Matthew Garrett

There was a similar, but slightly different, diamond graphics card issue in the past. In short diamond thought that releasing programming information would lead to the loss of their uboat fleet in the north atlantic.

This resulted in a campaign of people buying new graphics card contacting their marketing people once and telling them that they were buying competing hardware due to diamond's refusal to support linux. Eventually this got the desired result and, if I remember correctly, diamond paid good money for their hardware to be well supported.

Maybe the same technique would work for Lenovo and others. I will either buy hardware which explicitly supports linux or build a box out of linux compatible bits. If I never buy a windows licence then it should be easy to avoid hardware which requires it :-)