System76 Rolls Out Lemur Pro Laptops With Core Ultra "Meteor Lake"

[sophisticles]

Also, you are waaaaay out of date on your software dev salary. I work for a different megacorp, but our college hire devs make that much in total comp. People in these threads don't have to guess about this stuff. Glassdoor tends to have thousands of salaries submitted for these roles at large companies like MS.

Senior software developers at Microsoft...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Senior-Software-Developer-Salaries-E1651_D_KO10,35.htm

And that's just the employee's total comp. The loaded cost is much higher to the employer once you factor in insurance and everything else.

I don't know how much I trust Glassdoor, actually I do know, I don't believe a word they say.

The medical labs i worked for were out-sourcing large amounts of their development work to Pakistan, India, Egypt, Mexico and Colombia. Guess how much they were being paid, go on, guess. $1000 a month, I had seen the accounting paperwork where we paid them as "consultants".

I have 2 college degrees and the IT field is in such shambles I was recently offered a manager position at $16 an hour and another job for zero dollars a week, i was offered a piece of any future profits the company may make.

The economy is in shambles, if you have a good paying job I suggest you pucker up and kiss everyone's ass as long and as hard as you can.

[sarmad]

How exactly did that work? Did you have to push the shift key and the arrow if you wanted the opposite direction?

Yup, exactly.

[skeevy420]

There's actually two losers in that scenario, namely System76 and KDE that have just given away a laptop for free.

I could understand if there was a Keynesian Multiplier style effect from giving away free laptops but if free software, which doesn't cost them a thing, doesn't stimulate demand, this will only hurt them financially.

Good try though.

If either company can't afford $1300 in sponsored content or paid advertisements then they probably shouldn't be in business. I'm using the retail price. The laptops probably cost the companies less than $1000 seeing as how the System76 Lemur Pro is $999 during the introductory period.

You might not know this, but Phoronix is source media. By "source media" I mean that other content producers source, copy/paste, steal, Michael's articles word for word; typos and all. Phoronix doing a promotion means 100 other places will advertise that Phoronix is doing a promotion about how if a person signs up for Phoronix Premium by 4/20/24 they might win a Linux laptop thanks to KDE and System76.

Michael gets more paying customers while KDE and System76 get a lot of internet buzz from the giveaways and the systems comparisons. It also means that Slimbook and System76 are able to get their names and products in front of more people. They can also use the benchmark results in their product advertisements. Giving them away to hopefully active users means there's always that forum person who can comment "I have a *System76 or Slimboot* laptop it's the best Linux laptop I've ever had." to drum up word of mouth sales. I like to think that a lot of us here have drummed up some AMD GPU sales for Linux users.

Note that I'm intentionally not bringing up comparing them with similar generation Intel laptops. It's a bit of a conflict of interest on the System76 side since they also sell Intel products. They just happen to both sell similarly spec'd AMD laptops.

What you didn't consider, and me until now, is that they'd potentially have to pay Michael to run the benchmarks and run the giveaway since it will cost him the most time and money of all. For them it's a product and shipping fees. For Michael it's running benchmarks for up to a week, writing about it, and then some more shipping fees.

4/20/24 just happens to have 420 forwards and backwards. When you're two high you have to give away two laptops .

System76 is from Colorado so they should do the double 420 giveaway just for shits and giggles.

[anda_skoa]

What i do know from working in the medical field for over 15 years, 5 for two hospitals and 10 for 2 medical labs, including one of the largest labs in the country, is that Linux use in the corporate world is greatly exaggerated by its proponents.

Where i saw Linux was in server use, such as Web Servers and in NVIDIA DGX servers that featured Ubuntu.

I have seen Ubuntu based workstations in patient service centers, but that was rare and I saw Ubuntu use for sales people working overseas.

It's all the case where you don't see it.

Almost every device that has more computing need than what a micro controller can do is running some form of embedded Linux (often a customer specific configuration based on Yocto).

A modern surgery can even have Linux running the lighting system.

[partcyborg]

And for the record, i don't think any software developer is making 200k a year, MS only pays about 125k.

Showing once again you are making it up as you go along. PLENTY of developers (myself included) make >$200k/year. It depends partly on your level on the job ladder but mostly on the cost of living in your area.

