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System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

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Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#121

Post by pimeys »

pimeys wrote: post #119
carlesfe wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have an x230 with OpenBSD, can you share which tutorial did you use to get the SIM wlan working?

I have one of the supported cards[0], so it's quite straightforward: Check the APN from your operator's settings. - Try the card first in a phone. Preferably turn on the SIM lock and change the PIN code. - Insert the card to the laptop, boot. - `doas ifconfig umb0 apn your.apn.com` - `doas ifconfig umb0 pin XXXX` - `doas ifconfig umb0 up` - Confirm the gateway from `ifconfig umb0` when it appears, should say inet and…

P.S. Oh, and I found my information from `man ifconfig` and #openbsd IRC channel.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#122

Post by hajile »

jaabe wrote: post #83
tonysickpony wrote: post #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…

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

That may have been true at one time, but not anymore. In the 2007-2012 range, mac laptops were the best. After that, hardware stagnated until around 2015 then took a nose dive with the next design.

Likewise, the days of the legendary OSX (sorry, MacOS) stability are long-gone. The team has been slowly gutted over the years to work on iOS since it makes them more money. The security issues from a couple years ago show a design team ignoring reasonably security standards and not implementing any kind of testing or QA.

I only have one mac system left and that's simply for testing Safari. Modern Linux is much more stable in my experience.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#123

Post by stevehawk »

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #90
jaabe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

> This is why I became a Mac user. Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don…

I'm a recent switcher. I got a Mac mini and installed my own 32GB RAM kit after delivery. I wish it played nicer with my Alienware 34" monitor (i dont know which side is to blame) but I know I don't miss Linux.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#124

Post by ohithereyou »

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #90
jaabe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

> This is why I became a Mac user. Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don…

>brew is miles away from apt.

brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being correctly picked up in the Homebrew build process so it is trying to use a deprecated x264 API that has been built, which is causing it to fail however building the same software outside of Homebrew (same source tarball that Homebrew downloaded) builds just fine with libdvdread and x264 in ffmpeg support.

I'd report it further but the time last someone asked about it they were basically told to fuck off. Their rules for avoiding burnout state the following which really summarizes their recent change in policy:

> 1. Use Homebrew

>Maintainers of Homebrew should be using it regularly[...]

>3. Prioritise Maintainers Over Users

>It's important to be user-focused but ultimately, as long as you follow #1 above, Homebrew's minimum number of users will be the number of maintainers. However, if Homebrew has no maintainers it will quickly become useless to all users and the project will die. As a result, no user complaint, behaviour or need takes priority over the burnout of maintainers. If users do not like the direction of the project, the easiest way to influence it is to make significant, high-quality code contributions and become a maintainer.

Yet proposing a patch for this gets met with "create your own tap and stop bothering us". I'd love to help you, guys, if you weren't gigantic pricks about it!

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#125

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

I admire the efforts to get coreboot support, and love their open hardware initiatives, but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome. There was no need for them to create their own distro. That is a huge expense just to reinvent a wheel that has already been reinvented ten thousand times. And in the end most of their users will probably just load up the one they use already.

Configuring Linux userland's components to work together in a way that isn't garbage for what you're trying to do is an absurdly complicated task, that's why there are so many Linux distros: maintaining a distro is pretty much the only way to avoid doing all that work over and over again. It's a significant flaw in the Linux ecosystem.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#126

Post by bwat49 »

darrmit wrote: post #76

I love the idea of System76 and Coreboot and keep checking in on them every few months but the story seems to remain the same - horrible battery life. I can’t see dropping over 1k on a laptop that barely lasts 4 hours out of the box.

The new darter pro gets decent battery life, I get around 7 hours on mine. It has similar hardware to the galago pro, but with a 54 whr battery instead of 35 whr.

Their other models do have poor battery life though. The galago pro is especially egregious, I don't know why anyone would buy a 13 inch laptop that only gets 3 hours of battery.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#127

Post by ac29 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #95
robocat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WiFi finally seems to be working reliably I got the XPS15 and installed Ubuntu 18.04 (best choice of laptop I could find that had an i9 8950hk, although only Windows is officially supported). I had heard it was best to replace the Killer WiFi with an Intel mini card. However the Killer WiFi has been rock solid for me with Ubuntu (I have read that Windows has more problems with Killer WiFi than Linux!). Regular Linu…

Yep, replaced both the NVMe and the Broadcom wifi in my 9350. I'm not buying this year's model as the Killer wifi is soldered down. Killer indeed.

For what its worth, I've had zero issues with WiFi on my 9380. The "killer" wifi is just an ath10k:

  02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
  Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Killer 1435 Wireless-AC
  Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
As far as I can tell, its no different from any other Qualcomm Atheros WiFi. I believe the "killer" differences are just in the Windows drivers.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#128

Post by checkyoursudo »

jaabe wrote: post #83
tonysickpony wrote: post #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…

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

I have been a full-time Linux user since in got a bunch of Mandrake CDs in 2002 I believe (and a part-time user before that), an iOS user since the start, and a macOS user since last year, and I cannot honestly say that I prefer one over the other in toto, really.

I've been using Gentoo Linux as my desktop/work OS for more than 10 years now, and I have no more problems with it than I do with macOS.

My Gentoo/Linux complaint is that I cannot for the life of me get PDFs to print correctly. While my one main complaint with macOS is that macports and homebrew are pretty crappy compared to portage, in my purely subjective experience of course.

Otherwise, I really like using both, each for different things. They each definitely do different things better than the other, but I don't actually know how much of that has to do directly with the operating systems.

Anyway, they are both unix-y enough for me that it's fine for what I want.

It's always interesting to me to read about people having such bad experiences with mac or linux or anything else really, since that has never been my own experience. Even with Windows, which I really dislike, I've almost never had any bad technical experience with it. (Bad user experiences, sure.)

I don't know if I am just lucky or just have lower standards?

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#129

Post by monocasa »

wahern wrote: post #54
monocasa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's that DRM doesn't work if they don't have a place that the user doesn't own, combined with that core is also used for system init because it's in the right place and you already want similar crypto you'd need for DRM for secure boot. There's not really any interesting IP in those cores from what we've seen.

But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or convoluted setup is useless. If the issue is why Intel, AMD, NXP, etc aren't more transparent with their references, DRM doesn't really explain any of that. The only reason that makes sense to me other than sheer neglect is fear of IP infringement claims, a fear th…

> But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or convoluted setup is useless.

DRM for a general purpose device needs way more than that. You need a full 'Trusted Execution Environment' to run the code that uses those keys.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#130

Post by wpietri »

wyclif wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you purchased a Lenovo lately? I've not had good luck with them. Same. My Thinkpad 25 has already been back twice. And both their field service and their factory service have really gone downhill. As much as I love the keyboard, this may be my last Thinkpad.

But where can you go from there? Who makes a better PC laptop?

From what I can tell, Thinkpads are in a slow decline. So it's not so much that I expect to buy a better one, but that they'll be about the same as everything else. If they aren't already.
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