That’s a bit of a weird argument to make.

We were talking about PCs with preinstalled OSes. How often do you come across DIY-built PCs with preinstalled OS?

If you select your own components you never have a preinstalled OS.

Also, most people who switch from Windows to Linux do so on existing hardware. It’s rare for people to buy a completely new PC to try out an OS. Maybe if €1000+ is something you shell out on a whim, but not if you actually work for your money.

For existing hardware you always have the hardware lottery on Linux.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)

Congratulations, you just happened to get the point that I made. And for some reason you thought that was a gotcha.

My argument was that if Linux came preinstalled on machines (apart from the current selection of tiny boutique manufacturers), these machines would be configured by the manufacturer to include only components that work well with Linux, which is not the case if you use a device that doesn’t have manufacturer support for Linux.

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

The “doesn’t come preinstalled” part is still huge, combined with the “doesn’t have first-party device manufacturer support”.

If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn’t only mean that you don’t have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don’t put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn’t have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.

And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.