>Pre-installing windows, bundling software (including telemetry - long history of this) makes Lenovo money at the time of sale, and afterwards.

I'd use "spyware" instead of "telemetry" considering the shit Lenovo has done.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/further-evidence-lenov...

Dang. Six years since Superfish fiasco. I must have been in stasis for some of that.

Certainly feels that way.

Would you trust a preinstalled Ubuntu image from Lenovo more than a Windows one?

I mean you do have a point but on the other hand you aren't paying for that os so you could change it anytime (without litterally voiding money). It could also make more people start to use Linux which isn't bad .

Thanks for the laugh, I needed it

Wow that's a whole new level of evil.

> OEMs make significant money pre-installing windows on their machines.

Then why is it that, whenever I see a choice, the Linux option is always cheaper?

For instance, I just went do Dell's site and randomly selected a laptop (https://www.dell.com/pt-br/work/shop/isv-workstations-certif...). The default operating system option is "Windows 10 Pro 64bit Brazil Portuguese"; if instead I select the "Ubuntu Linux 18.04" option, the price gets R$ 686,00 lower (and that's before removing the "Dell Endpoint Security" antivirus option, which decreases the price by another R$ 240,00).

Linux doesn't have economics of scale, placement or subsidies... You're paying what Microsoft subsidizes to install windows, office, etc.

https://www.techjunkie.com/why-would-a-linux-laptop-be-more-...

> Bloatware Saves You Money > Because those companies who make those titles pay fees to have that software pre-installed on your new computer. They see that new desktop as a big billboard, waiting to be populated. And, boy do they load it up! > This Ubuntu installation doesn’t come with any bloatware, Dell isn’t making the kick-back, hence it increases cost.

> Other Costs > But, let’s not forget that these companies are USED to Windows. All of their internal processes are based around Windows systems. All their support personel are trained in Windows. > So, smaller supply and a dedicated demand equals higher cost. Basic economics. > Not to mention the additional cost of support staff for these laptops, who need to be trained in an entirely different environment

"This Ubuntu installation doesn’t come with any bloatware"

Actually sorry, this is not accurate. Canonical shipped Ubuntu with an Amazon search app, does plenty of telemetry, and forces updates. Unless you are very technically proficient it is very hard to disable all of it. (I remove or neutralize motd, appport, snapd, ubuntu-report, unattended-upgrades, ubuntu-advantage, whoopsie and more)

Ubuntu came with a controversial search lens that resulted in local searches returning web results from amazon that were supposed to be anonymized in 2012 and discontinued this stupid idea in 2014.

> does plenty of telemetry,

The telemetry that is sent on install does ask your permission to share and shares very innocuous data to boot

>The data includes information about your PC’s hardware, including the manufacturer, BIOS version, and the model of your CPU. It also includes information about your software, such as the version of Ubuntu you installed, your chosen desktop environment, whether you’re using the Xorg or Wayland display server, and the options you chose while installing Ubuntu. Other information, such as your time zone, information about your partitions, and your display’s resolution is also sent.

The other major source of leaks is the crash reporting tool which . Note that with open source software you don't have to trust the vendor you can actually see the source to the the tools that are communicating and convince yourself that they are serving legitimate needs that don't violate your privacy.

> forces updates

You can absolutely control updates of normal packages. Snap is indeed defective in that regard but nothing is forcing you to use it.

> Unless you are very technically proficient it is very hard to disable all of it

Packages are removable in band with the same tools used to manage all packages on the system. This isn't an example of extreme competence its basic understanding of the tools needed to use the system.

> motd

Not a data leak

> snap

a shitty tool but not one that harms your privacy or inherently does anything to you by existing just don't install snaps.

> ubuntu-report

This is the tool that reports basic info about your system after asking you once on initial install removing it... does nothing. If you don't want crash reporting its a checkbox in settings.

> ubuntu-advantage

This is something you have to sign up for having the package on your system isn't leaking your data

> Apport

This is disabled by default in stable releases. To disable sudo systemctl disable apport.service like every other service this is once again basic usage. It also doesn't leak your info without you allowing it even if enabled. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport

I think you should try this:

- set up a ubuntu system

- see what traffic it generates

- get it to stop

You will get pretty proficient at how apt and systemd work, especially after a couple release cycles and things get re-activated, re-enabled or re-installed.

Unattended upgrades is generally a good thing in my experience. It's quick and easy security patching. For Ubuntu, it's a bit more than that because they don't split the main and security repos, but on Debian it's one of my favourite features.

> does plenty of telemetry

Oh wait until you see how much Windows does of it. Its always about how much.

Part of why I prefer debian

But the point is that the linux laptop in GP's example was _cheaper_ (and my personal experience suggests this is a trend).

So assuming what you posted is true, why would companies offer a discount for the linux version?

Yes, it makes no sense. I would happily pay more for a laptop with linux support. Meaning that the vendor guarantees that throttling, hibernation and other tricky stuff work as intended. But nobody offers me this option.

Assume Linux license cost 0. Assume windows OEM license cost 600. Assume the end user pays the 600 for the windows license. Assume windows install earns X for other reasons. Unless X > 600 windows version would cost more, and earn more than Linux version?

And even if not, there is no guarantee the X will be given away to the customer, rather than go to the bottom line?

