Note that one of these is a blatant lie; I was not the person who brought up population in this thread, and I've done nothing but point out reasons as to why it's not a perfect representation of the market.

I already admit that GDP was largely a mistake to bring up when I can make the point better and easier with average income.

Your accusation of using any "back of the napkin calculation" is similarly ridiculous. Every single number I've cited is trivially verifiable to anyone with an internet connection.

You've been repeating "Linux market share is higher in Europe!", and sure, you've given a source for that. Market-share, however, is not market-size, as I've repeatedly said in this thread. To demonstrate it in a simple fashion so you can't avoid what I'm saying anymore: 100% of a market of 10 is less than 1% of a market of 1,000,000,000. "X has a higher share of the market in Europe than it does the US!" means very little on its own.

If the market in Europe is smaller than the United States, which isn't particularly controversial (that the entirety of the PC market in the US is just slightly smaller than the entirety of it in EMEA is fairly strong evidence [1]), the US is the bigger market, regardless of how much you repeat the market-share claim.

Especially when comparing luxury markets like high-end computing gear, what the population can spend is a significant factor in how big the market is: the United States' median person & median household has more to spend than the median person & household in most countries of Europe. This is not controversial whatsoever, and is trivially verifiable. [2] [3]

[1] Gartner's quarterly reports on it for the past decade; linking ten years of them would make this comment too large, but if you search their site with the query "PC shipments", you'll get the data.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Your premise was that the European market is not valuable enough to receive the same attention.

>> yet they are impossible to buy

> That's only because you're in a less valuable market

Your assumptions based on very indirect evidence of household income did nothing to support that claim. The difference should be pretty sizable. This is akin to saying "Europe has socialized medical system and free studies". While entirely true, it might or might not support the idea that people have less worries and more money for things like computers.

You stopped short of actual numbers because it "would make this comment too large". Q3/Q4 2019 Gartner estimates [0][1]:

> In the U.S., PC shipments totaled 14.8 million units in the third quarter of 2019, a 0.3% decline from the third quarter of 2018

> The EMEA PC market grew 3% in the third quarter of 2019, with shipments totaling 19.4 million units

> PC shipments in EMEA increased 3.6% year over year to 21 million units, with the fourth quarter of 2019 marking the second consecutive quarter of shipment growth as regional demand improves.

Africa and Middle East cannot account for enough of those shipments to support your claim that the growing (even if severely held back by Brexit) European market is not valuable enough to warrant attention, especially when shipments are slowing down in other regions. By the looks of it the markets are similarly sized even including Apple shipments which are not really relevant for the discussion. There is simply no data to support your claim. If the European market is not getting enough attention, its value is definitely not the reason. Feel free to keep going.

[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-10-1...

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-01-1...

Was curious so looked this up -- the North American market is bigger than the EU by ~50 million people.

Then again the North American market is ~500 million, the European market is ~750 million. Also the current statistics (I linked to them in a comment below) suggest Linux usage in North America at ~1.5%, and in Europe at ~2%. This suggests higher usage in Europe.

Canada doesn't have Lenovo with Linux preinstalled (only Windows & Chrome OS) on their product list. I would assume Mexico and the other islands are also excluded. So it's really only US vs EU.

It seems like it's changed from about two years ago; really strange.

It's even more apparent when you compare them by GDP.

Because Europeans don't buy the latest MacBook every year.

A laptop lasting 4 years is perfectly reasonable in Europe.

I agree with you about the population, but that is not the whole picture.

Is the consumption pattern different? Less disposable income? No prevalence of credit cards? Is this really a noticeable effect/difference?

Apple machines were never really that popular in Europe because they weren't marketed as intensively as in the US. Schools and companies were never equipped with them unless we're talking about video/graphics people. And half of Europe was not considering such expensive purchases until well into the '90s, perhaps even later. By then Windows was already skyrocketing, regular PCs were cheaper, and very few customers were invested in the Apple ecosystem enough (or at all) to push them towards Macs.

If anything I imagine Apple machines are taking their 5% market share in the US more from the Linux segment than Windows.

This doesn't make so much sense to me, at universities I've seen a ton of Apple laptops among students and professors. Clearly they broke through there.

Country-specific keyboards may be s factor.

Probably not. Most european keyboards are just differenr caps on the iso layout. Modern keyboards in the western world are usually ANSI or iso, and I believe there are one or two prominent layouts used in Asian countries.

I have never understood why the ANSI layout is popular. The compromises of the iso layout to cram the extra keys in are hardly noticeable apart from the right pinky if you touch type.

The key caps are different, of course, but that can't be very expensive.

> but the market is much smaller

How do you figure that? Statistics just say Linux has just over 2% market share in Europe [0], ~1.74% in the US [1], and ~1.5% in North America. Apple has a 30% higher market share in NA than in Europe. ChromeOS has a ~5 times higher market share in NA. This goes out of everyone else's market share.

The EU alone is ~450 million citizens, ~30% higher than the US. Europe has ~750 million citizens, ~50% more than North America.

Any reason to suspect that despite the higher population and the higher market share within that, there are still substantially fewer Linux users in Europe? And if so, what are the actual numbers of end users for each? You'd have to assume the "desktop market" is more than 3 times lower in Europe vs. NA to conclude that there are fewer Linux user in Europe.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/europe

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-ame...

Linux users does not equal people able/willing to order overpriced high-end laptops. Most of the EU is significantly more poor than the US, and you have to consider spending power when thinking about market size.

To quote a previous comment on this topic in a recent thread, though with a country not presently in the EU (but still the country with the second-highest GDP in Europe):

One example: The UK is a reasonably wealthy country. Median household income in the UK is 29,400 GBP (36,000 USD). The poorest state in the US (Mississippi) has a median household income around 43,000 USD

It's not about being poor. If I already have two desktops and a laptop, why should I buy another laptop every year?

Just compare European washing machines vs USA washing machines: European models use less water and clean better because of the hot water, USA models waste water, are noisy, and finish much faster.

Or oversized gas guzzling SUVs vs European cars.

It's about not being wasteful.

You brought up population, GDP, average income, etc. None of these explicitly support your claim, half of them actually work against it.

I gave you actual numbers for Linux usage and they do not support your assertion. I would have appreciated the same from you given that you are absolutely sure.

I responded to this elsewhere in the thread to avoid having to make a dozen comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22971567

I don't get what's so hard to understand about his point. There are more people and more Linux users in Europe, but each of those people has (way) less disposable income (money left over to spend on luxury goods) than Americans.

Thus, it makes financial sense to sell to Americans first and foremost, as opposed to the more numerous Europeans.

Meadian household income isn't great for this. I know here that I don't have to pay for healthcare or schooling and I'm sure many other things in America that are deducted after income.

Do you think that household income is a reasonable measure for disposable income? Fixed costs for a person or household tend to vary a lot based on the country/state.

The thing is that the site in France, written in french, announces this option yet it is not available.

Sure. It's understandable that'd be frustrating. It's still probably more likely due to poorly-adapted copy than due to a genuine interest in selling Linux laptops in France, or incompetence.

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