> I imagine what happened was that HP had a hard drive image they'd been loading... | Hacker News

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		dlenski 5 months ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option (2022) > I imagine what happened was that HP had a hard drive image they'd been loading on PCs since the early 2010s set up to dual-boot FreeDOS and a Debian kiosk installation with the digital manual. Someone at HP was tasked with making the image work on newer computers that didn't have firmware support for booting in BIOS mode, so they came up with the solution of booting up a copy of Debian that then auto-starts a FreeDOS VM. Seems likely, yeah. I wonder why HP still bothers to offer the FreeDOS option, rather than just ship with no OS installed; Microsoft doesn't actually care about OEMs shipping with no OS installed anymore, do they?

hulitu 5 months ago [–]

> Microsoft doesn't actually care about OEMs shipping with no OS installed anymore, do they?

Embrace, extend, extinguish. /s

They do care. Else you would see other OSs on new hardware.

yjftsjthsd-h 5 months ago | [–]

> They do care. Else you would see other OSs on new hardware.

Like Dell shipping laptops with Linux preinstalled?

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