A lot of people here drive Tesla cars, and they've been putting stickers on them apologizing for Elon. I don't see the same for HP computers. Meg Whitman famously brought HP from the largest computer company in the world to one that was not even in the top 10. After than, she ran a very unsuccessful campaign for governor of California.
I don't want to demonize HP, but your headline go me thinking about computer history. I don't advocate politics -- OS/2 users from all political camps are welcome. But I do acknowledge that politics exist. When I did OS/2 consulting, I supported HP computers along with the rest. HP isn't going to help us much. Lenovo, my goto brand, isn't going to help much either.
I'm not trying to "demonize" HP but I DO want people to stop and think about whether or not they want to buy an HP computer. It could be that only after Meg bought HP that it stopped working well with OS/2 or maybe her time period had nothing to do with it. But she certainly was a failure running HP and thankfully, even though I don't live in California, she didn't win an election there.
I have never put a bumper sticker any car that I've ever owned. But this is the first one there I'm thinking about turning the Tesla Logo upside down AND adding a bumper stick that says something like, "I bought a Tesla before I knew he was a [with a picture of a donkey's rear end). In my book you are either helping as many as you can or you are hurting them. The knife is very sharp and he comes out on the bad side of it.
My views on politics is this. I'm standing in the middle of a road loading over two fences, one on each side of the road. Across the fences are fields of mud with people from the left and right throwing mud over the fences including over the road that I'm standing on but at each other. Meanwhile they can't see the road (to progress) but they only see their fence and think that the only think in the world is either their side of the fence or the other side. They don't realize there is a highway of people (like me) that don't care about politics. We only care about trying to do the best we can and for some of us, me included, I try to help people and not make anyone's lives worse than they are.
It would be cool if we could align with one of the brands with open-source BIOS and non-proprietary hardware. They are obscure at this point, but I hope they will grow. The right to repair movement might help us get better long-term prospects for OS/2-compatible hardware.
I agree. There WAS a company with packages with black and white that looked kind of like cows that worked closely at least with the bank I was working for to make better computers that were easier for both users and support people to use and maintain and they got them to work very well for us and we bought only from them. I don't remember what happened but suddenly they started having business problems and they ended up getting bought and we ended up HAVING to go with a company that had great sounding speeches but the products were not as good as the cow computer company. I'm not trying not to name them. I just don't remember their name.
I personally bought computers from them too and installed OS/2, multiple distros of Linux, BeOS, just to name a few with a program (don't remember the name) where you could have up to eight??? OSs to choose from at boot up. It wasn't easy installing that many OSs because some REQUIRED that they have a partition within the first 1024 of the hard drive which meant things were pretty chopped up on the multiple hard drives. Thankfully OS/2 could easily have multiple hard drives look like one partition on one hard drive. But that was back in the '90s and things have gotten better, in some ways MUCH better (wireless devices) and at the same sometimes MUCH worse. And I'm not meaning anything about the HP computer I bought.