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System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

blog.system76.com

181–190 of 330 posts

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#181
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree on "If you drop an Apple, it's also dead.", but "If you spill liquid on an Apple, it's a dead machine." hasn't been true for me: Spilled a whole glass of water on my MBA which was running and it immediately turned off. After drying it on the heater for half a day it turned back on without any problems or damage.

Check out Louis Rossmann's Apple repair channel on YouTube. The vast majority of boards he repairs are broken because of liquid damage (he does actual board-level repair using microsoldering, unlike Apple which merely replaces everything). It's definitely a huge problem.

But isn't this a problem for nearly all laptops?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#182
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.

Do you ever have to do any laptopping for more than 2-3 hours in a place where there is no opportunity to plug in to a power source? My experience simply says that's really unlikely for me, and my couch and desk at work are 99.999% of the use cases. So battery allows me to meet these vendors halfway.

> Do you ever have to do any laptopping for more than 2-3 hours in a place where there is no opportunity to plug in to a power source?

Yes, almost literally every day.

My typical schedule is to show up for standup at 9, then be at a diner by 9:30. I work from there until noon, then back to the office until 2 to charge my laptop. At 2 I leave and work from a hammock in a park or something similar.

That's ~6 hours every day of working where there isn't a power outlet nearby.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#184

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.

Exactly this. If you're a typical Linux user, you've probably already built computers from scratch. A MBP/MBA laptop aimed at Linux is where the need actually lies.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#185
post #153

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.

Some laptops have a built in battery along with a swappable battery. The battery life people could get one of these and get enough spare batteries to smoke the mac several times over.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#186
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Louis Rossmann's Apple repair channel on YouTube. The vast majority of boards he repairs are broken because of liquid damage (he does actual board-level repair using microsoldering, unlike Apple which merely replaces everything). It's definitely a huge problem.

But isn't this a problem for nearly all laptops?

Mythbusted: "It's a more durable laptop because it's made of aluminum"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7XSckjRPo0

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#187
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proud x201 user here. Wifi works perfectly, suspend/resume, docking/undocking too. As for battery life, it was around 19W/h when I first switched to linux after FreeBSD. After installing tld and powertop it is stable around 10.8-12W with wifi enabled. Maybe you might want to try a recent distro, I'm using Fedora and I really like it. Even my 3G usb dongle worked flawlessly with zero config. PS: I remember having a fl…

Partly, that's because the x201 is so old. It's had about 7 years to mature support. I had an x201 new, and I ran into all those problems listed above for the first two years. Hell, I had to use a USB WIFI dongle for the first year or so because the drivers hadn't stablized.

Yeah, I'm so tired of hearing this come up when people are looking for Linux laptops. It's very old, and VERY ugly. Most of us want something modern that runs Linux well.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#188
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't this a problem for nearly all laptops?

Mythbusted: "It's a more durable laptop because it's made of aluminum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7XSckjRPo0

What does this have to do with liquid damage?

(Sorry can't watch the video right now because I'm on mobile data)

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#189

Nowadays I use Intel NUC boxes for Ubuntu LTS - stick in RAM and M2 disk and that is it, all done. I don't see myself moving to System 76 unless they bring out an exceptional product. For instance, if they did a desktop that contained two motherboards, one for a 'server' and one for a 'client', then that would really help build web apps where you don't want your 'server' to be slowed down by your IDE, browser tabs an…

I use an intel Nuc as a Linux box running Ubuntu LTS as well. As you stated, everything worked perfect right out of the box. Which makes me think: Since a NUC is essentially laptop hardware, why hasn't anyone thrown these components in a laptop case, and be done with it?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#190
post #153

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.

I've had that all-day battery for years on various Thinkpad X1 Carbon's that I've owned. Linux doesn't do as well as advertised but I can still go 6-8 hours of active use (it will last all day and all night if the screen is off (like when I forget to close it before I go to bed).
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