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System76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware
- Yhippa 8y agoDoes anyone have any detail about this device? From what I've read it seems really cool. Just wish there was something to chew on before the big reveal.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 8y agoThere's a little bit of info here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=System76-Thelio-Next-Week https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=System76... The marketing seems to hint at premium product / premium price.
- jchw 8y agoI'm very excited for this. I have a pretty nasty love/hate relationship with my personal Thinkpad P51. It's a fantastic device on paper, and the build quality is great to match, but... I try to boot Linux and I remember why Linus once gave Nvidia the finger all over again. Even on Thinkpad, issues you wouldn't see with nearly any Linux desktop system crop up when Optimus is thrown into the mix. Nouveau actually outperforms proprietary Nvidia drivers in certain circumstances, which had me extraordinarily confused. It would be nice to boot into a laptop actually designed to use Linux from the ground up. And I don't mean what Dell does - I'm grateful for what they do, but I really want unmodified Linux to work as well on my laptop as it does on nearly any desktop I've built. System76, with both properties that they are going open with firmware and designs, AND building entirely for Linux, seems perfect to me. I wonder a lot about their stated goal of a completely open compute platform. Sure, there's ISAs like RISC-V on the horizon, but I get the feeling many components like GPUs are quite far away from having open source equivalents that can act as drop-in replacements. There's a whole lot more than raw computation in modern CPUs and certainly more in the motherboard. Id still be moderately pleased with a "mostly" open platform, which is better than today where your choices are basically Lemote Yeeloong or something useful but nearly entirely closed off.
- shmerl 8y agoAvoid Optimus like a plague if you are using Linux. There are quite decent Thinkpads with Ryzen/Vega APUs these days (like A485) which should work fine with upstream kernel and Mesa. But of course it's still Lenovo, so various blobs like UEFI remain.
- techntoke 8y agoWhile I agree generally on most distros, it works really well with Arch and is pretty easy to setup: - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME
- jchw 8y agoArch Linux is nearly entirely unusable with this Thinkpad, which is a shame since that's my distro of choice usually. I fiddled with drivers for a good while but was getting severe issues hanging with proprietary Nvidia, and Nouveau simply crashed on boot. I'm currently on Fedora, which is one of the few distros that seemed to work without crashing all the time.
- blacksoil 8y agoMost painless config for me is to enable Nvidia only when I really need it. Say when I need to run a graphic-heavy application I spawn up a new X11 process running atop Nvidia drivers. For daily stuffs, I stick with Intel drivers
- Shikadi 8y agoI got Arch working fine on a Thinkpad with a GTX 900m series card. I just followed the guide for bumblebee. This was a good number of years ago though, but it still works with updates and all
- shmerl 8y agoNvidia blob doesn't really support PRIME properly. You can't use integrated GPU (Intel) to run your DE, while offloading specific heavy tasks to discrete one (Nvidia) which is kind of the main point. If you want to use PRIME, stick to AMD / Mesa.
- xenadu02 8y agoHow are they not going to go out of business when cheap Chinese competitors copy their open source design?
- mcny 8y agoNot that I know anything about manufacturing but from outside it looks like Apple's secrecy hasn't exactly prevented Chinese competitors from copying either.
- xienze 8y agoWell that’s the thing, once you start manufacturing something in China, you’re sunk. Doesn’t matter who you are, your IP is going to be stolen, midnight shifts will produce extra units that won’t be going to you, etc.
- syntaxing 8y agoGood question. So many companies go out of business because of Chinese competitors undermining the R&D margins. But then again, somehow companies like Prusa Research have steadily increased in sales even after three years of Chinese kits flooding the market before he (Prusa) even started his company. I hope it's the same for System76.
- antt 8y agoI hadn't heard of Prusa Research before, which is odd considering I seem to own a 3d printer that's been manufactured by them. I know where I will be getting my first sls 3d printer from.
- lostapathy 8y agoI think you mean SLA printer? Prusa has nothing in the pipeline for sls, but they do sla.
- wmf 8y agoI think this misunderstands System76's business. Today they are selling rebranded Clevo laptops so they are already facing cheap Chinese competitors... and yet they stay in business because what they are really selling is Linux certification, branding, support, warranty, etc.
- syntaxing 8y agoPretty excited but part of me is kind of disappointed that the unit is a desktop rather than a laptop (from the teaser pics)
- dorfsmay 8y agoI would love to support them, but I need a trackpoint and 3 buttons.
