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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

#51

Post by wapz »

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,…

Can't you pick up an XPS or thinkpad with essentially your ideal specs and linux? The one thing is you won't get great battery life on the ultrabooks because they usually have smaller 4 cell batteries I believe.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#52

Post by mciancia »

Arnt wrote: post #46
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.

Which T is closest to a Macbook Air 11"? There are many fine linux laptops in the desk-home type, 14"-17". The selection isn't so fine if you're looking for something that'll fit in your lap on the plane or train, and have 8G of RAM. Or at least 4.

Maybe x260?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#53

Post by sz4kerto »

yaantc wrote: post #34
crazy2be wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By perfectly fine, do you mean: - Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows) - Battery life is shit (ier than on windows) - Sleep mode has one of the following problems * Does not properly suspend (i.e. wakes up immediately when suspending, shuts down instead of suspending) * Does not properly resume (i.e. kernel crash on resume) * Sometimes does not properly resume (even more annoying to debug) * Resumes randomly, when you…

Owner of a Thinkpad X1 3rd gen running Debian (started with Jessie, now Stretch), and my experience is quite different but there are some things to know. Let's trade anecdotes: > - Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows) No problem there, always been rock solid. The chipset is likely to matter, my laptop uses an Intel chipset. Performance wise Intel may not be the best, but the Linux support has always been good in my ex…

> The thing is, a stock Linux distro is made independently of the PC hardware that will run it. There's no integration like any PC vendor does when installing Windows, making sure the Windows configuration is well tuned.

You make it sound like Windows needs to be fine-tuned (by the vendor) to provide good battery life. This is absolutely not the case. You install a bare Windows 10 on a random laptop, and battery performance will likely be much better than on Linux.

Anecdata, but my desktop Lenovo workstation's suspend function worked well with Linux, but after an update (few months ago) it never resumes successfully. Nothing in logs -- just simply doesn't wake up properly. (4.10 kernel.) These are painful things.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#54

Post by crazy2be »

hvidgaard wrote: post #35
crazy2be wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. They can do something more than Apple (i.e. not just USB-C ports), but less than others. The Apple design doesn't end up being small or light, because to actually use it you need a plethora of connectors. At a minimum, I would expect standard USB, headphone, sd card reader, standard HDMI, mini displayport. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that an HDMI connector adds more…

I'm of a different mind. A laptop is inherently portable, and I want wireless. - No headphone cable, I have bluetooth headphones - No ethernet, I have wireless - No hdmi/displayport, I have chromecast/miracast In general, I don't want to connect all that much to my laptop. And for the things I want to I'd prefer a universal connector such as usb-c. Make a docking station that works over usb-c where I can connect what…

You can do both. My point is that most of the ports and features they removed really cost nothing in terms of weight, and so aren't really engineering tradeoffs in a sense, but rather design tradeoffs (i.e. thinner). In the feature/weight space, they are not even close to the pareto optimum.

Personally I find wireless anything to be a persistent pain and not worth the trouble, but since it costs almost nothing to add, I'm totally cool with adding it. Maybe in 10 years it won't suck.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#55

Post by d0vs »

mafro wrote: post #49
d0vs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple build overpriced low-end perf laptops with high build quality, I'd rather have performance at a way lower price.

Downvoted: opinion presented as fact

Compare the cheapest Mac ($1000) to an $800 ASUS:

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

https://www.amazon.com/i5-6300HQ-keyboard-Microsoft-signatur...

The ASUS has:

- a larger screen

- a better CPU

- a better GPU

- as much memory

- more storage

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#56

Post by Lio »

s_kilk wrote: post #23
SunShiranui wrote: post #10

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.

> 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.

Thinkpads are great but if I buy a Thinkpad T-series laptop I'm forced to buy Windows with it.

Also it's not supported by the manufacturer. Thinkpads have great support from the Linux community but Lenovo doesn't officially guarantee its use (I would be happy to hear if I'm wrong on that).

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#58

Post by crazy2be »

keymone wrote: post #27
crazy2be wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. They can do something more than Apple (i.e. not just USB-C ports), but less than others. The Apple design doesn't end up being small or light, because to actually use it you need a plethora of connectors. At a minimum, I would expect standard USB, headphone, sd card reader, standard HDMI, mini displayport. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that an HDMI connector adds more…

vga and ethernet on modern laptop is a sin. they are barely younger than 5" floppy disks.

VGA is still the most common connector type I see on projectors and in conference rooms. It's being slowly replaced by HDMI, they might be about even now.

Ethernet is still the premier PHY layer for people who want their shit to work. Wifi is still flaky as crap these days in many places. Thus, there is no Ethernet replacement yet.

As chriswarbo says, the age of the tech is completely irrelevant. Instead, it's the utility / cost tradeoff that matters. A floppy drive would be expensive in terms of weight/size, and would be useful to approximately 100 people (10 if it's 5"). VGA and Ethernet adaptors would be useful to probably 1/2 to 1/4 of the users, and cost almost nothing to have.

Also, VGA specifically is one of those ports that's still really nice to have, just in case. Last thing you want is to show up at a conference room and not be able to plug in your laptop.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#59

Post by ekianjo »

Lio wrote: post #56
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.

Thinkpads are great but if I buy a Thinkpad T-series laptop I'm forced to buy Windows with it. Also it's not supported by the manufacturer. Thinkpads have great support from the Linux community but Lenovo doesn't officially guarantee its use (I would be happy to hear if I'm wrong on that).

Dont they have a contract with RedHat to ensure compatibility?

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#60

Post by pawadu »

Morgawr wrote: post #42
gnud wrote: post #25

I'm currently looking for my next linux laptop. Unfortunately, system76 is out because it doesn't seem like they offer any other keyboard layouts than US?

I bought a System76 laptop 5 years ago, still use it today. It's not perfect and I had some issues in the past but it's still going strong. I did buy it with a UK keyboard layout and back then it was an option, I'm not sure if things have changed since then though.

wait, UK and US layouts are not the same?
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