One fifth is a market segment that is large enough to cater for. If you even put a small team on the task of ensuring that Linux installs on your notebooks, and make the minimal neccessary changes (like this BIOS change... or better revert of a breaking change), then you could claim Linux support as your unique selling point, and grab a huge fraction of those 20%.

Keep in mind that that's 21.7% of stack overflow users (i.e. developers), not users in general.

According StatCounter (based on browser stats), GNU/Linux represented 1.44% of desktop/laptop OS as of last month. Perhaps developers are more likely to use these laptops in particular, but they're unlikely to be 100% of users.

The unfortunate reality is that while this number is largerish, whenever a company comes out with a linux-based "developer edition" laptop, folks don't buy it.

The Dell XPS 13, for example, is a great looking machine - but too many folks were busy buying macbooks to help Dell learn this market segment does indeed want more products like this.

We need to vote with our wallets, in order to reinforce this behavior.

Perhaps this may change now that developers are feeling disenfranchised with Apple over the recent model releases.

To answer your question, as a picky hardware nut I have yet to see anything worth paying extra for. Give me a 4lb 15" 1080p matte IPS with user-expandable RAM and a PCIe m.2 slot, a SATA drive bay instead of a cdrom, _no_ dedicated graphics card, a non-chiclet keyboard, a high quality trackpad _centered under the space bar_, and a user-replaceable (hot-swappable?) battery that gets 8-10hrs on a single charge and I'll think about forking out extra money. Otherwise eff off, I'm happy with used Thinkpads.

It's a tough crowd to please, to be sure, especially when half of us are perfectly capable and willing to put in the extra effort to get random finicky component X working.

Hardware margins are thin, unless you're Apple.

And when I say professional-grade, I mean sturdy, expandable, and hackable to the core. Designed for Linux/*BSD first, that still runs Windows if the end user wants to install it themselves. If something like the Novena can succeed with a 1.2GHz ARM, I'll be damned if something similar with a quadcore x86 wouldn't do a hell of a lot better. It may bring in small change to a Dell of the world, but there has to be _somebody_ in China who would think otherwise.

The way to do it, I think, would be through a crowd-funding type of platform. 3D print a prototype, prove the sales are there, and then you can spend the money on design and tooling for manufacturing.

Every attempt I've seen, though, has either failed, or fallen prey to the lock-in-based lure of Microsoft.

Those notebooks are generally more expensive than their Windows counter parts (because Microsoft subsides then) and does not offer any customization (Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition still comes with a "Windows" key, wtf?!), so why bother?

In my case, coming with either Windows or Ubuntu is exactly the same, since I use Arch Linux and will have to reinstall anyway.

Almost all Linux users are familiar with the process of putting Linux on a machine, since that's the only way to get it. The thing that's primarily helpful about seeing a manufacturer have a "blessed" linux system to me is more that I can be confident all the drivers I need exist; I'd probably whack the install they sent me and replace it with something else anyhow.

> The Dell XPS 13, for example, is a great looking machine - but too many folks were busy buying macbooks to help Dell learn this market segment does indeed want more products like this

Not sure about the why other (potential) Linux users might not buy notebooks such as this, but despite single-booting Linux for the past several years, I wouldn't be any more likely to buy a computer with Linux pre-installed on it because the chances that the computer has a distro/configuration I would want to use is basically zero; if I'm going to have to reinstall Linux and/or configure it from scratch, then the fact that it's specifically marketed as a Linux laptop doesn't really give me anything. I suspect that this might be at least partially responsible for "developer edition" laptops failing, as at least in my anecdotal experience, many people who are looking for an out-of-the-box experience aren't generally inclined to use Linux as their main OS in the first place.

Couldn't agree more (as a Fedora user myself! - Ubuntu is typically the "blessed" distro on these systems for various reasons).

However, "linux support" is more than a chosen distro - it's the supporting code necessary to make linux a first-class citizen on the given hardware (driver support, setup scripts, porting popular software, etc...), as well as support knowledge and training at the OEM (bash is bash, and Firefox is Firefox on Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch or whatever).

As for technical support and training, I can see that being useful in an enterprise context, but again, I honestly can't see the type of people who want to single-boot Linux on their laptop being interested in support and training from Dell, HP, etc. It's been my experience that by the time someone is comfortable enough to use Linux as their sole OS (which many people don't want to do despite being comfortable enough due to needing Windows for other reasons, like gaming), they aren't really going to need or want any tech support from an OEM.

On the other hand, I've yet to find a distro that pre-installs a GUI with configuration and packages anywhere close to what I want in a setup. I go out of my way to use distros with an option to install without a desktop environment even if it has an option to install the one I want, since it usually comes with a lot of extra crap I don't want. Obviously I'm probably a little more extreme here than even most Linux users, but at least among Linux power users (i.e. the people I'd expect to be interested in buying a laptop to single-boot Linux) that I know, Unity is considered to be kind of terrible.

Am I wrong in assuming that these types of "developer edition" laptops will generally come with a vanilla Ubuntu install? I admit that I've never really looked into getting one, so it's quite possible I'm mistaken in understanding the kind of setup they provide

There are other laptop lines targeted for developers.

The fact that there are about as many developers who are Linux users as there are Mac users is quite telling.

I need to update my LinuxCounter [1] profile after years of neglect.

[1]: https://www.linuxcounter.net/

(and I should update my profile too)

Lenovo have a 20% market share in the UK and my gut feeling is that 20 million UK employees sit in front of a computer rather than a sat-nav or a point of sale system etc.

Given that Lenovo have dozens of Thinkpads and Yoga variants, there are probably a dozen machines of interest to the linux desktop type of person.

If we assume that PCs/Macs get replaced every two years (generous) then the arithmetic works out at around a thousand sales per model per year to desktop linux users. I run normal Ubuntu not some variant - Mint/Debian/etc. Linux != Ubuntu, there are those that prefer the Red Hat flavours. Therefore a default Linux install of Ubuntu isn't going to be what picky linux devs will want.

Note that in the UK the keyboard is different and there is a 'u' in colour. You would want your default linux install to work out the box without having to change locale settings.

Obviously the US/Canada market is vast compared to the UK, but not more than 10 times larger. So that still means a low figure for expected linux sales even for the gigantic Lenovo company. Why would they bother to support it? There is no business case.