That same target audience would be the least equipped to install a new drive or handle any problems that do come up. How many John Q public people have even opened up their laptop to dust it out?

Problems might be rare, but if I am selling a product (in this case new storage with Linux on it) I need to be able to charge enough to cover all my overhead. Every time I sell it and it doesn’t work out of the box that’s time spent helping the customer, more shipping/return costs, or both. Markup has to cover all that, and I’d guess that it’s not viable as a business model to charge a high enough price to deal with all the random static from computer illiterate people.

I get what you’re saying but I just don’t see it being a viable business strategy to sell this product to that target audience.

Anyone who knows enough to seek out and purchase a Linux OS drive can just download and install it themselves.

Hmmmmmm… I think the hardware bugs might be rare, but common enough to make this a tricky product to sell consistently to the unknown masses.

Also, I think storage partitioning could be a problem; assuming some number of people would have other drives that they had OS/media together, or just separate storage with files they wanted to keep. Those would be NTFS, which can read/write on Linux but you won’t have the best compatibility with Linux program execution (depending on a ton of factors).

There are countries where this is culturally how litter is managed. Japan is a fully developed example - bins are hard to come by, everyone brings their trash with them.

It can be done.

I’m sure this guy’s dad that needs help installing Linux will appreciate the clarification, good thing you’re here to point that out

Louis explains in several videos on his channel.

They’re experimenting with a business model where they ask users to pay for the product if you get value from it. Development isn’t free, their time is valuable. In return they’ll never harvest and sell your data.

If this experiment is a success it can demonstrate that it’s a viable business strategy to not harvest data, which is good for everyone.

Personally, at this point I’m trying out the FUTO keyboard but it’s too janky for me to pay for it. Lots of bugs and swipe is not good. I hope it gets better and I’m trying to help the project by submitting bug reports.

Grayjay I’ve barely used but I see the potential, and if it gets good I’ll pay for it. I paid for Signal messenger because it’s the same kind of thing.

It’s up to you. They’re telling you what the price is, it’s the honor system if you use it and get value from it.