To back up a step, why should there even be a "linux developer edition" model? Why can't they just make a solid laptop to begin with, that also just happens to support Linux? What's honestly different? The icon on the meta key?

To answer your question, as a picky hardware nut I have yet to see anything worth paying extra for. Give me a 4lb 15" 1080p matte IPS with user-expandable RAM and a PCIe m.2 slot, a SATA drive bay instead of a cdrom, _no_ dedicated graphics card, a non-chiclet keyboard, a high quality trackpad _centered under the space bar_, and a user-replaceable (hot-swappable?) battery that gets 8-10hrs on a single charge and I'll think about forking out extra money. Otherwise eff off, I'm happy with used Thinkpads.

It's a tough crowd to please, to be sure, especially when half of us are perfectly capable and willing to put in the extra effort to get random finicky component X working.

I think it was a little bit cheaper because it didn't come with a Windows license.

It's probably more expensive, as they don't get the moneys from the "Special Offers" preloaded on the computer.

Because a large part of device sales isn't in profiting from the hardware, but in co-branding with the OS vendor, and crapware preload applications.

Hardware margins are thin, unless you're Apple.

Yes, I'm well aware. My point was that I and many others would happily pay extra to pad their margins if anybody would just make a laptop screen/chassis/motherboard barebones combo worth paying for. In my judgment, nobody has understood the audience well enough to convince the business types to let them even try to actually get a truly professional-grade machine to market.

And when I say professional-grade, I mean sturdy, expandable, and hackable to the core. Designed for Linux/*BSD first, that still runs Windows if the end user wants to install it themselves. If something like the Novena can succeed with a 1.2GHz ARM, I'll be damned if something similar with a quadcore x86 wouldn't do a hell of a lot better. It may bring in small change to a Dell of the world, but there has to be _somebody_ in China who would think otherwise.

The way to do it, I think, would be through a crowd-funding type of platform. 3D print a prototype, prove the sales are there, and then you can spend the money on design and tooling for manufacturing.

I wouldn't mind seeing that.

Every attempt I've seen, though, has either failed, or fallen prey to the lock-in-based lure of Microsoft.

The problem is, generally the only thing that "Powered by Linux" laptops offers (I am talking about big manufacturers like Dell here, not System76 or others) is Linux pre-installed.

Those notebooks are generally more expensive than their Windows counter parts (because Microsoft subsides then) and does not offer any customization (Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition still comes with a "Windows" key, wtf?!), so why bother?

In my case, coming with either Windows or Ubuntu is exactly the same, since I use Arch Linux and will have to reinstall anyway.

Dell XPS Linux doesn't comes with Windows and it is or was cheaper by like 200$ than the normal XPS.

Dell Precisions can be ordered with Linux in the US. The price is about $95 less, with Ubunutu. It's higher than Windows for RHEL.

I bought an XPS15 and I put Linux on it. But I didn't buy the "developer's edition" because I still wanted a Windows install, that pretty much just sees gaming. So I don't show in the statistics for Dell as an obvious Linux user, but if my research had turned up that the XPS15 worked poorly in Linux, I would never have bought it.

Almost all Linux users are familiar with the process of putting Linux on a machine, since that's the only way to get it. The thing that's primarily helpful about seeing a manufacturer have a "blessed" linux system to me is more that I can be confident all the drivers I need exist; I'd probably whack the install they sent me and replace it with something else anyhow.

> whenever a company comes out with a linux-based "developer edition" laptop, folks don't buy it

> The Dell XPS 13, for example, is a great looking machine - but too many folks were busy buying macbooks to help Dell learn this market segment does indeed want more products like this

Not sure about the why other (potential) Linux users might not buy notebooks such as this, but despite single-booting Linux for the past several years, I wouldn't be any more likely to buy a computer with Linux pre-installed on it because the chances that the computer has a distro/configuration I would want to use is basically zero; if I'm going to have to reinstall Linux and/or configure it from scratch, then the fact that it's specifically marketed as a Linux laptop doesn't really give me anything. I suspect that this might be at least partially responsible for "developer edition" laptops failing, as at least in my anecdotal experience, many people who are looking for an out-of-the-box experience aren't generally inclined to use Linux as their main OS in the first place.

> the chances that the computer has a distro/configuration I would want to use is basically zero

Couldn't agree more (as a Fedora user myself! - Ubuntu is typically the "blessed" distro on these systems for various reasons).

However, "linux support" is more than a chosen distro - it's the supporting code necessary to make linux a first-class citizen on the given hardware (driver support, setup scripts, porting popular software, etc...), as well as support knowledge and training at the OEM (bash is bash, and Firefox is Firefox on Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch or whatever).

I mentioned this on the sibling comment, but I've honestly never had any issues with drivers/hardware support with Linux on laptops ( with the exception of putting Linux on an early 2015 Macbook shortly after they came out, which had a new wifi card model, one of those new-at-the-time force touch trackpads that used different drivers, etc.). That being said, I only started using Linux in 2012, and I know that things used to be much worse in that regard.

As for technical support and training, I can see that being useful in an enterprise context, but again, I honestly can't see the type of people who want to single-boot Linux on their laptop being interested in support and training from Dell, HP, etc. It's been my experience that by the time someone is comfortable enough to use Linux as their sole OS (which many people don't want to do despite being comfortable enough due to needing Windows for other reasons, like gaming), they aren't really going to need or want any tech support from an OEM.

Dells are great as far as Linux support. I have an Inspiron at work and a Dell XPS 13 at home, but run Linux natively. I was kinda surprised everything worked on the first try .. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, extra displays on the docking station .. the works.

I was more talking about software (OS-specific and DE configuration, packages, etc.) rather than hardware. I've only first started using Linux about four years ago, and I understand it used to be quite different, but I've honestly never had any significant trouble with regards to hardware working on Linux. With the exception of the time that I put Arch on an extremely new Macbook, everything has always worked pretty well out of the box for me. The only hardware-related thing I've ever had to configure on my non-Apple laptops is adding a kernel parameter in the bootloader config to get the backlight adjustment to work.

On the other hand, I've yet to find a distro that pre-installs a GUI with configuration and packages anywhere close to what I want in a setup. I go out of my way to use distros with an option to install without a desktop environment even if it has an option to install the one I want, since it usually comes with a lot of extra crap I don't want. Obviously I'm probably a little more extreme here than even most Linux users, but at least among Linux power users (i.e. the people I'd expect to be interested in buying a laptop to single-boot Linux) that I know, Unity is considered to be kind of terrible.

Am I wrong in assuming that these types of "developer edition" laptops will generally come with a vanilla Ubuntu install? I admit that I've never really looked into getting one, so it's quite possible I'm mistaken in understanding the kind of setup they provide