Yes, it did. The DoJ fixed the price of Windows for all the major OEMs, and all sales had to be made via the same OEM-only website.

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).

> Is there really nobody in America who can sell Linux PCs at a profit, when the OS is free?

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

Note though that Dell's Linux offerings are commercially supported distros--so Linux is not "free (as in beer)." And I can't really imagine that selling a laptop with upstream bits and saying we won't take your call for support would go over well when selling a laptop.

> Note though that Dell's Linux offerings are commercially supported distros

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.

No problem at all. But the question was about Linux being free. And it's a good bet that a hardware manufacturer probably isn't going to ship with a community-supported distro with no support.

In the UK, RM Ltd launched the original 7in Asus netbook into the education market with two options. (1) Windows XP with normal support. (2) Linux with no support except "reset to factory condition".

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.

There's frequently speculation that Dell will discontinue or stop updating it, which doesn't suggest huge success. It's also just one PC model from only one major OEM, and I believe it's mail-order only.

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.

Not just one PC model.

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.

> It's also just one PC model from only one major OEM, and I believe it's mail-order only.

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.

Correct. Dell and others also sell Linux on servers.

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...