System76 Unveils Thelio "Open" Desktops With Intel/AMD CPU Options, NVIDIA/Radeon GPUs

[torsionbar28]

I really wonder why they did all this build-up, pushing "open hardware", then selected one of the least open ecosystems available. AMD and Intel are never going to open their black box firmware, even if every single Linux enthusiast in the world demanded it the fraction of sales to those people vs. the Windows / Apple folk are negligible.

Did you type this post on your definition of "open ecosystem" machine? Or are you just blowing smoke?

[madscientist159]

Did you type this post on your definition of "open ecosystem" machine? Or are you just blowing smoke?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux ppc64le) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.67 Safari/537.36

Oh and this machine has a really nice AMD GPU connected to a great big gaming monitor by DisplayPort too. No blobs on the CPU side of the IOMMU. Great experience, especially for trustworthy computing [1].

[1] c.f. "trusted computing", a wholly different concept and implementation

[M@GOid]

^ Sounds like someone is not the target demographic. Why pay $40k for a new BMW when you can buy a used honda civic for $9k?

^ Sounds like someone got rooked by their "Opensource hardware" marketing campaing. A fool and his money are soon parted.

[WolfpackN64]

While Thelio isn't as open as many people hoped, they really designed a smashing case. And I'm all for local manufacturing.

[sarmad]

I looked at their website, but 3 things made me very upset:

1 - Are they trying to sell a PC with no frontal ports (USB/Audio)? Really?

2 - Where are the manuals for those things? I searched for other products and none of them had manuals.

3- $1100 dollars for a Ryzen 5 2400G system?

I'm sorry, but nope. I'm a Open Source enthusiast not a idiot. No amount of wood in a fancy case will convince me paying that much money. A couple hundred more and you could buy a Threadripper system an build it yourself.

The "build it yourself" part is worth money, you know.

[sarmad]

So, what parts of the system are open now? If neither the motherboard nor the CPU nor the GPU are open, what's left other than the case?

[madscientist159]

While Thelio isn't as open as many people hoped, they really designed a smashing case. And I'm all for local manufacturing.

Sure, the local manufacturing angle is good, and the case looks great. The problem I have is with the "innards" -- why not offer something based on an open, owner-controlled architecture to go with the open case? Literally all they would have had to do was select one of the existing mainboard / CPU options (like for instance the Talos II ) and added it alongside the other options, passing along any extra cost to the end user. The're literally a Linux shop building their own OS already -- this should be simple compared to what other OEMs / system integrators would have to go through.

FWIW I'm typing this from my own Talos II machine. On Chrome. With the only visible difference from this desktop to my older x86 desktops being the boot time and the fact that uname spits out ppc64le instead of x86_64. So you can't argue the user experience is worse in the same way as, for instance, trying to run a full desktop on a Raspberry Pi (the latter doesn't tend to end well... )

[WolfpackN64]

Sure, the local manufacturing angle is good, and the case looks great. The problem I have is with the "innards" -- why not offer something based on an open, owner-controlled architecture to go with the open case? Literally all they would have had to do was select one of the existing mainboard / CPU options (like for instance the Talos II ) and added it alongside the other options, passing along any extra cost to the end user. The're literally a Linux shop building their own OS already -- this should be simple compared to what other OEMs / system integrators would have to go through.

FWIW I'm typing this from my own Talos II machine. On Chrome. With the only visible difference from this desktop to my older x86 desktops being the boot time and the fact that uname spits out ppc64le instead of x86_64. So you can't argue the user experience is worse in the same way as, for instance, trying to run a full desktop on a Raspberry Pi (the latter doesn't tend to end well... )

Of course, ideally they would do something like this. Especially since they promoted it as an open-source platform. Probably they took a more pragmatic approach in the sense that other architectures might not run all software (especially on the gaming side). Maybe one day S76 and Raptor could collaborate.

[mzs.112000]

Sure, the local manufacturing angle is good, and the case looks great. The problem I have is with the "innards" -- why not offer something based on an open, owner-controlled architecture to go with the open case? Literally all they would have had to do was select one of the existing mainboard / CPU options (like for instance the Talos II ) and added it alongside the other options, passing along any extra cost to the end user. The're literally a Linux shop building their own OS already -- this should be simple compared to what other OEMs / system integrators would have to go through.

FWIW I'm typing this from my own Talos II machine. On Chrome. With the only visible difference from this desktop to my older x86 desktops being the boot time and the fact that uname spits out ppc64le instead of x86_64. So you can't argue the user experience is worse in the same way as, for instance, trying to run a full desktop on a Raspberry Pi (the latter doesn't tend to end well... )

I ran a full desktop on a Raspberry Pi, back in late 2015. I used the Raspberry Pi 1, Model B+. I had it overclocked to 1.2GHz(I could get it to 1.4GHz, but it wasn't stable enough to work with). By setting GPU memory to 32MB and dedicating the rest a system memory, using Midori for most web browsing, it was actually usable. I hooked up 2 USB sticks, a 16GB one for extra storage, and an 8GB one(with 4GB as more extra storage, and 4GB as swap), that probably wasn't the best or fastest solution, but it worked. The Raspberry Pi, and the powered USB hub for my WifI card, mouse/keyboard and USB sticks were all powered from a 15W solar panel full-time(I had a 12v 8Ah battery, and some cell-phone chargers).

[madscientist159]

Of course, ideally they would do something like this. Especially since they promoted it as an open-source platform. Probably they took a more pragmatic approach in the sense that other architectures might not run all software (especially on the gaming side). Maybe one day S76 and Raptor could collaborate.

Commercial games really are the main bit of proprietary software that a Linux user is bound to encounter, but at the same time running proprietary, licensed multimedia software on an open PC at least partly defeats the purpose -- it sets up an immediate conflict over who should have control of the PC, and the hardware can only ever serve one master. If we ever hope to take back control of our computing resources, wouldn't it make more sense to sidestep the issue entirely and use a separate Windows PC to run proprietary games on? Of course open games work great on Talos and other related platforms (I'm thinking of Xonotic and such), but we all know the titles there can be a bit dated by modern standards.

We're definitely open to System76 including our mainboards, etc. in their product line. The result of that would be a truly made in the US and open, owner controllable PC -- a great step forward! Just waiting on System76 to accept our challenge and start working on it.