System76 To Explore Offering High-End ARM Linux Laptops / Desktops

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76 To Explore Offering High-End ARM Linux Laptops / Desktops

In System76's road to manufacturing their own laptops and desktops, the Linux-focused Denver-based company has their eyes on offering ARM-based products...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=System76-Wants-High-End-ARM

[johanb]

An ARM laptop with 15+ hours of battery life which performs similar to a current generation mobile Celeron/Pentium would be nice.

[davidbepo]

ughhh...

[schmidtbag]

It's about time. If they can pull this off before the existing AArch64 laptops get decent Linux functionality, I'm going to buy it. For me personally, ARM makes for a better laptop architecture than anything AMD or Intel can put together. I've always wanted to support System76 but I'm not interested in buying another Intel laptop (and I'd rather build my own desktop).

[UseLinuxNotWindows]

I have hoped for a decent ARM based laptop (and by that I mean powerful) for a long time. I have a Pinebook (2nd edition with 1080 screen) but the specification is rather low (quad core Cortex A53 with 2GB RAM and eMMC upgraded to 64GB). It is surprisingly usable for light word processing (LibreOffice) and word processing tasks but as for being a serious development PC - maybe not. There is no reason at all why somebody could not produce a 16 core ARM-64 machine with (say) 16GB RAM, USB 3.x and SATA running a mainstream Linux distribution (like Debian). Yes please! The Pinebook Pro will be a step up (Hex Core RK3399 with 4GB RAM and up to 128GB eMMC) but not enough. System 76 have the pedigree and capabilities to pull this off.

[Britoid]

If I can grab a Ubuntu/Fedora generic ARM ISO, slab it onto a USB stick and get it to boot on most ARM laptops, desktops or even servers with no tinkering, install it and have it boot, we're golden.

If I have to do the Raspberry Pi or Android methods, back to square one we go.

[Brophen]

Super exciting! I really think that laptops should focus on battery life for portability (a dead laptop isn't very powerful at all), security (because they can be stolen easier), and internet connectivity. If you need more oomph remote control your power guzzler at home

[Jaxad0127]

If I can grab a Ubuntu/Fedora generic ARM ISO, slab it onto a USB stick and get it to boot on most ARM laptops, desktops or even servers with no tinkering, install it and have it boot, we're golden.

If I have to do the Raspberry Pi or Android methods, back to square one we go.

The UEFI support should solve that. Hopefully, we'll see that in the next RPi as well.

[SyXbiT]

I wonder if Nvidia will come back to the game. I'd be interested in a laptop running a new Tegra

[jpg44]

When one can use off the shelf laptops with AMD CPUs that come installed with Windows, you can then either install Linux in Virtualbox or set up dual boot for Linux. or just get rid of Windows it came with entirely and go all Linux, and it all works very well, I dont know what the point is. Has large amounts of RAM all for a low price. I don't know what the benefit is of ARM from System 76 probably costing $1200 by what their hardware prices look like when I can get more for far less with commodity hardware.

It also seems like most Linux experts prefer to do their own installations of OS so pre-installs are not a huge benefit. Big server farms usually have an architecture in place for automatic provisioning, install, and configuration of the OS on the new servers and workstations as they are added anyway because they need this anyway to take care of reinstallations, refreshes and upgrades. So it seems like for both the corporate market and the linux expert market, pre-installs carries little benefit. Its mostly something that appeals to the non-tech consumer and those are the people that pre-installs really matter because the non-tech consumer does not care about OSs, software, they just want stuff to work out of the box.

Also ARM is a lot of hype and x86 works fine for mobile platforms. The ISA doesn't matter much, not with the difference between x86 and ARM, and I am familiar with both. It has to do more with the fabrication technology. The RISC age is over, most RISC chips are RISC in name only, as even ARM chips have been so extended to allow for better code generation optimization, that they are not RISC any more.