On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 07:46:40PM +0100, Edward Bartolo wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Call me paranoid but I am noticing big companies like Microsoft making
> it very difficult to buy a computer or laptop without Windows
> installed.
>
> Are you experiencing the same difficulty and what do you do when you
> need to buy a new machine?

The thing to watch out for is whether there are free drivers for *all*
of the hardware. I have an old ASUS EEEPC that I use for a laptop.
Even though all the early EEEPC's came with Linux installed, it tool at
least a year before they released one that did not require proprietary
drivers. And some irony, it came with Windows XP preinstalled.
I just installed Debian and stopped worrying about the Windows, which I
used once a year or so to buy copy-pretected ebooks (which I promptly
decrypted so I could still read them into the far future (yes, this
was legal in Canada)).

Lat year I doubled its RAM and replaced its approx 160G hard drive with
a 1T drive with an SSD cache. It is suddenly much faster as long as I
don't run Chrome.

I'd be happy doubling the size of the screen, except that it I did that
it wouldn't fit in my backpack any more, and that's *important*.

I got my hardware and installation info from the Linuxlaptop site. Is
that still in operation?

If I were buying a laprop now, I'd have to do research into what's
available, check out the availablility of free drivers, make sure I
can use it without secure boot, try to find out if I can make it work
with a free BIOS, and so forth. I probably would consider one of the
Linux computer vendors, possibly ThinnkPenguin (one I haven't seen
mentioned here yet).

There was a discussion on soylent news a month or two back about
getting a free laptop.n There were a lot of alternatives mentioned to
the obsolete laptops approved by the FSF and to the Librem.

In particular, there were serous questions whether it was possible to
get a secure computer running free software if you were to use INtel of
AMD CPUs.

There seem to be viable ARM processors, and I've even heard mention of
an ARM laptop; I've had no luck tracking it down. Does anyone else
know of a source?

Some Chromebooks apparently can be made to install Linux instead
(though their boot process leaves something to be desired). But the
ones with ARM processors all seem to lack adequate size hard drives.

-- hendrik