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System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

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Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#61
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither intel nor AMD supports core boot. Community efforts to add core boot focus entirely on intel because of market share (although intel is also plenty hostile to floss in this regard).

Not sure about the support. Intel employees regularly submit to coreboot repo. I know at least for the Atom based designs that I've been involved in Intel provides reference designs using coreboot and supports it.

They support it to the extent it is required to support due to contractual obligations for chromebooks or other vendors who may have similar deals with Intel. I doubt if Intel actually sees coreboot as something worthwhile outside of a shim to load FSP. To that end, they have also create a BSD licensed project called slimboot (more like shimboot) which exemplifies that approach better.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#62

Do people actually buy laptop/desktop from system76? I tried to price a laptop from them before and it was quite expensive compare to main stream vendors like Dell. Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.

I have used System76 systems and I have to say I didn't enjoy the experience. Dell has Project Sputnik although when I tried it out, the OEM Ubuntu OS (a fork of Ubuntu) didn't factory reset correctly wiping out the ability to recognize the GPU. There's LAC Portland and they were super friendly, I might try to buy a computer from them if my computer dies (and ask for debian or something).

How recently did you buy the System76? It seems like most of the negative experiences were a few years ago; perhaps they have improved over time?

Also, thanks for the heads up about LAC Portland.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#63
I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed.

My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency across GUI frameworks. Surely I can tweak them to my liking, but the rabbit hole goes very deep until it comes to a satisfying result.

Pop!_OS is the first OS that stay out of the way, I barely notice the existence of OS, and neither do I want to tweak it, and that is the way I want from a distro. The workspace arranging and switching is a nice touch, making it feel like home for tiling window manager users, coming from i3wm, xmonad or whatsnot.

I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Pop!_OS provides by far the closest experience I get.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#64

Do people actually buy laptop/desktop from system76? I tried to price a laptop from them before and it was quite expensive compare to main stream vendors like Dell. Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.

I have an Oryx Pro and I'm really happy with it.

The build quality is not MBP standards, but support has been great (replaced a keyboard no questions asked when a key failed, helped me debug some updates that I screwed up) and the price premium is higher than total DIY, but certainly nothing in the range of say, Apple hardware.

PopOS is pretty nifty and I like it more than stock Ubuntu. I also like the amount of work they are doing to advance the Linux ecosystem hardware wise, software wise, and evangelism wise.

I could quibble about some of the laptop tradeoffs (heavy AF and pretty awful battery life and fan noise) but I knew those going in, and decided they were worth it for a dev machine that mostly lives plugged in on my desk.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#66

I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed. My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency…

Lucky you because there's an OS that tweaks everything to your liking. The fact that Pop!_OS is not a rolling distro might be a big - for many people.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#67

I bought a Galago Pro (since discontinued) in 2015. It's still my daily driver and it's held up very well. I even once dropped it from a second-floor balcony.

It will serve you well for many years to come. My gazp6 from 2011 still runs solid

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#68
post #20

The exclamation point in "Pop!_OS" is making me uncomfortable.

I've heard good things about it, but oh, that name... it makes it sound like an early-2000s kids' toy. Just name it Pop OS. And get rid of the underscore if you want to be user-friendly to the average person.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#69

I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed. My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency…

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

Same here. For me the answer was KDE Neon. I have like one or two grievances with KDE Neon currently. One of them being that OBS Studio often stops responding when I try to exit it. But for my use-cases KDE Neon has been the best desktop experience I have had in the 10 years since I switched to exclusively using Linux and FreeBSD. Along the way I have gone through a few different distros.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#70

Do people actually buy laptop/desktop from system76? I tried to price a laptop from them before and it was quite expensive compare to main stream vendors like Dell. Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.

When I bought one they were just straight Sagers, not even rebranded. No customization that I could see. At the time some important features were not supported including Linux' own suspend-to-disk.

Keyboard was so terrible and wifi dropped out in so annoying ways that I end up smashing mine (I reused the CPU and other components in a barebones later). This was 2013, though.

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