Probably not going to happen. The vast majority of their users wouldn't want such a thing, so those who do can either suck it up or screw off and build their own system.

Yes it would - their motherboards have the licensing info stored in them. I'm not sure on the specifics of it, but I do know that you can flash a BIOS to certain motherboards that's been dumped from Dells/other makers systems and get a "free" Windows license. Of course there are ways of solving this, but it's not worth it, as noted above, because very few customers actually give a crap.

But if you want to be a martyr for this pointless cause, go ahead and waste your time to save $50. Personally, I tend to build my systems, but if I were to buy a prebuilt machine, well, it's prebuilt. Why not complain that you can't get it without a CPU?

For many things I prefer Linux, but I still need Windows for games and I'm alright with that (for now). However, I hate the crippled Windows installs that come bundled with PCs. They're useless garbage. I'd rather pay for the license myself and have a pure Windows system then have to deal with that shit. And depending on how willing I am to part with $300-400 (might as well go for a fully-fledged Windows OS instead of a restricted one), I'm quite likely to put it off or not do it all together and just install a free Linux distribution.

The agreement with the copyright holder is implicit with the sale of the copy. That's (part of) what copyright law covers. When you buy a product, you are guaranteed certain rights and privileges (among them, the right to disassemble and reverse engineer). And you are allowed to make copies for backup purposes, if it's reasonable to assume the original copy could be damaged or degrade from use.. and I don't know anyone that would argue that for CD/DVDs.

Well, after a while of leaving my thread alone, I have installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I am also going to turn my unused partition on my desktop into a nice Ubuntu pad.

That said, I didn't think it would be this easy. I'm running 1024x768 resolution, my audio works, and I have internet connectivity. With XP I had to install drivers for each of these functions! I thought I was paying for 'the windows experience'?

THIS IS JUST AS EASY AS WINDOWS.

In short: I'm about to transform into a Linux junkie.

That would depend on if he updated up to and including SP3.

Good point. And I hope he had; I recently reinstalled my father's computer from c.2003 XP disks (possibly SP1, possibly not) and by the time the machine got as far as downloading one of the various Microsoft malicious spyware removal programs, something out there somewhere had already installed a backdoor into the machine. Had I been aware that he connects directly to the wall through a USB modem, I'd have taken along my laptop to act as a firewall for the duration of the XP install and update cycle...

EDIT: I've installed Ubuntu, but only in a virtual machine. An issue I had above and beyond my general dislike of the current Linux productivity applications was that there seemed to be no GUI-building tools as simple as Interface Builder or even ye olde MFC-in-VC6. So I also didn't like the coding opportunities. The central OS did everything you'd want though; I'd be more than happy to have it on a netbook or any machine mostly for browsing and emailing.

This experience was a year or two ago, so I'm unable to answer that question directly. However, from the website it looks like Glade isn't integrated with any particular IDE? You need to go into Glade, sketch out your interface and type in all your function names, then write code that includes the same function names declared globally and link to libglade, then explicitly issue a call to load your user interface? And, presumably, scratch your head for absolutely ages if you'd made a typo in one place but not the other.

On that vague topic, how's KOffice doing? I'm one of those people that likes simplified user interfaces that optimise the speed and ease of doing things I'm likely to want to do, hence why I'm not too big a fan of pre-2007 Word or OpenOffice, could KOffice be the open-source suite for me?

That could be fine. The set up I'm currently most used to, here on OS X, is Xcode + Interface Builder, which are separate programs though they do quite a lot to synchronise with each other during the course of projects. There's no real code generation to do though, since the runtime deals with all that. That said, it does go far beyond any other platform I'm aware of and beyond the abilities of vanilla C.

Eg, to populate a table, you draw out the columns in Interface Builder, put a formatter on them, e.g. to say "this column contains numbers expressed as a two-number percentage", give them a variable name, then later you provide a table delegate class which is asked "give me the class instance for row n" as necessary; the columns are automatically populated by looking up the variable names within the class and converting them to the format you asked for — the class can be of any layout and needn't inherit from any automatically generated class, the variables can be of any standard NS type, whether a string or a number or anything else, they'll be reformatted as requested. You can supply instances of completely different classes for different rows, it doesn't matter. It's called key-value coding in Applespeak, see here if your curiousity is piqued.

I guess if I was having to use a predefined structure or else write code to manually populate each cell of a table then I'd be more worried about integration of the one tool with the other. How do the design patters behind GTK deal with this sort of stuff?

First of all, I've seen very little Linux installations that work 100% out of the box like that.

Second of all, your laptop was likely made after XP came out, which is why you had to install drivers. I'm sure Linux didn't have your drives back then either. Install Vista or Win 7 (if you have enough RAM) and I bet you you don't have to install any drivers.

Heh, saying Interface Builder is nice is kinda like saying the GIMP is nice.

Sounds marginally better than IB. I like VS, where I can just double click the event I want and type in my code. None of this making controllers, connecting stuff together, blah blah blah.

I haven't had to install any drivers on Windows 7 - the ones that it didnt include it downloaded automatically for me. Come to think of it, I didn't have to install any for Vista either.

As someone else said, it's ridiculous to expect an ancient copy of XP to include new drivers.

I think it's pretty strange that some people say "Ubuntu works perfectly out of the box, while for Windows I need to hunt down a bunch of drivers and it is a pain in the arse...", while other people just as confidently state the opposite. I guess different hardware give different results, but then some of these people go on to claim that the story is the same for multiple computers! In my experience, Windows has always worked out of the box. I haven't tried installing any Linux for a few years now because I got sick of people telling me "it has improved a lot since then, it works as well, if not better, than Windows now" - only for me to find that I still have to futz around with drivers and config files and stuff just to get Flash working or whatever. I'm glad that it works well for some people.

@Karadoc: Funny you should say that; I cant get Flash to work. And the pretty after-effects built into the system won't work until after I hunt down a driver.