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

[ermo]

Let me just get this straight: System76 is one of the (very) few vendors who are completely honest about wanting to create vertical integration between hardware and software, using a Linux kernel and an Ubuntu base plus their own value-added Open Source engineering efforts?

And people in this thread are actively *bashing* them for pouring engineering resources into actually trying?!

:facepalm.jpg:

The way I see it, if you've ever complained about the likes of ASUS et al. not supporting Linux and instead shipping their laptops with shovel/crapware on top of Windows 10, you should be over the moon at System76 trying to shift the status quo back towards a more integrated solution (which is how things were before Microsoft somehow managed to successfully market the concept of a closed source Operating System as a product on its own).

Not that I'm saying that System76 is all the way there yet, but isn't it a start at least?!

[drohm]

Their laptops still continue to be just Clevo rebranded...

Guess you missed the part of the article where he said they want to build their own branded laptops. Oh well.

[deusexmachina]

And people in this thread are actively *bashing* them for pouring engineering resources into actually trying?!

:facepalm.jpg:

The way I see it, if you've ever complained about the likes of ASUS et al. not supporting Linux and instead shipping their laptops with shovel/crapware on top of Windows 10, you should be be over the moon at System76 trying to shift the status quo back towards a more integrated solution (which is how things were before Microsoft somehow managed to successfully market the concept of a closed source Operating System as a product on its own).

Not that I'm saying that System76 is all the way there yet, but isn't it a start at least?!

But it is loving to want people to do the right thing. Bashing is what men do to each other to promote greatness. It's just a man thing I guess.

[tildearrow]

Even more so in German.

Also in Dutch if you don't pronounce the 'O' and 'S' separately (i.e. 'popos').

Why so?

[mmstick]

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.

• I've credited Daniel van Vugt every time I've backported a GNOME Shell / Mutter patch. I've mentioned that he works for Canonical every single time as well. I've also never claimed to have written any of these patches. I'm not sure what you think you've read, but there is no hostility towards Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution.
• Flatpak support is available in a staging branch if you want to have it now. A number of people in our community are actively using it. It will be rolled out officially when elementary is finished with it.
• We've thoroughly tested all of the GNOME Shell / Mutter patches on all of the hardware in our lab, as well as on many of our personal systems. That testing occurs on a daily basis. We needed to backport these patches because we sell laptops which run abysmally on GNOME Shell without them, due to all of our NVIDIA laptops using PRIME. It was a blocker for release of the Gazelle as it badly effected it to the point of being unusable without the patches. I've received many compliments at how much better everyone's systems are running with the patches we've backported, and solved all of the issues we've had with tearing and poor compositor performance on NVIDIA.
• It was 18.04 when we switched to systemd-boot, and this was mentioned in the System76 blog, and even Phoronix, well before release.
• Our graphics switcher does not do anything to the boot loader or anything like that. The only thing it does is creates a modprobe blacklist that blacklists both nouveau and the nvidia driver so that the kernel will not load the dGPU at all on the next boot. It's the only way that works reliably on every system. We've gotten a lot of people telling us that our solution is the only one that works for their system, where the nvidia-prime/bumblebee solution does not. Until the beta NVIDIA driver is complete, and the x11 patches are merged, this is the best solution we have today.

[cynical]

Can’t say the comments here aren’t predictable. We can’t have any company trying to make desktop Linux successful. They are the enemy, and they must be destroyed.

[mmstick]

Can’t say the comments here aren’t predictable. We can’t have any company trying to make desktop Linux successful. They are the enemy, and they must be destroyed.

It's okay. We sort of have to expect this. Yet they're by far and large a vocal minority. Most of them just read the headline and go straight for the comment section :P

[DavidKL]

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.

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.

Apple pays the most attention to exploiting its users' wallets. It does a lackluster job of much else, especially these days. I'm typing this from a 2013 Macbook Pro running an outdated version of OS (according to the mighty Apple) and, despite its flaws, I wouldn't trade it for a recent machine nor the latest OS. Apple loves to constantly reduce the featureset of the OS, erode the usability of the product to gain more profit (dongles, inferior power cable design vs. MagSafe, etc.), change the UI again and again, and force-feed its users cloud-based spyware. Want to create a list of every file you've downloaded, every site you've visited, and every file you've opened and send that data to both Apple and MS? Use OS X.

It lies relentlessly about caring about user privacy, while simultaneously engaging in all sorts of dirty tricks — like putting deleted logs into unallocated space, using all sorts of unnecessary metadata that users can't readily control, placing special notices in directories if a user has the audacity to turn off some of the spyware, and on and on. Apple is no better than Microsoft when it comes to abusing its customers but it lies about it more effectively because there are a lot of lemmings out there who are convinced Apple really gives two cents about protecting individual liberty/agency rather than lubricating the acquiring of billions more dollars by doing whatever rubber-stamp secret authorities dictate.

Windows 10 is worse. We're in a truly shabby situation. OS X, which has never been great in the UI department nor in the transparency department, continues to deteriorate. The Internet is becoming more of a script nightmare honeypot each day. Spyware is being built into CPUs and other products more and more. Even Linux has questionable qualities, like the debate over systemd and the security disaster that is Firefox.

Apple and MS are parasites, like any truly effective corporation. That's the point of them, after all. Sell less for more. As Ambrose Bierce said... individual profit, no individual responsibility. Insiders actually said, without a hint of shame, on MSNBC, that the Justice Department has a policy of avoiding charging corporate executive criminals — instead going for the strategy of fining the companies. So, while they plunder everyone we can fixate on the latest tawdry sex scandal.

[DavidKL]

Can’t say the comments here aren’t predictable. We can’t have any company trying to make desktop Linux successful. They are the enemy, and they must be destroyed.

There are a lot of things in this world that have been both bad and successful. Sometimes there is more to aspire to than selling a lot of something. Sometimes the aspiration is to improve the world rather than merely to skim a profit off of it.

[DavidKL]

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

Do you have one of the recent "all dongles all the time" Macbook Pros? The ones that also lack the superior MagSafe connector? The ones with the inferior keyboards?

Have you seen the constant removal of features from the operating system?

I can talk about what Apple is good at...