System76 Still Aiming To Be The Apple Of The Linux Space With Software & Hardware

[wizard69]

You don't want to go the Apple way.

No they need to go their own way which hopefully the world of free software would support. Beyond that not everything Apple is bad, if a Linux vendor could support a set of development tools as robust as Apples (including their software stack) that would do wonders for Linux. By the way I don’t mean copy here in the sense of a mirror image. What I mean is a quality, well maintained software stack that programmers really want to develop against. There are things that Apple does well that the Linux community needs to take notice of.

Consider for example Apples XCode IDE, which frankly isn’t the best on the market but is light years ahead of what can be had on Linux. This includes Eclipse which seems to have an built in ability to break itself at will. If System 76 could take a lesson or two from Apple then they should do so. If they start to make crap hardware (Apples current problem) then they will rightfully suffer. But decent hardware coupled with robust software is not a bad thing at all.

[wizard69]

They are quite important if you rely on your machine, especially to do work.

Now you get into how you define reliability. Soldering in RAM certainly will make for a more reliable machine. I don’t knock Apple for doing this, I knock them for the ripoff pricing on machines with upgraded RAM.

As for storage I really don’t think we have enough experience with SSD’s to say for certain that soldered in SSD’s impact the machine negatively. In any event l, in the case of laptops, I prefer rugged construction to easy to replace components.

I wouldn't want an Apple computer, simply because it's not possible to take storage out, put it into another machine, and resume work as usual. Not to mention, the longevity of hardware is severely reduced as well.

There are good reasons not to want Apple hardware these days but I really believe you are misinformed here. Soldered In components mean far longer trouble free operating vs a bunch of plugged in components.

Also, the fact that everyone wants to make thin things is simply pathetic. Laptops overheat, and can't even fully utilize their hardware, which is simply sad.

well this is true. It is so bad that frankly it is effectively false advertising. Beyond that it means crap keyboards and other human factors issues. Of course many users will never see this because they run Apples power optimized browser and little else. I literally had a MBP 2017 that ran the battery down at about 1% per minute with moderately heavy use. This is one of the reasons I want to see a highly optimized ARM based laptop. Sadly it will likely be Apple that will introduce a viable ARM based laptop.

[royce]

I just switched back to Ubuntu from Pop OS. I initially installed it to try its nvidia support, cuda and software availability, and seeing as I'm an Ubuntu user, I thought it would be good to try. The reality of it:

• The nvidia switcher pop provide is a far inferior solution to nvidia-prime. The former requires touching up boot (and thus needs secure boot off) and a reboot. The latter simply requires X to restart (eg log out and back in).
• They want users to somehow know when something's an Ubuntu bug as they will direct you to Ubuntu when it is the case. In my case, fair, I usually can tell, but I would wager (judging by their subreddit) a ton of their users are linux newbies. Reporting ubuntu bugs to their launchpad requires the use of the ubuntu-bug command line tool - it collects relevant system info around the package you're reporting and opens an issue to the right component in launchpad. The tool doesn't work however as it doesn't recognise the system as ubuntu (which is fair)
• They switched from grub to systemd-boot in 19.04 without telling anybody
• They released nvidia-430 too early. There were tons of issues with it originally. Thankfully I could fix it.
• They've been backporting to gnome unfinished and untested patches which have caused me trouble when I've needed to use Gnome (I'm a sway user, but occasionally I need to use my nvidia gpu for rendering graphics).
• They've made the choice not to add snapd to their distro. Whatever you think of snaps vs flatpaks, they do provide with an avenue to installing a ton of commercial software that's not available in Ubuntu/Debian's repos. Stuff like Jetbrains IDEs, which I would also wager are pretty popular to their use base. But they've also not added flatpak support (I believe it's coming on their next version) yet
• In general, it feels like a more constricted version of Ubuntu. Performance unsurprisingly is not any better and stability if anything is slightly worse.

However, the one thing that really made me switch is their hostility to Ubuntu, and the way they take credit for the work Ubuntu has been doing to improve the gnome desktop experience. This is seen left and right on their subreddit, where some of the developers post. It's really left me with a really bad after taste, the whole thing felt more than a bit toxic.

[zxy_thf]

This seems like an incredibly misinformed post.


First off well managed control is not a bad thing. QT is similarly controlled but is still popular in Linux land.

Your post also shows incredible misunderstanding about what I'd like to say.

I have ABSOLUTELY NO interest in discussing the advantage or disadvantage of Apple's control, and I personally very enjoy the relief of no need to worrying every little thing by using Apple's products.
So stop spamming your worship of Apple to an Apple user.

All I would like to express is: Apple is Apple because Apple does not rely on others for the most important stuff.
Wannabes are Wannabes because they show little interest in pursuing such strategy.