> bundling software

More like malware. I've even seen OEMs shipping firmware that just reinstalls their software even when users reinstall their operating systems. Lack of Linux support becomes a feature in these cases.

I'm always torn on this kind of stuff. On one hand, if you're technically proficient you're basically getting a steal.

Say a device you want to buy would cost $200, but because of stuff like pre-installing software, telemetry, etc. it is sold for $150. You just throw a custom OS on there / jailbreak it / run a few commands that kill the cruft, and you now have a clean device for a 25% discount.

On the other hand, the vast majority of people are not that technically proficient, and are either unaware or unable to defend themselves from aforementioned stuff. My parents recently bought a new Smart TV and if it wasn't for me they had no idea how much those log and send back to the mothership.

Then, if enough people actually are aware and combating this, it no longer is justifiable for the corporations and I lose my improptu discount. To me, a price I'm willing to pay to give others more privacy, but other people may not be so privileged.

I feel similar with using adblockers. There's lots of ads and I hate them, but because I'm technically inclined I can block them. But if lots of people do this, and they do, the cat and mouse game escalates to a point where I cannot do it anymore.

Is there a community for rooting Smart TVs and putting some other OS (i.e. LibreElec) onto the hardware?

Conversely, does anyone know if there's some way to re-use smart TV hardware? I had a Sony Android TV get smashed by a wayward child's actions some time ago and took all the boards out before recycling the rest, and I'd love to use it on my old dumb TV which has an aging Xbox 360 driving it, but I can't figure out how I'd get normal video output from the thing.

The hardware used in Smart TVs is generally raspberry pi level (to the point the SoCs the rpi uses were actually designed for set top boxes) but a lot less friendly from both a kernel support perspective and hardware perspective because you don't have the entire Raspberry Pi foundation and hacking community behind making the software and hardware easy to hack on. Outside "I'm in it for the hardware hacking" grabbing a Pi 4 is going to be infinitely more effective, particularly if you want to throw libreelec or a de-googled Android TV on it without doing a lot of the hardware and software work yourself but even if you do it's unlikely you reach Pi quality.

At the "more money but I just want a device I can run my own software on that works out of the box" the Shield TVs are great, you can throw an open source Android TV on it (not that the branded one is all that bad tbh).

Mmm. I have an RPi 4 but misclicked when ordering and ended up with a 1GB model. The Kodi performance on it is unacceptably bad; which is surprising considering that codebase used to run on an Xbox 1 with one core and 64MB.... so it became a Volumio machine instead, once I got an external USB DAC that didn't suck as much as the onboard sound does. (Talk about electrical noise, ugh).

The reason I wanted to see if I could get that Sony hardware running on some other screen (besides the re-use angle) is because Android TV gets you access to the first party Netflix and other streaming services with the proper UI. Netflix-via-Kodi is not really a very good user experience presently. You mention open source Android TV - is that something I could run on other kinds of devices? Can you get the Netflix etc. apps on it?

Yeah 1 GB will limit you out of running Android TV on it straight out, I think it requires 2 GB minimum.

If you go fully open source on any device (Android TV or not) you lose full levels of Widevine (or whatever DRM) support. Apps like Netflix work on open source builds of Android TV but you won't get high quality streams as a result. I think Disney+ was one that refused to work at all, the rest seemed to run. So if you're doing "open source" for purity reasons those are the types tradeoffs you have to make regardless of the hardware or software you choose.

OTOH if you're just looking for a decent unrestricted first party external Android TV box that gets updates (old model is 6 years running on updates now) and has full play store/app support the Shield TV is $150 new and will run all of the apps at 4k 60 HDR out of the box. It can even be officially unlocked and rooted but again some apps will stop working (e.g. Disney+) if you do that. Shield TV Pro is $200 if you want additional RAM and built in app storage. Comes with a nice remote too.

> The Kodi performance on it is unacceptably bad

Under Raspbian? It seemed to need a lot of fiddling to be usable so I went with the OpenElec image. Later switched to OSMC, still working great on a 1gb RPi 2.

> external USB DAC that didn't suck as much as the onboard sound does

Shouldn't it output digital audio over HDMI?

Sure does, but my beautiful-but-old amplifier does not have HDMI. I use SPDIF a lot, but haven't found a good cheap USB-to-SPDIF sound card yet. Plenty of pricier ones, but the point here is to find some use for something I already cheaped out on in the first place.

I guess $25 might not be cheap enough either, but there are some HDMI->(HDMI+SPDIF) splitters on Amazon for that price.

That's an interesting thought. Is it easy to extract this in another form? Like coax spdif? Or do you need a home theater amp with hdmi in?

Personally I'm using the latter, I forgot all about SPDIF. There are splitters on Amazon that take HDMI in and output HDMI video plus SPDIF audio, but they seem to all be in the $25 range, so may not be worth it.

Wanting to "smarten" a dumb TV is the exact opposite of the common trend here on HN, but in any case, the motherboard is likely to have LVDS or VbyOne output to the panel; if your dumb TV's panel uses the same interface and resolution, you might be able to do it.

(You can get "universal scaler" boards which can drive any panel.)

I wonder if they would have won the lawsuit if they simply brought this up - We're happy to refund you the price of the laptop if Windows was not pre-installed and with all of the other bundled software: Please pay us $50.

It kinda makes sense to just buy the laptop with windows and then flatten and re-install linux.