Lenovo, which years ago purchased IBM's personal computer business, appears to have quietly stopped offering Linux as a pre-installation option. None of the company's 49 ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebook models -- nor its many ThinkCenter and IdeaCenter desktops -- can currently be ordered with Linux.
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ter
16 years 6 weeks 1 day 15 hours ago
Lenovo and Linux
My personal experience (within last 3 months) attests not just to the denial, but to the hostility on the part of Lenovo personnel to the mere suggestion that a customer may not want M$, nor pay for it. There was nothing quiet about it. Denial of ditching at the top becomes actual hostile ditching at the bottom. Needless to say, I could not remain loyal to the brand.
There are reasonable alternatives. Explore them on your next purchase.
lozz
16 years 6 weeks 1 day 7 hours ago
Lenovo vapourware promises
All this sounds identical to the arguments I had with Lenovo Australia in 2006.
Their site claimed that "Linux" was offered on "selected models". I wanted a Thinkpad without any opperating system so I could use Kubuntu. They said they couldn't do it, but couldn't, or wouldn't, say why.
When I asked about these "selected models" they got very mysterious and claimed that they'd heard of such models being available in Canada, but didn't believe any such models were available from their source in Singapore. In any case, they said, it would involve a special one-off order to the Singapore distributor.
When I pressed them concerning the particular model involved they finally quoted an absolutely top of the line model at over $A5,000. I gave up and finally ended up buying a new Thinkpad from Grays online auctions for many hundreds of dollars cheaper than Lenovo could offer. I still ended up with XP though.
I recently saw a new US-sourced T61 that came with XP, but also included a SUSE 10 disk. Pity they couldn't have included a proper GNU/Linux distro though.