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System76 Unveils Their Firmware Manager Project For Graphically Updating Firmware

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  • System76 Unveils Their Firmware Manager Project For Graphically Updating Firmware

    Phoronix: System76 Unveils Their Firmware Manager Project For Graphically Updating Firmware

    While most major hardware vendors have been adopting LVFS+Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux, Linux PC vendor System76 has notably been absent from the party for a variety of reasons. Today they announced their new Firmware Manager project that bridges the gap between their lack of LVFS support and their own hosted firmware service...

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  • #2
    For fwupd, the only solutions available were to distribute either GNOME Software or KDE Discover, which is not viable for Linux distributions which have their own application centers, or frontends to package managers.
    fwupdmgr is a command line application not tied to anything by Gnome or KDE.

    Why are they lying to force their NIH crap?

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    • #3
      I am amazed that the interface on top of programs like flashrom is getting all this attention, or the fact that they gather firmware blobs somewhere.

      How much time are these companies spending on making programs like flashrom better?

      -- a significant flashrom contributor.
      Last edited by libv; 17 August 2019, 11:03 AM. Reason: add --

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      • #4
        Developer of the firmware manager here. This is an excellent summary of the project!

        Originally posted by Awesomeness View Post

        fwupdmgr is a command line application not tied to anything by Gnome or KDE.

        Why are they lying to force their NIH crap?
        Would you like to explain to your customers, and all of you end users, why they need to use command line applications in order to check for firmware updates, read their changelogs, and apply the updates? Or do you want to give them automatic desktop notifications that open a nicely-designed UI where they can read changelogs and update firmware at the click of a button (or the return key of a keyboard)?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by 144Hz View Post
          Awesomeness they want to protect sales numbers and other commercial sensitive information. For now they don’t trust the upstream services.
          a service now owned by the Linux Foundation?

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          • #6
            Originally posted by mmstick View Post
            Developer of the firmware manager here. This is an excellent summary of the project!



            Would you like to explain to your customers, and all of you end users, why they need to use command line applications in order to check for firmware updates, read their changelogs, and apply the updates? Or do you want to give them automatic desktop notifications that open a nicely-designed UI where they can read changelogs and update firmware at the click of a button (or the return key of a keyboard)?
            Could you explain to your customers, why if they install a different OS (e.g. RHEL), they need to install yet another piece of software to update the system firmware? which they wouldn't need to on a Dell or Lenovo machine.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Britoid View Post
              Could you explain to your customers, why if they install a different OS (e.g. RHEL), they need to install yet another piece of software to update the system firmware? which they wouldn't need to on a Dell or Lenovo machine.
              People who are capable of installing another OS are probably capable of using the UEFI-based updater?

              System76 ships their computers with their own OS which now has a nice GUI for firmware updates that has an option of working with LVFS. It's open source and compatible with latest display tech. What's the reason for all the hate? I thought Linux was about choices?

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Britoid View Post
                a service now owned by the Linux Foundation?
                Not all people trust them nowadays. Most of those point out their donation page. I don't want this thread to derail into identity politics - I'm just providing context.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by numacross View Post
                  System76 ships their computers with their own OS which now has a nice GUI for firmware updates that has an option of working with LVFS. It's open source and compatible with latest display tech. What's the reason for all the hate? I thought Linux was about choices?
                  Linux is all about choice, unless your choice is not my choice in which case it's wrong.

                  I'm not going to say that there's not a lot of duplicated effort in the Linux space, but this isn't a case of it. The devs saw that there was no solid GUI for updating firmware that worked for their needs so they made one, open source, and platform independent so that other distros could use it as well. They even said they're completely open to a Qt port. As for LVFS, "owned by the Linux Foundation" but run by average people, and people make mistakes. I feel like hate on this project is unjustified.

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                  • #10
                    I am afraid this product is more of a result of bad communication or conflicting constraints between system76 and LVFS than a NIH situation as mentioned above in some comments. I haven't fully understood the whole story on what went down or what the problem is.

                    Here is a blog post from the lvfs lead developer and a blog post from system76 about their problems.

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