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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

#221

Post by sithadmin »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #216
sacul wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that as more and more workplaces move to open-layout plans and have an increasingly mobile workforce, max unplugged work time is becoming more and more valuable as a feature.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#222

Post by ac29 »

gamache wrote: post #209
ac29 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux hardware support often takes years to mature -- for example, the graphics hardware on my Haswell laptop has seen steady improvements despite being years old. I would strongly recommend against using a LTS linux release from around the time your computer was released. Its just going to be too old. Try Ubuntu 17.04, or take the jump and just use Arch. I use Arch on all my work and home machines, without issue. Ma…

For what it's worth, I tried a few different OSes, including Ubuntu 16.10 (which was the latest at the time), before settling on 16.04 LTS (which was released a year after the laptop came out). I plan to try 17.04 when I get some time, but I also expect to be disappointed. I got about 10min into an Arch install before laughing myself into a coma -- I've seen smoother Unix installs from the 1990s. But I will reiterate…

I'll agree the the Arch installer could be better, but its not difficult, especially having done it a few times. The install starts pretty barebones and then you add on what you need - annoying if you want a 1-click to fully setup GNOME (or whatever) desktop, but perfect for people like me. You also get the benefit of learning how all the parts of a working Linux desktop come together.

Personally I find all-in-one installers annoying. I find I have to spend a ton of time removing crap I don't want and replacing it with what I do want. It would take me probably as much time or more to install and configure Ubuntu as Arch would.

You might want to check out Fedora too -- I hear the latest release is pretty great. Arch based distributions like Antergos or Manjaro might be good to check out if your only hangup with Arch is the arcane installer.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#223

Post by ersii »

jasminz wrote: post #132
cmdrfred wrote: post #91

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…

Uhh.. Hi, I'm a Scandinavian (Swede). I got a desktop exclusively on WiFi. I've never seen an office or a home actually use "powerline" (Network over electricity network).. Oh well, one anecdata against another anecdata :-)

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#224

Post by vladimir-y »

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…

It's funny that you wrote about Thinkpads, for example currently Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5 gen) is the best ultrabook on the market (including macbooks pro, yes nowadays macbooks pro are ultrabooks).

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#225

Post by sireat »

microtonal wrote: post #105
noir_lord wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that buying 6mths behind just under the state of the art gets you 90% of the performance often for half the cost. I've been custom building my desktops since the 90's and I can't remember the last time I had an issue with hardware, I think it was a Geforce MX440 so ~2003. The driver story on desktop hardware for Linux is absolutely great (in my experience) if the hardware has been out 6mths or more or uses a c…

I have given this advise on Hacker News before: on eBay 2-3 year old workstations can be had for 300-400 Euro. Typically these are workstations from companies that replace machines every 2 years or so. These are typically equipped with Xeon CPUs, plenty of memory, sometimes ECC etc. Moreover, since they are usually HP/Dell workstations, they are certified to be compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so all the har…

I love buying old workstations, however power costs have to be considered.

For example my 2x Xeon 2670 (16 cores/32 threads) is quite the power hog.

Your example is pretty good since V2 Xeons are Ivy Bridge le vel and consume noticably less power than V1 equivalents.

However that particular CPU is basically i5 not i7 (just 4 cores/4 threads).

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#226

Post by BlackjackCF »

I'd be interested to see what they're offering. They're slowly hitting the market of devs with the Galago Pro. Still, it's not quite there since most of their stuff is just Clevo (at least that's what I've heard?)

I ended up buying a XPS 15" in lieu of not buying a MBP.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#227

Post by cassidyjames »

cwyers wrote: post #218

> 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…

There were plenty of electric cars before the Model S. You might say that "electric cars" was a solved problem space. Around that time, Tesla was "selling rebadged European sports cars" in low quantities as a proof of concept. Of course there's no way they could beat GM and what their mountains of cash could put out. But Tesla steadily built out their Model S production, and rapidly became the poster child for the viability of electric cars. They have been extremely successful since.

I think it's entirely possible that a similar situation can happen in the PC space, and System76 believe they're positioned to do it.

Disclaimer, I do happen to be a web developer at System76. But the argument stands; you can disagree that System76 has the ability to execute on this vision, but after building a very successful business around Linux computers for 11 years, I happen to believe it's going to happen.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#228

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

criddell wrote: post #157
lai wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also add that if they can also get the same quality trackpad as that of MacBooks, I would also flock to it.

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 believe they're trying. Microsoft has a "Precision Trackpad" spec for this purpose:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cu...

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#229

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

vladimir-y wrote: post #224
solatic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's funny that you wrote about Thinkpads, for example currently Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5 gen) is the best ultrabook on the market (including macbooks pro, yes nowadays macbooks pro are ultrabooks).

"best" is subjective - it doesn't have a "click anywhere" touchpad (it's still a mechanical hinge-based design), there's no 2x display option, battery life still doesn't come close, and so on...

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#230

Post by akinalci »

If you want a MacBook-quality laptop running Linux, the obvious thing to do is put Linux on a MacBook. There's only an issue if the MacBook is out of your price range, or they Apple doesn't support a specific build you want. But will this company be able to deliver custom-designed, high quality hardware at a lower price point?
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