A large number of sales of said device. That's pretty much what drives any manufacturer.

In consumer space it’s probably 1 sale for every 100 Windows. If you’re constrained on engineering resources guess which one you won’t care about ?

1 to 100 in the consumer space seems to me extremely optimistic, not sure if I'm betting that it's a 2 or 3 orders of magnitude miss.

I know it's not representative of the consumer space as a whole, but Linux users apparently make up about 1% of the Steam userbase fwiw https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Li...

Yeah, but that 1% can choose either the Linux reference hardware or keep buying some other random laptop and throwing Linux on it.

So, the market is really rather less than that 1%...

Well, since Steam is the only gaming platform available on Linux, and since Steam is sold as a system based on linux with its own Linux distribution, SteamOS, and since Steam have its own version of Wine that magically runs Windows games on Linux, I would say that this statistic says nothing at all.

It would be difficult to get the mainstream vendors to match this initially, but I suspect the Linux focused vendors like Pine and System76 would do so fairly rapidly.

The way to convince the mainstream vendors would be what's attracting them to release Linux support right now. The popularity of Linux devices for people who want to work on the same machines they run their servers on.

Like I said though, I'm not sure whether this idea is workable or even makes sense.

I mean, Pine's and System76's laptops don't even use the same CPU architecture as each other currently...

Some certification of genericity required for all future device purchases by publicly funded institutions, for example.

That's what Microsoft did. Initially there were a lot of issues and also things like hibernation didn't always work right.

Linux needs to have similar certification. The rest would be to have customers look for it and prefer hardware that's certified.

You mean something like this:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/make/Lenovo

Or this:

https://support.lenovo.com/il/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-fo...

It's all really very nice, but even on certified machines, some hardware parts are not working on Linux (X1 fingerprint reader, for example).

> It's all really very nice, but even on certified machines, some hardware parts are not working on Linux (X1 fingerprint reader, for example).

But then I guess they aren't really doing their job when certifying things that don't work.

HW vendors that want to race to the bottom, sure.

But if I want to differentiate, commanding a higher price, then I'll probably be different.