Why wouldn't they? You find out all sorts of things when you work for a company, strangely enough.

what and then blow your companies secret position on a response to a user query, knowing that if found it would very likely endanger your continued employment with that company....

You honestly think that's more likely than, someone made a mistake or said something to close a support call???

The statement is there in black and white and it is as crystal clear and unequivocal as you can get.

Ive frequently as a complete peon been privileged to know non public info about the inner workings and policies that was not only non public but that I was forbidden to share with the world as a matter of course. Far from being unusual this is the norm.

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.

Well we'd be talking about a secret conspiracy (secret as it's not publicly known) by one of the largest companies in the world (Microsoft) to block installation of Linux on Lenovo's systems.

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.

What if Lenovo and MS have an agreement what to preinstall on those Laptops - which is very common. Furthermore, Lenovo agreed not to offer ways to install specific other software - no bundled Antivirus CD, no downloadable Lenovo Picks app - and maybe or maybe not - don't prepare customer support to answer "how to install Linux".

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?

customer support person made stuff up 'cause he wanted to seem to know the answer, so he could close the call and get on with his job?

Or Lenovo and MS have a vast conspiracy to use disk drivers to block linux install..

which is more likely.... you decide.

They are using disk drivers to restrict what gets installed - not just Linux both other Windows - Windows 7 or future versions of Windows which they want to build hardware obsolescence into and force you into throwing good hardware away.

That's very likely.

> Or Lenovo and MS have a vast conspiracy to use disk drivers to block linux install..

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem

Sure I remember the old winmodem days well, but that was a well known (and very frustrating) problem, which was a stated position of the companies in question.

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....

> but that was a well known (and very frustrating) problem, which was a stated position of the companies in question.

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.