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System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

blog.system76.com

131–140 of 330 posts

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#131
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vga and ethernet on modern laptop is a sin. they are barely younger than 5" floppy disks.

Is it a sin to use the latin alphabet on keys? That's several thousand years old. What's wrong with widely used communication standards?

great straw man!

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#132
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think WiFi is that common in desktop hardware.

In business not really, the majority of home users are on WiFi though.

Ok, I would assume this is something that might differ between countries. Here in Scandinavia I've met extremely few people running their desktops exclusively on WiFi since it's generally unreliable when having lot of devices talking to same AP/WiFi router in a noisy environment with lot of other networks taking up same frequencies. Actually, I would say running Powerline to desktops is more of a standard approach here.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#133
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vga and ethernet on modern laptop is a sin. they are barely younger than 5" floppy disks.

VGA is still the most common connector type I see on projectors and in conference rooms. It's being slowly replaced by HDMI, they might be about even now. Ethernet is still the premier PHY layer for people who want their shit to work. Wifi is still flaky as crap these days in many places. Thus, there is no Ethernet replacement yet. As chriswarbo says, the age of the tech is completely irrelevant. Instead, it's the ut…

> cost almost nothing to have

you're dead wrong here. it costs space, which is a precious resource in modern laptop builds.

i just feel like companies and people hanging on to these archaic technologies is hindering progress and adoption of newer and better technologies. after all why do you need thunderbolt port if you already have the vga? why do you need better wireless chip if you can always plug in the cable? these stupid decisions are made on a level that impacts the whole industry.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#134
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple build overpriced low-end perf laptops with high build quality, I'd rather have performance at a way lower price.

The "build quality" means it looks nice, but it sure isn't durable. If you spill liquid on an Apple, it's a dead machine. If you drop an Apple, it's also dead. Thinkpads can survive a hell of a lot more abuse.

Definitely agree on "If you drop an Apple, it's also dead.", but "If you spill liquid on an Apple, it's a dead machine." hasn't been true for me: Spilled a whole glass of water on my MBA which was running and it immediately turned off. After drying it on the heater for half a day it turned back on without any problems or damage.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In business not really, the majority of home users are on WiFi though.

Ok, I would assume this is something that might differ between countries. Here in Scandinavia I've met extremely few people running their desktops exclusively on WiFi since it's generally unreliable when having lot of devices talking to same AP/WiFi router in a noisy environment with lot of other networks taking up same frequencies. Actually, I would say running Powerline to desktops is more of a standard approach he…

I'm in the US. I'm told houses are bigger and further spaced apart here. So perhaps that is why it's more common here.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VGA is still the most common connector type I see on projectors and in conference rooms. It's being slowly replaced by HDMI, they might be about even now. Ethernet is still the premier PHY layer for people who want their shit to work. Wifi is still flaky as crap these days in many places. Thus, there is no Ethernet replacement yet. As chriswarbo says, the age of the tech is completely irrelevant. Instead, it's the ut…

> cost almost nothing to have you're dead wrong here. it costs space, which is a precious resource in modern laptop builds. i just feel like companies and people hanging on to these archaic technologies is hindering progress and adoption of newer and better technologies. after all why do you need thunderbolt port if you already have the vga? why do you need better wireless chip if you can always plug in the cable? th…

BAM: https://www.notebookcheck.com/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_sony...

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By perfectly fine, do you mean: - Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows) - Battery life is shit (ier than on windows) - Sleep mode has one of the following problems * Does not properly suspend (i.e. wakes up immediately when suspending, shuts down instead of suspending) * Does not properly resume (i.e. kernel crash on resume) * Sometimes does not properly resume (even more annoying to debug) * Resumes randomly, when you…

Proud x201 user here. Wifi works perfectly, suspend/resume, docking/undocking too. As for battery life, it was around 19W/h when I first switched to linux after FreeBSD. After installing tld and powertop it is stable around 10.8-12W with wifi enabled. Maybe you might want to try a recent distro, I'm using Fedora and I really like it. Even my 3G usb dongle worked flawlessly with zero config. PS: I remember having a fl…

Partly, that's because the x201 is so old. It's had about 7 years to mature support.

I had an x201 new, and I ran into all those problems listed above for the first two years. Hell, I had to use a USB WIFI dongle for the first year or so because the drivers hadn't stablized.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#138

It's nice to see this - I'm definitely interested in seeing computers built and designed for Linux. I must say, however, I don't see that need for desktops. Custom desktops are relatively easy to build, even for customers. A well designed linux laptop, with no driver issues, good build quality, that doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness? That's what I'm missing.

I haven't enjoyed building computers since I was a teenager. I'd much rather pay for someone else to do it. I pay for several people to come around my house and do things I know how to do but would rather spend my time elsewhere. This is no different.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#139
post #88
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A well designed linux laptop, with no driver issues, good build quality, that doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness? That's what I'm missing. It exists, it's the Thinkpad T-series. I don't get all this hand-wringing over the need for hypothetical great Linux machines when we have Thinkpads available right now.

T450 owner here, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop. My machine hangs when I unplug it from the Thinkpad dock. X rendering glitches are an hourly occurrence and X crashes weekly. In laptop mode, the trackpad handling is not up to snuff either. (I guess if I wanted all those features, I could just install Windows.)

You will most definitely want a recent kernel (16.04 ships with 4.4 - you want 4.8 or later). Also check the Arch wiki about Intel video to see if you can fix your problems with X (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics), eg. switching from SNA to UXA.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#140
I build my own desktops, but if I didn't, I'd totally buy System76. A friend has one; nice stuff.

Really hope this works out - not only do I love seeing Linux plays, quirky plays, contrarian plays, and quirky, contrarian Linux plays, but also, we need more alternatives to Dell/Lenovo.

Also also, they seem like great people.

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