alt Hacker NewsI have a 17 year old Dell Mini 9 that's never seen Windows in its life. Was one of the first laptops I could find that didn't have the Windows tax. I put Gentoo on it several years ago, which took a few days, I wonder if the binaries come in 32 bit nowadays.
While most things ran absolutely fine, Firefox ran like crap, which really makes you realise how awful the modern web is.
When I got the netbook I had dreams of hacking in Emacs wherever I went. The tiny keyboard makes that quite uncomfortable, though. So it was only really used as a music player and web browser while traveling a few times, basically what you'd use a phone for today.
Was one of the first laptops I could find that didn't have the Windows tax.
In the early/mid 2000s, we used to buy computers, install Linux and then ask Dell etc. to refund the Windows license, which often worked.
My girlfriend at the time got a Dell desktop really cheap that way. IIRC it cost something like 400 or 500 Euro and Dell refunded ~100 Euro for not using the Windows license. I never really understood the economics, because installing Windows was probably profitable for them due to the adware shipped with Windows.
Probably it was easier/better for them to just give a refund to noisy Linux users than to admit that they were making big bucks on all the crap shipped with the Windows installation.
As an aside, at the time a lot of HP laptops could be purchased with FreeDOS and I think Lenovo was similar.