You honestly think that's more likely than, someone made a mistake or said something to close a support call???
We aren't talking about deep dark secrets we are talking about normal privileged company information.
The strange thing in fact is not the employee knowing things not shared with the world its the employee actually disclosing it.
For the CS rep. to know this, all Lenovo CS rep's would have to know.
And not one of them leaked this juicy info. to the press or reddit or anywhere else....
Just doesn't strike me as a likely course of events.
The customer rep gets a cryptic sticker on his desk: "Models 1234S, 3333S: Signature Windows Disk ONLY". If a customer calls asking for a restoration media, they get the correct one. If they call asking for Linux, sorry it is not supported according to my sticker.
I'm just making this up of course, but it is not entirely unplausible to me. In fact I find it more plausible then just an accident. Why would a customer rep just make stuff like that up?
Or Lenovo and MS have a vast conspiracy to use disk drivers to block linux install..
which is more likely.... you decide.
That's very likely.
That's not a vast conspiracy. That would be a pretty quotidian conspiracy. In fact, it would look a lot like the "Winmodems[1]" that were a thing before (and maybe around?) the turn of the century.
Those existed because they made machines marginally cheaper by emulating the modem in software. Which only worked on Windows and caused much gnashing of teeth back when.
I believe Winmodems came to be solely because of cost savings. I also believe that the fact that it was functional exclusively on Win was a second-order effect that approximately nobody in Redmond took issue with.
...As an aside, I'm going to assume consistency on the part of all those who are being snide about customer support folks, and assume you make a point of never calling customer support (I'm not referring to the parent poster here). After all, you can't trust anything those idiots say, so why would you bother?
the customer support bit and wanting to move to the next call is based on my own experience of working in support many years ago, there was a strong temptation to tell the user something to get onto the next call as that was usually your performance metric....
And I'm pretty sure it became well known due to discussions just like this, over time. There was a ton of confusion about it at the time; I'm really not in the mood to attempt to search for 20 year old nerd-grousing, but I remember it from various Linux lists at the time.
And it wouldn't surprise me a bit if some CSR at Best Buy gave bad information about Winmodems, and people like me took the bad information at face value and then got in a discussion about it in some forum...
And the cycle of life is complete.
I'm actually surprised when I see people give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt despite years of building mistrust.
I guess a lot of people are just really naïve sheep. Also, notice how others saying stuff like this here on HN are downvoted into oblivion.
It's probably a tribal mentality: just like people become fans of some sports team (Giants vs. Red Sox) or car brands (Ford vs. Chevy) and develop a religious fanaticism about it, probably the same thing happens with Microsoft and Apple (we definitely see it a lot with the latter). Worse, with MS in particular, a lot of peoples' livelihoods are tied up in the whole MS ecosystem. So perhaps all the pro-MS downvoting and posting is coming from people who've bought into MS, especially for their careers (namely, legions of .NET programmers and MCSEs).
If you actually read the specifics about the situation, you'll learn that the SSD is set up in RAID mode, and the Intel hardware also supports AHCI mode.
Acronis and all other OSes do not have driver-level support for this new experimental RAID hardware at all; they do support AHCI, of course, like they have for years.
The BIOS normally has an option to revert the hardware back to normal AHCI mode, but Lenovo intentionally restricted the Advanced page in the BIOS containing this option (which is available and unrestricted by default in the BIOS code they received from the manufacturer) by adding a goto statement to the BIOS's code.
As far as why Lenovo restricted it, it's likely for the same reason Lenovo was prohibited from preinstalling software. Signature PCs claim to have the "best" performance settings, mandated by Microsoft. If NVMe is superior to AHCI, Microsoft would sensibly mandate NVMe.
That is not true, many users have tried using the very latest bleeding edge kernel. The drive is not detected at all by Linux when it is in RAID mode. The usual fix is to disable RAID mode and just use AHCI. On most sane systems (but not Lenovo), you can do this easily by changing a single BIOS setting.
Also, my understanding is that the benchmarks show no appreciable performance benefits of single-drive SSD RAID over AHCI.
They have behaved in negative ways for a long time they will need to behave differently for quite a long time before they are trusted again.
They have cleaned up many but not all of their behaviors. They are still abusing patents against smaller android distributors. If they care about their patents they would sue Google or the AOSP steering group (or whoever runs it). If they were actually with an open ecosystem they wouldn't be doing those lawsuits.
In the context of Microsoft's behavior, blaming them is not an unreasonable default stance. Though when evidence does come along to the contrary someone holding such a stance must be willing to change it or be wrong.
Most (80%) developer experiences these days are probably limited to their behavior from year ~2008 and onwards.
I tend to not read commments on articles anymore, where Microsoft is blamed for something. Reminds me of Slahdot.