this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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As far as I know only Lenovo is offering to omit the Windows licence off some of their computers, but only if you buy online of course.
Dell might do a similar thing for enterprise customers, I actually don't know.
As I understand it, most enterprises have an agreement with Microsoft for commercial licensing of Windows that lets them pay per user instead of per machine. Given that most enterprises tend to lock in a contract with their hardware provider of choice, it wouldn't surprise me if they had something in there to omit Windows since they already pay for it directly. Plus enterprises windows has features for managing windows at scale (group policy, centralized auth, etc).
I worked for one of the IT departments at my university and we got Ubuntu machines straight from Dell on occasion. I recall those machines being somewhat quirky if we tried to flash them with Windows later (might have been missing a TPM header, or equally arbitrary hardware requirement, but it's been like 10 years).
In the consumer space, Framework will also let you skip buying a windows licence as well.
In my company we already use a standardised Windows 11 Enterprise image, so the Windows 11 Pro licences that come with most PCs are of absolutely no use to us (apart from when we resell them, and even then you can get OEM keys legally for a couple of Euros so they're not worth much).