[wizard69]

This hatred of Apple is hard to understand. They are literally the prototype for reliable well designed software. Take ten minutes with Windows 10 and you should see just how wrong design can go. To put it another way borrowing what Apple does well can do wonders for Linux. Right at this moment Linux really doesn’t have a well accepted desktop environment. Even worse there is nit a SDK for GUI apps that is well thought out and suitable for quickly bringing desktop apps to Linux. In fact the GUI toolkit world sucks on Linux.

Good lord I had almost forgotten how nitpicky some hardcore Linux users can be. No matter what kind of work a company does to advance desktop Linux, you'll still go through it with a fine toothed comb and look for things to whine about.

Sometimes this comes down to two things. One is the inability to read for content. The other is being so wrapped up in hatred that they can’t see the good that comes along with the evil at Apple.

When they talk about being like Apple, they're referring to the one thing Apple does right: paying some blasted attention to user experience and making hardware and software that feels polished and functional without having to spend 5 hours googling and learning some arcane bullsh*t just to make a particular thing work correctly.

this is so true. People really can’t grasp the huge difference in software quality across the 3 popular platforms. Frankly I’m talking from both the view point of a user and that of a developer. Apples software infra structure is good enough that many people will put up with a lot of non sense from Apple to have access to it.

[wizard69]

Your post also shows incredible misunderstanding about what I'd like to say.

I have ABSOLUTELY NO interest in discussing the advantage or disadvantage of Apple's control, and I personally very enjoy the relief of no need to worrying every little thing by using Apple's products.
So stop spamming your worship of Apple to an Apple user.

Obviously you have missed my point that I’m not a current Mac OS user. I don't worship Apple at all, in fact their biggest negative, over priced hardware, has me running Linux today as my laptops operating system.

What I’ve tried to point out to the more misinformed people in this thread is that Apple does indeed do something’s really well that are worth emulating.

All I would like to express is: Apple is Apple because Apple does not rely on others for the most important stuff.
Wannabes are Wannabes because they show little interest in pursuing such strategy.

frankly I have no idea how this applies to this situation. System 76 wants to adopt some of the practices that drive Apple. That can be a good thing if they adopt the right practices. Building a business around good practices has nothing to do being a wannabe.

[arzdfd]

Phoronix: System76 Still Aiming To Be The Apple Of The Linux Space With Software & Hardware

System76 continues doing much more work on software these days as well as expanding their own hardware manufacturing capabilities. This is much more than they did a decade or even several years ago when they were just selling PCs/laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu. As summed up by System76 founder and CEO, Carl Richell, their end game is much more Apple-esque...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...egrated-Vision

It just sucks that damn near every portable option around, regardless of brand, either has just an APU or is Intel with an Nvidia GPU when graphics are necessary.

[Guest]

Now you get into how you define reliability. Soldering in RAM certainly will make for a more reliable machine. I don’t knock Apple for doing this, I knock them for the ripoff pricing on machines with upgraded RAM.

As for storage I really don’t think we have enough experience with SSD’s to say for certain that soldered in SSD’s impact the machine negatively. In any event l, in the case of laptops, I prefer rugged construction to easy to replace components.

There are good reasons not to want Apple hardware these days but I really believe you are misinformed here. Soldered In components mean far longer trouble free operating vs a bunch of plugged in components.


well this is true. It is so bad that frankly it is effectively false advertising. Beyond that it means crap keyboards and other human factors issues. Of course many users will never see this because they run Apples power optimized browser and little else. I literally had a MBP 2017 that ran the battery down at about 1% per minute with moderately heavy use. This is one of the reasons I want to see a highly optimized ARM based laptop. Sadly it will likely be Apple that will introduce a viable ARM based laptop.

I don't think soldering in RAM or storage to prevent the possibility of it unplugging will help when your laptop gets abused because of some accident you have. If it falls on a surface with something poking out, it will get punctured. These accidents happen, and when I think of being able to easily move to another machine, I mean being able to recover from a totaled laptop, one that's beyond repair. Even if it were to be repairable, I'd rather be able to take out storage and continue working quicker rather than wasting effort setting up a temporary machine.

[deusexmachina]

Such a waste of time and effort. They should focus on not being retarded. They should just focus on hardware. Trying to be the Apple of something? Oh they're sodomites, makes sense.

[drohm]

I wish they could/would partner up with AMD to make Linux PCs and laptops. It just sucks that damn near every portable option around, regardless of brand, either has just an APU or is Intel with an Nvidia GPU when graphics are necessary.

Where's muh APU laptop that can offload to an AMD GPU?

Agreed. I did hear that they were looking into it, but no timeframe for how soon.