Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

blog.system76.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 330 posts

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#101

Post by unhammer »

francis-io wrote: post #48

I hope you guys have lots of success, we really need more options for linux on a laptop. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I really want a 13 inch laptop thats thin/ultrabook format, with low specs and only a HD screen. All I do each day is use a browser and SSH into other machines, I don't need an i5/i7 processor and HiDPI display to do that. My ideal laptop would be an XPS 13 sized laptop, with a 1080p screen,…

My girlfriend uses the HP Spectre x360 (model 4105-no), which works great in Xubuntu 17.04. It's fast, silent and looks great. Maybe a bit higher spec than you want, but then if you want to run a web browser without noscript that's probably needed these days :-/

No hardware issues that I know of (but I had to uncomment HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf to get it to suspend, and of course XFCE doesn't know what to do with tablet mode, nor do we …). The rather big trackpad might take some getting used to though :-)

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#102

Post by hans0l074 »

Good luck! I'm always pleased to see news about S76 pop-up on HN. I'm a proud owner of two S76 laptops, a Galago Pro from late 2014 and an Oryx Pro from mid-2016. Both are going strong (though the Galago needs to be plugged in, the battery is nearly dead). My Oryx is a beaut (and a beast!). 64GB of RAM, 2x512GB SSD's - one running Ubuntu, the other Win 10. At work, we can run our entire platform on it. They shipped to Finland on time, very satisfactory builds. I missed the NVidia 1080's by a month or two, but the GTX 980M lets me play, for example, Dragon Age:Inquisition at very high settings. I love these machines. I still use my Macbooks, but for all dev/gaming purposes the Oryx has been very productive to use. Excited to see whats next from them.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#103

Post by oliwarner »

This is a brave step. Taking control over design and manufacturing is going to be expensive.

I guess that's why they're starting on desktops. You can limit custom fabrication to the cases and then it's just part-picking. There's also good margin on peripherals.

But ultimately where this is going to make or break them is on laptops. The problem there is it's powers more expensive. Mainboard design, screens, batteries and a much lower uptake of high-margin peripherals.

That said, many, many developers are happy to drop a few thousand on a good portable because it's a business expense they can easily justify. There's money to be had if they get it right. In that vein, they need to get away from their current image of rebadging generic hardware. Ergonomics are important.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#104

Post by ufo »

speeder wrote: post #94
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…

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...

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#105

Post by microtonal »

noir_lord wrote: post #21
sniglom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have no issues building a desktop, but if somebody asked me about what (modern) components to choose for no driver issues, I wouldn't know. Avoiding issues and getting support could certainly be worth something.

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 hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work.

Just to give one random example:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/DELL-Precision-T1650-CPU-Intel-Xeon-E...

Xeon CPU, 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD for 425 euro.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#106

Post by noir_lord »

Majestic121 wrote: post #96
cmdrfred wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On laptop, sure. But on desktop? I've never met anyone using something else than plain old RJ45

My media PC is on wifi because I rent the place and couldn't be bothered to lift the carpets to run a cable right around the room.

It's some piece of crap TP-Link but it works 100% of the time so far.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#107

Post by bdavisx »

sidm83 wrote: post #75
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.

That's not the case always. My first cheap thinkpad worked great, but the 2nd expensive one (T440p) has bad driver support for Wifi (on current and last Ubuntu LTS). Connections are unstable and throughput is ~0.3x of the dongle I use (both 2.4Ghz 802.11n). Hardware - Realtek RTL8192EE PCIe.

What dongle do you use? I've got a Clevo laptop that otherwise works great w/ Ubuntu, but the wifi is pretty bad.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#108

Post by unsigner »

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...

The 380x and 390x are HOT. Newer Radeons are much better in that regard, and generally very decent cards - 470/480 and the recent rebrands/reclocks 570/580.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#109

Post by nissimk »

sidm83 wrote: post #75
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.

That's not the case always. My first cheap thinkpad worked great, but the 2nd expensive one (T440p) has bad driver support for Wifi (on current and last Ubuntu LTS). Connections are unstable and throughput is ~0.3x of the dongle I use (both 2.4Ghz 802.11n). Hardware - Realtek RTL8192EE PCIe.

Always opt for Intel hardware. They have Linux device driver developers on staff. Sometimes the newest chips are not supported, but they always release something within a few months.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#110

Post by brightball »

kayoone wrote: post #85

System76 gained some popularity from the frustration about the latest MBP, so i guess this is their response to that. I don't really buy the text about their vision and goals though, in the past they have not really been well known for great build quality or good design. They basically sold pre-installed Linux on rebranded chinese laptops. Their new goals are ambitious and sound too ambitious but i wish them best of…

Right now the biggest thing that they have going for them is a fairly well known brand in the market, which is a big deal considering who they are up against. It's a real growth opportunity if they can really differentiate themselves with a quality experience.
Post reply on HN