Almost Impossible To Sell A Pre_loaded Linux Desktop Computer 4521

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Highland Ham wrote on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:20:00 +0100

If Microsoft is going to stay in business as a monopoly, at some point it may very well have to answer that question -- and even then, the Government would probably take a rather dim view of any such answer that doesn't allow for the possibility of a non-Microsoft driver.

But here's one possibility; the virus problem with Microsoft gets so bad that everyone jumps on the "trusted vendor" bandwagon, and find out it's a trap, allowing Microsoft to do what it wants as no one else can gain access to the trusted nexus.

Rather unlikely, admittedly.

4-5 year old hardware is beyond depreciation, admittedly, but there's a few issues that may very well drive vendors of brand *new* hardware to consider Linux -- and I also have some rather old hardware (my newest machine is a 1.4 GHZ Athlon), but as long as it works, why not use Linux on it?

At work I'm trying to get a 550 MHz dual-disk box to dualboot, so that's even older. It runs Win2k reasonably well, but it feels sluggish. (Turns out the hda drive, with NTFS on it, has a bad spot, which is making life annoyingly interesting. My original intent was to do a physical backup of the entire disk in case something goes wrong with GRUB.) I'm hoping that Gentoo will make it snappier -- and I need another Linux machine for various reasons anyway. :-) I don't anticipate hardware compatibility problems, and in fact Linux is fine on the second disk.

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.