Where are Purism, System76, Tuxedo Computers, Starlabs, SlimbookES, and others? Instead there’s Dell, HP, ASUS, and Fujitsu…
Well because of money. You certainly have to pay to get Ubuntu certificated. And you only do this to have a Linux system with support from the manufacturer.
It’s an enterprise problem with an enterprise solution.
The normal personal systems are not in the same segment.
Precisely. It’s not just “it works”, it’s third-party hardware that Canonical tests, certifies and commits to support as fully compatible. They’ll do the work to make sure everything works perfectly, not just when upstream gets around to it. They’ll patch whatever is necessary to make it work. The use case is “we bought 500 laptops from Dell and we’re getting a support contract from Canonical that Ubuntu will run flawlessly on it for the next 5 years minimum”.
RedHat has the exact same: https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware
Otherwise, most Linux OEMs just focus on first party support for their own hardware. They all support at least one distro where they ensure their hardware runs. Some may or may not also have enterprise support where they commit to supporting the hardware for X years, but for an end user, it just doesn’t matter. As a user, if an update breaks your WiFi, you revert and it’s okay. If you have 500 laptops and an update breaks WiFi, you want someone to be responsible for fixing it and producing a Root Cause Analysis to justify the downtime, lost business and whatnot.
It’s expensive af and only worth it if you have dell/hp/asus/fujitsu like volumes. The Linux first venders are sadly not there yet.
Oh, OK. That makes sense. What a pity.
Because the list is “certified” not “works with” - essentially, the “certified” list is for hardware that not only works, but that Canonical will guarantee works and will make software changes to fix if it breaks
Sure, but why aren’t those vendors certified? Is it a lack of action on the vendor’s part? Is it a monetary problem where Canonical is demanding too much money and thus gatekeeping smaller vendors with smaller pockets from being certified? what is it?
This is corporate-grade stuff. That’s why only Dell, HP and Lenovo bothered certifying their laptops. They hold an oligopoly for fleet laptops.
Hmm… it would make sense for the linux vendors to get on the corporate list then, no?
No chance.
Imagine, you’re in a large company and buying (or more likely, leasing) several thousands laptops each year. This is corporate world, you need to minimize expense, downtime and failing that, someone to blame.
You need to have a supplier with sales, 24/7 support and logistics in your country. Who has stock available at all times is able to replace any broken piece of equipment in less than a business day. Even if you keep a small inventory at hand, this inventory needs to be replaced quickly.
Trust me, corpos never buy from small vendors. They always go to the big brands.
