But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.
Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.
Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.
If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.
Unfortunately, he represents a non-negligible majority of users out there. But I care not discussing anything with him and his like on HN. I've got better use for my time.
I have no doubt such companies have employees, or contractors, who not only monitor message boards on behalf of the company, but who post comments on them in a deliberate attempt to influence discussions in ways favorable to the company's interests. Whether they are effective is another question. But they are trying.
Younger readers should be aware of this as they are the ones being targetted.
Perhaps it's not that a majority of users are convinced price equates to quality control so much as a majority are aggressively manipulated in terms of what information about software they are exposed to.
What you can't do (Apple say) is run Apple OSs on non-Apple hardware.
Other than NetBSD, I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it.
But I will investigate. Thanks for the FYI.
The PowerPC macs are a bit less well supported just because there are fewer distros for PowerPC, but on the other hand, since apple's pretty much abandoned them, going with linux or a BSD has its own advantages
I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook .
Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works. (And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )
Or maybe bootcamp could mention Linux.
This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?
Yes, agree with Mr Binary - in a perfect world, computer hardware and software are completely divorced. The hotel wouldn't worry about viruses, because there would be no storage on their computer at all - I provide that with my stick. All I need is a 'kiosk computer', hardware that I can repurpose.
The first USB sticks came on the market in 2000, so I very much doubt you stopped using them before the Internet showed up.
Not only do I divorce the OS from the hardware, but I separate the OS from my personal data. Unless I have both wholly residing in RAM (which I find generally faster than HDD or USB/SD), they are not on the same media. As much as possible I try to make the OS read-only and the media used for data (e.g. RAM for short-term data storage or HDD for long-term data storage) read-write. Perhaps there are parallels to certain object file formats and their separation of code and data.
I've also thought a lot about and experimented with the use of separate, simplified, fast-booting OS's for different purposes. I am forced to use different OS's to perform certain tasks. But the popular all-purpose OS's are huge and often I only need a small fraction of their functionality.
What if we did not think in all or nothing terms about OS functionality? What if some OS's were small and only limited-purpose?
Rebooting is the slow step. But these limited-purpose OS's, being small and simple, can be very robust and responsive once booted.
The smaller the kernel and userland, the more RAM I have for storage.
Linux distributions have been doing this very successfully for the past 9 years (knoppix paved the way, but almost every linux distribution today can run live from a CD/SD/DiskOnKey, and store your data on an SD/DiskOnKey (the same one, if properly partitioned).
And it's unlikely a hotel or your student lab would actually let you reboot into your own distribution; once you have control of the hardware (which you must have), you practically own it from that moment.
CherryPy is actually a much better solution than yours:
Your lab, and your hotel room, is likely to have a screen that can take VGA or HDMI input - so you've got a display; You can get foldable silicon keyboards for $10 or so, and a small travel mouse for $10 more. So, for $45, you have something you can _already_ use at your lab or hotel room, with no one having to fear you're putting viruses on their system.