Those of us who have been around the collaboration between Fedora and Lenovo know about the struggle it can be to find the Fedora configs for devices that are supported to ship with Fedora. Long story short - it’s not clear which devices have Fedora preloads available. It only shows once you are literally configuring the device, so you could only get to that screen by accident or because you learned about it from outside of the website.
That much was clear, so we decided to have a Fedora Compatible Devices list where we can list all of the computers that ship Fedora. Then we could use Fedora online spaces to help with the clear marketing that Lenovo is not doing. That project will happen in two phases - master list in Fedora Docs and then a web page on the main Fedora site.
The idea worked when we thought that all we needed to find were the links to the North America and Europe Lenovo stores. That’s just two links to maintain in the list and on the website next to every Lenovo computer that offered Fedora. However, it seems like it’s not so simple.
Over the course of a couple of social media posts it seems like you actually would need to post a link to the Fedora config of a Lenovo device for each country in which it is available. Otherwise if you start checking out from one page and then select a country that is different from the one whose page you’re shopping in, it will kick you out to that country’s page and forget the config you put together. Not only that, but it seems like it doesn’t even redirect you to the same device, so a prospective customer would have to go hunt that config down. Didn’t matter if it was North America or Europe - it worked the same way. That’s not a good thing.
So how does this affect the Fedora Compatible Devices list? I don’t know. Unless we got a list of every country that a product is available in it would be way more work to find all the applicable links to compile them in a master list. Then there’s the question of how you would represent the Lenovo offerings on the Fedora website. Lenovo is what prompted the idea, but now we know that any link we glam up will not work for others.
What ideas do we have to overcome this? We have a bit of an issue where Lenovo has dedicated enough resources to support Fedora preloads (the most important bit), but we need to convince them to help us with clearer marketing. In order to do that we need to move the needle, and this idea of marketing them on our site is part of the strategy. How can we pivot to make this work?
As you laid out, product links will not be viable; they also tend to be fragile.
What about listing product numbers which users can hopefully search for on the Lenovo Website? We could still link their site somehow so that referer count counts us.
This would also help those who order through other channels, for example mandatory distributors (if your company or institution has those contracts). I’m not only thinking of “ships with Fedora” but also “Fedora ready” here
Do we know if product numbers capture the detail of what OS a customer is ordering? Or is that totally hardware focused? I do think that idea could work, but it’s also not user friendly. You would really have to want Linux on your laptop to go through that process unless we did a lot of work to make a step-by-step guide on how to find these products.
Expanding that idea to the broader “Fedora Ready” device list may make this something that’s already done before we move into the website phase. Thanks for the idea.
Should have done this in the original post, but tagging @mpearson.
Vendor marketing strategies can be messy. There are differences in electrical standards and languages may limit models available in certain markets. I once attempted to obtain the same model laptop (for use by post-docs or visitors) that the large enterprise where I worked provided to employees, only to be told that model was only available for orders of more than 1000 units.
Marketing games are normal in today’s business environment: Kia delivery delays to protect “marketing budget”. Many vendors are vague about certain details (SSD models, wifi hardware). This allows vendors to bargain with suppliers for reduced prices or better delivery schedules, but could mean that some configurations aren’t tested or are known to fail with linux, and that supplies of “Fedora Ready” configurations are limited. Systems sold with Windows pre-installed may be more profitable than bare hardware, so “Fedora Ready” systems may be deliberately made harder to discover in some countries.
The vendors for pretty much all components are listed.
Also, the certification process in thinkpads validates all vendors used. if the component doesn’t pass Linux certification, it cannot be used for that particular model.
The issue with finding Fedora thinkpads is merely a marketing/webshop one.
Lenovo’s US webshop team used to split thinkpads with Fedora Linux (or other distros) into different products, but a lot of models which were certified for Linux were never made available. This appears to be fixed now though… all models which offer a “Build your Own” option allow you to choose Fedora if the machine was certified for it:
