I know part of the price is to support Mint, but $599 seems a little pricey for the specs.

Same goes with a System76 and Ubuntu, don't like Ubuntu, swap out the OEM install with the distro of your choice.

For a desktop, thinking about it, you can do that in the UK as easily. I suppose I never though of doing that as it is obviously cheaper to build your own desktop.
it is a good point well worth remembering that in most countries there are independent PC shops which you could buy a desktop from without and OS.

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The laptop I bought few years ago had a minimalist OS, something like old DOS, which was suitable only to boot and allow to install a real OS. Since no OS was provided with the laptop, it was priced less than others. I installed Ubuntu.

I tried to find a laptop like that bit it was cheaper to buy the windows one on sale

Hi,

I build my Desktops but purchase Dell refurbished Laptops then place a dual boot Slackware & tweak to suit the Laptop.

Interesting article I found when searching for laptops with no OS Linux laptops: should you avoid buying Windows

I think an interesting point is that it is more common to find barebones desktops versus barebones laptops. I agree with his statement:That is a good point and IMHO there are and also are not common hardware items for laptops. There's simply more room in a desktop and fewer manufacturers stretch the design envelope to make subtle changes which then cause limitations on hardware choices inside a desktop box; whereas the laptop manufacturer may find a layout which fits best inside their form factor, the electrical interfaces may be standard, but the cabling or phsical connections may be unique. Plus they may also get a batch purchase of motherboards made special for their product.

It still goes down to the consumer vs corporate laptops. Consumer laptops will be smaller batches and pushing the latest technology where corporate laptops will be more standard.
My last couple laptops, the one I'm using as a server and the one I'm using as my main laptop were both bought used so while they had Windows it was paid for by the original owner.
I'm building a couple, well probably should make three to be fair, desktops now. As my son gets older and is more into gaming the performance limits of used laptops is becoming an issue. First step was a shared system to replace the Bluray Home Theater that Samsung seems unable to make function properly then his gaming PC. Goal is not not use windows for any of those.
I should start planning one for my daughter, will just have to find a pink 'girley' case for her

The funnier thing was also as part of my search, it rapidly found tons of refurbished laptops, mostly Dell, starting at like $149 with Win7 on them. Pretty good specs, I'm not Mr. Gaming or super high performance, but for the usual of browsing, youtube, email, and documents typical of what a home person or student needs those $150 laptops were more than up to the challenge.

So you can't beat that, and yes it's $150. You buy it, trash Windows or crush the Windows partition if you wish to still keep it and then race ahead with a good, but cheap machine.

And I get what you're saying enine about stuff like the pink girly case, in my situation it's a cheetah patterned case. Still, it's way lower effort for me to just purchase a ready made system and go "Here you go, Sweetie!" versus me spending time building one up. The family doesn't care about Linux, they're ultimately going to need Windows to stay common with their teachers and peer students. If they become serious CS or Engineering students, they can explore Linux on their own and I'd happily help them out. Alas ... none of them are pursuing technical. They don't even care about any pro sports! .... kids these days!

Hi,

I agree with Dell refurbished Laptops. Never had a real issue with Dell. Onetime my wireless & keyboard had to be replaced. Dell at home did the repair with no question or problem. Second time the keyboard ribbon had a issue but Dell replaced again. No problem. Great bang for the buck! I am on my forth purchase and would not think twice about getting another from Dell refurbished.

I build desktops and don't buy PC laptops new so that makes me....Something else

I usually do purchase laptops, but usually on the Dell refurb site the $150 ones are all Inspiron and not Latitude. I ended up getting my D430 for $120 from Amazon.
The other issue is most people buy big laptops and use them one a desk. We want portable laptops so its harder to find the smaller screens. And now its harder to find smaller screens with ample storage.
So I've spun up my owncloud server so we can use small laptops/netbooks/tablets and access the rest of our data from our server. Now I don't need a laptop big enough to take a terrabyte drive so I can use a tablet for couch surfing and go back to having a more powerful desktop pc.

As far as the kids using whats in school? My son's school uses Bing for image search and Truvo for search. I may not recall the spelling but its basically malware that redirected their browsers to their search page. SO were not going to use the same as the school anyway. Plus so many school get duped by Apple anyway and were not going that route either.
I try to teach them how to figure things out rather than directly what menu to look for in an OS.
be glad your kids are not into pro sports BTW, they are mostly all crap now a days.

My daughter has to have everything 'girly', has to be pink and glittery, etc. But she's well balanced too, she'll go camping and she's find with going to hunt bambies mother when she gets a little older.

Going back to building some desktops this will help stretch the $ a little bit as well. If I spend the same as I would on a cheap laptop on an initial dekstop I save in the long term when I only have to replace a part of the desktop at a time rather then the whole laptop.

That is a very good point and it is my hope that more and more people can make use of that knowledge to get better deals on hardware and avoid paying the M$ tax just to buy a computer.

Admittedly, I do only use the smaller independant PC shops. Trying to get a PC from a big retailer is such a painful experience with regards to negotiating hardware vs software swapping.

In the years that I have been purchasing new systems, I usually ask for more RAM instead of M$. But that's my preference.

Depends on the deal, sometimes you can get a cheaper desktop if you buy some special package deal, similar to hoe my eeepc was cheaper to buy the windows model than the linux model. But I still prefer the build it yourself over buying one pre-built just so I can choose what goes in it.

I had the same discussion one time wrt to external hdd's. My preference is to buy an external enclosure and then put the drive in myself, someone said why go to all the trouble and my response was is it really that much trouble to open box, stick in drive, turn 4 screws to hold drive, close box? There isn't much to putting together a pc so its not any more trouble than ordering one pre-made.

There is no "Have bought Windows PCs and converted them to dual boot" option.

I converted a Dell netbook entirely to Slackware Linux - 1 GB ram was woefully inadequate for such a resource hungry system like M$ anyway.

I shrunk Win7 and made a laptop dual-boot with Slackware. This was a bit of a challenge since there were two primary partitions devoted to recovery which had to be shifted over.

I was unable to get Win7 working on my PC after adding Slackware so I erased it and installed Win-XP in its place. Once each year I need to get onto Windows to run my tax software.