If all would have been clean deals wise, there wouldn't have been such a mess of Windows tax and never ending tying problem.
I don't appear to have a record of how many OEMs that applied to (or else I can't find it), but the number I remember is 40.
This had the very amusing effect of increasing the price that IBM paid for Windows. IBM went to court to complain that Microsoft had tripled its price, but as far as I recall, that price increase was from $9 to $27.
Either way, nothing stops anybody from setting up a company to sell Linux PCs -- you could do it yourself. Is there really nobody in America who can sell Linux PCs at a profit, when the OS is free?
Since that's evidently the case, blaming Microsoft just looks like a fig-leaf for some more fundamental failure(s).
Dell sells the XPS 13 Ultrabook with Linux pre-installed pretty successfully. Tuxedo is another Linux HW vendor. At lot more devices are listed at http://linuxgizmos.com
What's the problem with that? Why should I use a different distro if the installed one works perfectly with all HW components? If I really needed another distro I could user docker or the like on that same device.
Dell UK tried offering Linux with no support, but with the option to buy third-party support from Canonical. The cost of support more or less excluded home and education buyers.
I wish it were different, but right now there's not much evidence there's a significant, existing unserved market for (GNU, not Chromebooks) Linux PCs.
https://certification.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Dell/?qu...
I do agree that it should be noted that people specifically want GNU to be big. Chromium OS and Chrome OS are fantastic operating systems that are very capable. And it's Linux. No, you cannot "apt-get install GTKapplication", but it's still very Gentoo underneath the GUI. Of course you still want a more general purpose distribution for general purpose needs.
I don't consider that a problem since Linux has always been mainly in the focus of developers. Linux is a top choice if you want a reliable work horse for your work which doesn't annoy with unwanted features.
Usual users are mostly gamers and surfers. They get along with the limitations of Windows and iOS, so they don't need Linux, and that's the actual reason for the small percentage of desktop Linux.
Which suggests to me that there are some other reasons for the failure of Linux desktop PCs, and that you really can't just blame Microsoft...
Plenty of companies have tried offering Linux pre-installed and almost all of them have failed for various reasons. The main reason is that people don't buy them. Either they are perceived as being too hard to use, or they don't easily run the business software or games that users typically want, or buyers are confused by Linux having 157 variants, or they are happy with Windows, or whatever.
The other reason is that manufacturers can make money selling Windows PCs but can't make money selling Linux machines, partly because of the extra costs of hardware qualification, drivers, increased stock control, accounting, book-keeping and advertising costs, and massively increased support costs... unless support is either denied or sold separately as an ongoing cost.
Of course, Linux is getting a free ride on the back of Microsoft's compatibility work. If you are using Linux then you are benefiting hugely from the cost of parts being driven down by Windows PC sales. (Apple switched to Intel partly to gain the same benefits.)
> MS use their heavy leverage of Windows pricing to prevent that.
One of the settlement terms in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft was not allowed to do deals on Windows pricing, so that all the leading OEMs were on a level playing field.
This settlement ran for roughly a decade. Did you see a huge rise in Linux PC shipments? No. The only real difference was that it pushed up the average price of Windows and made Microsoft more profitable.