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System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

blog.system76.com

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Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#211

Post by egeozcan »

ufo wrote: post #104
speeder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year I bought a i5-4690k, some slightly outdated but top of line mobo, 32gb DDR3 2400mhz and a bunch of 1tb WD Black... Total price was about 800USD yet it feels like I had bought something much more expensive, everything I throw on the machine runs fast, even the HDDs are fast enough that I don't feel need for SSD. Only mistake was buying AMD 380x for GPU

What did you regret about the 380x? I ask because I have been thinking about having my next card be an amd one because I'm tired of having to deal with proprietary drivers with my current nvidia card...

I own a 380x but it's in the corner gathering dust because of buggy drivers and crashes. It doesn't keep running long enough to get hot in my case.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#212

Post by adamc »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

Actually, what I want is a 17" screen (it's not just the pixels, I need the fonts to be big enough for my aging eyes) that is not crazy heavy.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#213

Post by adamc »

s_kilk wrote: post #23
SunShiranui wrote: post #10

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.

> 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.

Don't they have poor touchpads?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#214

Post by kuschku »

ac29 wrote: post #198
kuschku wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy Thinkpads also preloaded with free DOS. (Usually a lot cheaper)

How? Hasn't been an option on the last 2 thinkpads I bought. Just went and tried to customize a T470 and nope, still have to get Windows.

If you're a student, you can sometimes still get it.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#215

Post by leggomylibro »

dagw wrote: post #81
s_kilk wrote: 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.

It exists, it's the Thinkpad T-series. Does Optimus work the way I'd expect it to these days?

Ehhhh....

Bumblebee has kind of fallen into a 'not officially supported' state as of xenial, but it will work if you are willing to spend a bit of time cajoling it by messing with drivers and blacklists and config files.

Nvidia also has an official solution now called 'nvidia-prime,' but it's awful. You have to log out and back in to change which card you're using, so you can't just spin up the discrete card for one or two taxing programs in your workflow.

But it can work the way you'd expect it to, if that's what you're asking.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#216

Post by maerF0x0 »

sacul wrote: post #153
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

MBP-quality trackpads and MBP-equivalent battery life. I can't understand why battery life isn't higher on the list of "must haves" for people who want a nice linux laptop.

For me battery only needs to be about 2-3 hours. Otherwise I am moving from plug in to plug in (I leave chargers in many places like work, office, living room). Long enough to take a short flight without plugins.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#217

Post by solatic »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

> The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads.

Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era.

People who stick with Thinkpads today tend to do so because a) the enterprise support is still relatively solid, b) no real competitors for the Trackpoint, if you want one you need to get a Thinkpad, c) the keyboard, while not as high quality as it used to be, is still great relative to most of the market, d) Thinkpads are still basically reference laptops for Linux, and as a customer, it's reasonable to assume that there will be good hardware support.

If System76 wanted to go after Thinkpads, they probably could.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#218

Post by cwyers »

> Today, we can’t design and manufacture our products. We outsource this work. It’s similar to how Tesla used a Lotus chassis for their first car. (Like their Roadster, the outside of our computers might look similar to others but it’s the inside that counts.) The strategy was cash efficient and allowed us to focus on developing high value areas of the company. However, knowing what we wanted to build but without the means to do so left us constantly yearning for more.

...

> Phase three moves product design and manufacturing in house. We’re about to build the Model S of computers. Something so brilliant and beautiful that reviewers will have to add an 11 to their scores. Being that we’re System76 and we do things the System76 way, our design principles are polar opposite of the rest of the industry.

Is this serious? The Tesla Model S was a serious gamechangers for the viability of electric cars. Dell and Lenovo have made "OEM computers with Linux support" a solved problem space. These guys think they're going to leap from selling rebadged Taiwanese MacBook clones to coming up with original PC designs so great that they beat what Apple and its mountains of cash can put out? Are they serious?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#219

Post by sithadmin »

solatic wrote: post #217
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

> The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads. Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era. People who…

>Thinkpads

>the enterprise support is still relatively solid

That's not the experience I've had with my own company's support requests with Lenovo, and the lousy support relative to Dell is a prime reason why most clients I work with are dropping Lenovo for Dell.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#220

Post by lobster_johnson »

lai wrote: post #158
criddell wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has bothered me for a long time. Why are PC trackpads so awful? Why don't PC makers just do what Apple does with their trackpad?

I think it's patented.

Isn't a trackpad essentially a touch screen? Non-Apple phones to that just fine. There's the tactile feedback, but even the old-style physically-moving trackpad would be better than what vendors have today.
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