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.

The company has been running their own System76 Firmware Service as an alternative to Fwupd while now they have introduced a new Firmware Manager project that supports updating both from LVFS and from the System76-Firmware services. The Firmware Manager project is GTK-based, Wayland-compatible, and catered towards users of their Pop!_OS operating system but also other Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux distributions.

One of their ongoing issues with Fwupd was that it's tied into either GNOME Software or KDE Discover while they have wanted their own independent GTK application for managing firmware separate from those desktop specific "app store" programs. On Pop!_OS, the Firmware Manager is integrated into GNOME Settings under a new panel.

The System76 Firmware Manager is written in the Rust programming language and the company is open to the community writing other non-GTK front-ends for it. More details on their firmware management efforts via this blog post.