No wifi, can't remove Mini 7

I was trying to refer to the fact he's got trouble installing Lubuntu.

Sorry for being vague.

Notice that he didn't list Asus, though.

Yea- pretty much. There aren't that many these days. There was a lot of consolidation in the late 1990s (?). HP and Dell pretty much have been back in forth in the #1 spot in terms of market share for years. It looks like Lenovo though has taken #1 more recently.

Yea- this is true. Unfortunately from my understanding most are still doing it and it's difficult to get a BIOS without these restrictions if you contact these companies. Despite it being illegal nobody seems to be doing anything about it as almost nobody knows its illegal. Even if you do get somebody on the phone you'll probably get weird looks and they won't understand your problem-or know what to do about it. I might recall somebody succeeding in getting a new BIOS without the restrictions out of some vendor a few years back... but it's probably the exception rather than the rule.

Has anybody here tried replacing a EU bought laptop from any of these companies? Did you attempt to replace the wifi card? What happened?

I should probably also note that not all laptops will necessarily ship with these restrictions on every model even from the vendors above. For example I've heard Dell doesn't have the digital restrictions on the Alienware lineup. Unfortunately that may or may not still be the case- or it might not even have been the case when I heard this. When somebody says such and such doesn't do it- it's usually being said from what that person experienced as opposed to actual knowledge of the whole line-up or even every revision of a particular model.

For example we had number TP-Link routers with the same revision number received directly from TP-Link. A later batch contained the same revision number, but turned out to have a newer firmware version. The newer firmware version had added digital restrictions to prevent the user from flashing third party firmware. People who had stated in the past TP-Link Model XXX Revision 2 works with LibreCMC XYZ were in error. Such information is unreliable because companies make changes and the model and even revision information isn't updated to reflect these changes.

Different companies started implementing these restrictions at different times. IBM was the first from my recollection. HP, Dell, Acer, all seem to have started implementing digital restrictions much later.

I'm not a big fan of hardware compatibility databases. I interned for a company that focused on desktop GNU/Linux in 2005 and got first hand experience with a significant amount of hardware of variety of types. It quickly became apparent to me at that time there was no good solution to the problem other than to setup a division focused on selling hardware within the company that contained hardware that was free software friendly. Anything short of this doesn't work. Obviously they didn't want to do that and as nobody had a few years later, shortly after I had graduated I decided to work on solving this problem.

Such databases can be useful I think to narrow down hardware at some level, but it's best suited for companies/organizations/etc. Companies wanting to manufacture/sell/design/etc. Those who can afford to purchase lots of hardware for testing, development, etc. and then stock up on particular revisions and contract out. It doesn't work at all for the majority individuals. It's just too cumbersome and even among the technical users I see it as hurting progress by diverting resources from efforts to solve hardware-related issues. If your not working on support/driver development/etc its probably hindering proper support (even if the device itself is already supported, as future devices, or new technology won't be, if there is nobody working on it, or pushing for the release of code/spec/etc).