The reality is: installing a replacement OS post-sale is never, ever going to be the way to grow linux marketshare, if that's what you care about (it shouldn't be, but some people live-and-breathe year of the linux desktop so whatever, you do you). Its a lot more important that it ship with the hardware, and extreme attention to detail has gone into making sure it works well with that hardware. Certainly, some vendors already do this. Moreover, I'd also argue its even more important that that hardware be modern and desirable; the only vendor I've seen pull this off is Dell (genuinely sorry, because I love what Framework/System76 are doing, but their machines look like branded OEM Clevos, because they probably are, or were in the recent past. I support them; I own a Framework; but only because I want them to do better, not because what they're doing today is enough).
[1] UEFI GUIs are an improvement, but they still have 95% of the same usability issues of text-based BIOS: 1000+ settings with no hint what each of them means, XTLAs only understandable by hardware+kernel experts, unfamiliar interaction patterns like not having a big friendly button to just save and reboot, and so on.
Linux is not an OS for the average user, it's for tech savvy geeks and an extremely small subset of those people too.
Nothing wrong with what Lenovo is doing here, there just are no other OS in the market.
In a nutshell, this is bad no matter how you look at it.
What you think as "not tech knowledge" is a serious skill that is severely lacking in billions of people.
The user needs the install medium, they need to get it, download it, create it, get a USB or blank CD/DVD, etc. They need to either have the courage (or curiosity or aloofness or determination) to modify their computer on such a drastic level, they need to understand abstract concepts, follow a written manual that uses those concepts, they need to recognize those abstract concepts as they are implemented on the computer they are currently tinkering with, and so on, and so on.
> In a nutshell, this is bad no matter how you look at it.
True, but it's bad because the whole "personal computing" thing is bad. This detail is largely irrelevant.
I was 12 when I first installed linux and barely knew what I was doing. I easily would have given up if I couldn't figure out that my machine had a secret hidden bios setting. I learned a ton from that experience, that easily could have been missed if I'd happened to own one of these anti-competitive machines.
Installing a user-friendly linux distro has gotten quite simple too, requiring only a couple simple steps using some clean tools. Modifying hidden BIOS settings is a significantly more complicated leap than the plug-and-play imaging tools available today.
Asking her to install Ubuntu herself, though, would be another matter entirely. Installing any OS (including Windows, since it's about as complex as Ubuntu these days) is way beyond the skill level needed to actually use it.
Only on hacker news would people be so far removed from real life that they would say 'Ubuntu is for the average user'
And as you said, most people would not be able to install it let alone the fact they likely have no idea what it is, so in relation to this post about consumer lenovo laptops, it's irrelevant and doesn't matter to the vast vast majority of people.
the average user does not install operating systems. linux is perfectly fine for the average user if it comes preinstalled.
I recently installed Linux Mint and Windows 10. Linux was faster and easier to install, and has a friendlier UI. Have you seen the Windows start menu recently? It's cluttered with crap: I couldn't figure out how to do basic things with it, even searching was hard. You might do everything through the command line, but that's not the only way, the GUI does work.
Software's a different story, though a lot of things are online these days.