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Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by beagle3 on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @07:08AM (#12547058)
More likely, it's a conspiracy against Win7/Win8 users, which hurts Linux users as collateral damage. What likely happened was the ms/lenovo deal was "And Lenovo will make sure win7 and win8 are not supported on laptop", which lenovo solved by switching the hard drive to a mode not even win10 supports, locking it that way (that's the evil part), and putting drivers for it on the lenovo install media, which are win10 only.

Thus, this laptop can only ever be installed from the Lenovo win10 media. No win7, no win8, no retail win10 (for now), and .... probably as a (not unwelcome) side effect, no linux.

Still, just as evil and despicable.

Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by deviate_X on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @09:19AM (#12547850)
The problem with this conspiracy is that you can't install Windows 10 on the machine either ...
Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by beagle3 on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:23AM (#12549003)
From retail/downloaded Win10. Buy you CAN from Lenovo images, which are provided to you by Lenovo.
Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by josteink on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @09:47AM (#12548090)
Except windows 10s drivers are compatible with windows 8 and 7, since the driver model haven't changed since then.

So using that install media you can extract the drivers and install older windows versions anyway.

So it's a pretty crappy conspiracy :)

Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by beagle3 on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:22AM (#12548995)
Not at all. To be effective, it doesn't need to stop a very determined user (as evidence, someone reflashed the bios so they could install Linux).

And it does effectively stop users from installing Linux, Win7, Win8 and even Win10 - except from the provided Lenovo install media; which makes Microsoft happy (no Win7/Win8) and Lenovo happy (full control of installed versions).

Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by tunap on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @10:01AM (#12548195)
To clarify, the extracted drivers will load for 7/8/8.1 without editing an inf file?
Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by edoceo on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:13AM (#12548893)
You will have lots of manual digging to find the right drivers and will likely need to edit inf files.

The API/ABI for drivers didn't change between 7,8,10

Re:Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop by josteink on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @10:10AM (#12548271)
I'm speaking of Windows drivers in general. I can't make any specific guarantees for these particular drivers, but I don't see why they should be different.