Ask Paul: August 4 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I'm back home, finally, and somewhat rested, and so here's another mammoth installment of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Windows alternatives
andrew b. asks:

You've mentioned before that Surface was a bit of a slap in the face to PC builders since it was Microsoft competing against them. Additionally, it seems as though Windows and Microsoft are constantly getting into trouble in Europe regarding privacy, and I've read stories of random European governments making a push for Linux on their systems.

Can you see a future in which PC builders like Dell start making their own Linux distribution and pushing that? Intel has Clear Linux, but I haven't heard of them doing much with it.

No, because doing so would require a big, ongoing investment and the margins in the PC business are already laser thin.

What we've seen in the PC space to date is sort of predictable, retroactively, given this: they went with Linux on netbooks for cost reasons, triggering Microsoft to make Windows XP Starter Edition. Literally every major PC maker on earth introduced Chromebooks in the wake of Microsoft Surface. And some PC makers, like Dell and Lenovo/ThinkPad, do offer and support Linux on select models, as if feeling out customer demand should that ever take off.

The more likely outcome there, should Linux ever prove popular enough to make it a more mainstream offering, is for PC makers to treat Linux distribution makers as they do Microsoft by letting them do the heavy lifting and then just explicitly supporting the OS versions with hardware compatibility through drivers and, over time, with software utility solutions. But the nice thing there, should this happen, is that there will be competition. Where Windows only comes from one company, Linux distribution makers will trip over themselves to get pack-in deals from any major PC maker. And so they will do most of the work, I bet, and happily.

Ultimately, the PC model works (maybe barely) only because the hardware makers don’t have to invest too much in the software. But maybe Samsung (in smartphones and tablets) provides a model for the future should things change. That said, if you've ever seen a Samsung PC, you know they come with a metric ton of crap software. It may be better for everyone to leave the software to the community.
Why leak?
oasis21 asks:

Hey Paul, first and foremost, congrats on owning this site 🎉. Maybe a little late, but better late than never, I guess. Also, I'm looking forward to your writings about the behind the scenes of this site.

Thank you! It's been a stressful and busy year, but my wife and I feel like we can make this work, and it's been going well so far.

One thing I've not really discussed on this topic yet is that this change makes the site what many people thought it was, meaning a literal online representation of me. But what it was, before, was the product of a company, a small company, sure, but a company, whi...