Microsoft might pay $125k/y to engineers in India or something, but in the Bay Area California that won't even get you someone fresh out of school

[vient]

Configured something resembling my MSI Prestige 16 with QHD panel https://www.newegg.com/stellar-gray-...82E16834156576, got a price around $1800 (there is no 32GB option so I extrapolated from 24GB and 40GB prices). MSI costs $1400, has normal (in a sense) keyboard with numpad, 1440p screen. Yes, it also has Windows preinstalled which I guess is why you get a $400 discount.

Asus also has some nice offerings with 155H for $1300-1500

Also wonder if system76 will patch Intel Thread Director support in their kernel (ITD directly affects scheduler on such hybrid CPUs). It is not yet in mainline and one wonders when it will finally be there. I use CachyOS kernel on Ubuntu 24.04 for this reason.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

The CTO tried to give him the song and dance about support contracts and similar bull and the CEO asked if the company didn't have a fully staffed IT department that could build and support a system with these specs for less money.

You can guess what happened, the parts were ordered from Amazon and the system was built in-house.

I would have done the same thing, our Linux Sys Admin was making 90 grand a year, he could support one more server?

And for the record, i don't think any software developer is making 200k a year, MS only pays about 125k.

I think you are extrapolating your experience in a narrow field in a way that doesn't apply in general. I've worked for startups and several multi-billion dollar megacorps. None of them have ever cobbled together entire systems with parts off Amazon. Even the startups making less than $50M/year had contracts with one of the big OEMs like Dell / HP / Lenovo / Apple, and all of the basic office / developer systems were from them. Servers could be from them or a host of other enterprise server focused OEMS.

Also, you are waaaaay out of date on your software dev salary. I work for a different megacorp, but our college hire devs make that much in total comp. People in these threads don't have to guess about this stuff. Glassdoor tends to have thousands of salaries submitted for these roles at large companies like MS.

Senior software developers at Microsoft...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Senior-Software-Developer-Salaries-E1651_D_KO10,35.htm

And that's just the employee's total comp. The loaded cost is much higher to the employer once you factor in insurance and everything else.

[chocolate]

4) They spend 18+ months developing a new DE from scratch, only to desire to give it away for free to everyone so that other distros can create spins featuring COSMIC. Best part? In their mind they think the will somehow stimulate demand for their hardware, LOL!

Kinda makes sense to me tbh. Heck, their distro works better than most other distros even outside of their hardware, so I'm genuinely curious what their offerings may be, considering they surely have better firmware. Granted, I'm just one random guy from spaghettistan. But theoretically, if I were to work remotely for, say, a US employer that sends its employees their preferred hardware, I agree with others that I'd choose s76 in a heartbeat.
Still sounds like a weird idea, I agree, but beautifully so.

[sophisticles]

Their business model is to sell to people who use Linux at work, on computers provided by their employer. The difference of $1,000 for an employer who pays a software developer $200k a year isn't much, and especially so if it makes that employee more productive. And, guess what, they make enough money to develop all of those projects you mentioned (Cosmic, Redox, Pop OS...). Their business model is clearly working.

We do not know if their business model is working because they are not a publicly traded company or a charity that has to file paperwork that can be scrutinized by the public.

What i do know from working in the medical field for over 15 years, 5 for two hospitals and 10 for 2 medical labs, including one of the largest labs in the country, is that Linux use in the corporate world is greatly exaggerated by its proponents.

Where i saw Linux was in server use, such as Web Servers and in NVIDIA DGX servers that featured Ubuntu.

I have seen Ubuntu based workstations in patient service centers, but that was rare and I saw Ubuntu use for sales people working overseas.

Everything else was predominantly Windows.

In fact, i remember an instance in the large labs I worked at where a requisition was made for a high end Linux server that was going to be used for development purposes, the department manager approved it, a PO request was sent to accounting to fund the purchase, accounting nixed it and sent it up the chain for confirmation, our CEO got wind of it and in a meeting that i was in asked the CTO why we were buying a 40 thousand dollar Linux server from an outside vendor.

The CTO tried to give him the song and dance about support contracts and similar bull and the CEO asked if the company didn't have a fully staffed IT department that could build and support a system with these specs for less money.

You can guess what happened, the parts were ordered from Amazon and the system was built in-house.

I would have done the same thing, our Linux Sys Admin was making 90 grand a year, he could support one more server?

And for the record, i don't think any software developer is making 200k a year, MS only pays about 125k.

[sophisticles]

At least they didn't go full Commodore 64 style though

image.png

How exactly did that work? Did you have to push the shift key and the arrow if you wanted the opposite direction?