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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

I was there! And I recognize so many people in the video. And they look so young, of course.

The large penguins held up by Rick Moen (early on) and Eric Raymond (later) were mine, and I still have them. I also still have the letter that Microsoft handed out to everyone. Text is still at http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/dear-valued-customer.html

It was a very fun time... though I wish people had actually gotten their refunds. It's still not routinely possible to get computers without a preinstalled operating system from most manufacturers in the U.S., even decades later.

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In Germany is quite easy, however it hardly changed anything on how well GNU/Linux might actually fully support all the hardware one paid for.

With luck there is a kind of sponsored distribution, but better stay on that one forever, or risk having some long weekends fun getting everything to work as much as possible.

The only way to get my Asus 1215B to actually use the network without issues, is to plug it via LAN cable, after all these years I have given up having a stable WLAN conection, where everything else (Windows/Android/WebOS/macOS) just works.

>In Germany is quite easy

I think everywhere in Europe you can easily get new PCs without Windows bundled with them, especially in Eastern Europe where a lot of Laptops in the shops only come with Free-DOS by default as consumers would rather save the ~100 Euro Windows license on the machines and sort the Windows situation later at much cheaper price on the gray market.

No grey market: it's legal to sell on used software licenses in the EU, see Directive 2009/24/EC article 4 para 2. I buy Windows PRO licenses for about 20EUR.

Laptops sold without Windows preinstalled are still a rare sight.

>I buy Windows PRO licenses for about 20EUR.

You're overpaying. Windows is free to use if you can live with the activation watermark, or I paid 2,6 Euros for a PRO license on Ebay. 20 Euros for what Windows is today, is already expensive.

>Laptops sold without Windows preinstalled are still a rare sight.

Go to Romania. About half of the more budget friendly laptops on shelves are sold with Free-DOS.

Both suggestions would net me in the best case way less than I stand to lose in the worst case.

Can you elaborate?

>it's legal to sell on used software licenses in the EU

But in Germany you get sued in the first place for buying "keys with unreasonably low prices" (Lizengo).

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1313408-thousands-of-crimina...

1. Don't buy keys from Germany, buy online from anywhere else, that's the beauty of the internet

2. Germany can go pound sand, nobody care about that digital dinosaur

1. Don't buy key's AS a German

2. The people with the letter have to care. However dinosaurs could run, germany is a digital sloth.

Can't speak to that as I don't buy in Germany, and I'm not buying hundreds of licenses.

Same. I was there briefly (disclosure: former VA Linux...we dropped a lot of swag around the event)

It was a surreal moment.

> It's still not routinely possible to get computers without a preinstalled operating system from most manufacturers in the U.S., even decades later.

In brick and mortar shops yes. However online it is pretty easy nowadays to buy a computer without an OS or with a preinstalled linux distro which you aren't paying a license for.

Yeah I’ve only had a couple Windows-capable ones that shipped without it. Most recently a stack of a dozen Dell machines

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