System76 Shares With Us More Details On Thelio Open Hardware, Pricing Starts At $1,100 USD

[freespirit]

It works properly starting with version 64 AFAIK, but it's dog slow because of the lack of JIT. Mozilla doesn't really care about owner controlled platforms, they are more interested in x86/Windows and ARM/Android at this point, which is both concerning and disappointing. I don't know if community requests can change that attitude or not, sadly -- Firefox was a great browser back in the day but lately it seems to have gone places that are the opposite of what it used to be.

tenfourfox is working on JIT for firefox, i think should be awesome if raptor could help him to make it and push on upstream before the next ESR

[bridgman]

Also there are issues with the open amdgpu drivers simply not supporting video acceleration on older cards vs. the proprietary driver stack.

Quick question - are you talking about POWER-specific issues with the video code or just the much older cards from before we were able to separate the DRM from the decode logic and release open driver support ?

[Adarion]

OMG, today everyone needs some animated sci-fi fairytale for the launch of a HW.
Well, why not. But I'd rather have some hard details. HW isn't freedom design unless it's your custom ARM core, maybe Power or SPARC. Maybe, with a lot of money (and units to be built), one could ask AMD for a semi-custom PSP and GPU-part-blob free chip. Other than that I hardly see much chances.
Plastic parts in FreeCAD maybe nice, but they're still just plastic parts. Quite useless. We want the very HW to be free, the chips, the things that really make the device's heart beat!

Unless there is something real, some proof, some clear HW infos and specs, all these animated space tales are in vain.

[steve007]

EDIT: OK, there's a picture of part of the mainboard at https://betanews.com/2018/10/26/syst...-thelio-linux/ Here's my educated guess putting all the pieces together:

Mini-ITX Intel board, 2 DDR4 RAM slots, Core series LGA1151 processor, one PCIe slot, based on similar reference design to the Gigabyte mini-ITX board here:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#ov

https://static.gigabyte.com/Product/2/6514/2018030214214874_src.png

A perfect match. Slot colours, print screening, port types and position. Even the surface mount components look a perfect match.

I'd wager the basic system will be the https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#kf unless the picture is out of date, or they change the component.

[madscientist159]

Quick question - are you talking about POWER-specific issues with the video code or just the much older cards from before we were able to separate the DRM from the decode logic and release open driver support ?

I'm referring to issues that are platform independent -- so probably the older cards. From what I understand the Polaris 10 cards won't accelerate 4K VP9, or at least didn't as of a few kernel releases ago. In general the open AMD drivers have been fairly decent as far as not having many architecture specific issues, which has been great!

[madscientist159]

https://static.gigabyte.com/Product/2/6514/2018030214214874_src.png

A perfect match. Slot colours, print screening, port types and position. Even the surface mount components look a perfect match.

I'd wager the basic system will be the https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#kf unless the picture is out of date, or they change the component.

Nice find! I got close but didn't bother to refine further since I didn't think they would be brazen enough to put a stock Gigabyte board in this machine. Looking at their firmware updates though it seems they have used Gigabyte boards in the past so it passes the sniff test.

If it's a stock Gigabyte board with Intel ME and a blobby UEFI stack, this shouldn't be called an open computer. It's about as far from open as you can get.

[Vistaus]

At that price point this is likely to be ARM (cell phone / low end type processor) or x86.

They can't be using anything else, like RISC-V or POWERPC (most notably the Cyrus+ 2Ghz motherboard or POWER9 or something built around Freescale’s QorlQ P5 64-bit PowerPC CPU) for example? I know it might be a bit of a long shot, but I'm just saying there's alternatives to your ARM and x86 stuff.

[Vistaus]

Nice find! I got close but didn't bother to refine further since I didn't think they would be brazen enough to put a stock Gigabyte board in this machine. Looking at their firmware updates though it seems they have used Gigabyte boards in the past so it passes the sniff test.

If it's a stock Gigabyte board with Intel ME and a blobby UEFI stack, this shouldn't be called an open computer. It's about as far from open as you can get.

They only used Gigabyte in the past because their computers are based on Clevo hardware implementations (laptops, computers). So they didn't really "use" Gigabyte, they "put up" with Gigabyte as Clevo had chosen Gigabyte. I'm not saying they won't be using Gigabyte for Thelio, but it doesn't have to be as they were free to choose their own supplier this time.

[curaga]

Lack of JIT is hardly a dealbreaker anyway, every sane website is fast enough with interpreted JS. Block ads and don't use cancerous websites. And no, games do not belong in the browser.

[Teggs]

Screw storage.

Every case manufactured by anyone from this point forward needs this.