- KerrickStaley 8y agoThe three physical buttons are an anti-feature for me personally, because they reduce the size of the trackpad. And the trackpoint is a net neutral. I've used ThinkPads on and off for years and I still feel like a trackpad is more efficient than a trackpoint.
- MisterTea 8y agoUgh, how do you even begin to use rio? ;p
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI like the ThinkPads best where the size of the touchpad/trackpoint is reduced to the logical extreme. (It wasn't until I discovered ThinkPads, and specifically TrackPoints, that I could use a laptop as a "lap" top. I just unplug the touchpad on models which have 'em as I'll only ever touch it by mistake.)
- dorfsmay 8y agoTo each their own style. I am much more efficient with a track pad and 3 buttons. I wish they offered that as an option on their laptop line. A smaller touchpad is better for my workflow as I only use them for 2-finger scrolling and it leaves more space for the keyboard.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoSomething like this (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/accessories-and-monitors/keyboards-and-mice/keyboards/KEYBOARD-US-English/p/0B47189 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/accessories-and-monitors/keyboa...) might work for you. They're definitely building a "desktop" desktop, not a laptop, and from the description of 128-768gb ECC RAM/46-86TB storage, it sounds like the higher-end models will be rackmount form factors.
- wmf 8y agoIn other words, the case is open and manufactured in the US while the part the matters—the motherboard—is proprietary and made in China.
- kiwidrew 8y agoBut they've actually gone one step further than just manufacturing their own case: the "Thelio Io" board that they mention looks very much like a replacement for (part of) the motherboard's "embedded controller" (EC) functionality, and all of the design files and source code [1] certainly seems to meet the criteria to be called open hardware with open source firmware. For some context, the EC in most laptops is usually a highly proprietary ASIC (good luck even finding a datasheet) running a blob of proprietary firmware on an 8051 core. It's responsible for handling the power and lid switches, sequencing the powering on and off of the main system CPU, controlling fan speed and temperature sensors, etc. [1] https://github.com/system76/thelio-io https://github.com/system76/thelio-io
- jmvoodoo 8y agoWhat Carl and co are doing here is hard, and more than most PC manufacturers in the US are doing. Is it perfect? Of course not but they are doing the best they can given their resources. Given more I have no doubt they would do more. Please keep that in mind.
- xienze 8y agoGotta start somewhere. Kudos to them for actually trying to manufacture something in the US instead of throwing up their hands and saying “those jobs aren’t coming back.”
- donbright 8y agoDon't worry, I'm sure that the Aluminum smelter that provides their sheet has carefully weeded out all the "non-American" aluminum atoms. Also each Steel molecule must declare that it is not, and never has been, a member of any communist party. The plastic? Well, all of the petroleum feed stock comes from American-grown Rocky Mountain Plastic Trees.
- antoineMoPa 8y agoAs soon as I'm not a student anymore and have a career, I buy one. Before then, any laptop I buy will be under 450$ CAD.
- captn3m0 8y agoI bought the Galago Pro in my last year of college from my CTF winnings. Worked out great.
- elliottlocke 8y agoHow's the battery life on that?
- captn3m0 8y agoThe battery swelled just after the end of first year, so I had to replace it. The replacement still gives me around 2-3 hrs depending on usage. This is the old Galago Pro (I reviewed it at [0]), not the new aluminium one. [0]: https://captnemo.in/blog/2014/07/04/galago-ultra-pro-review/ https://captnemo.in/blog/2014/07/04/galago-ultra-pro-review/
- hardwaresofton 8y agoIf anyone from System76 is reading this thread, I just want you to know that the Oryx Pro is my endgame -- I plan to buy it ASAP replace my desktop and laptop as soon as I can get my hands on one. I am a stan of your business.
- faissaloo 8y agoI have one and it's an abdolute beast.
- hardwaresofton 8y agoCould you comment on the amount of sound it makes/how notable it is? Maybe with a decibel meter app or something?
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoI found a review here: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/review-system76-oryx-pro https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/review-system76-oryx-pr... No mention of machine noise, just that the speakers were not impressive.
- faissaloo 8y agoIt varies alot, it's noticably loud when the GPU is enabled, when I'm on integrated graphics it's usually not noticable.
- merb 8y agowell i would prefer some docking stations instead of what they offer. (and a usb-c loading cable)
- hardwaresofton 8y agoI hear this, but honestly the fact that they have enough graphical power and the ports to power two monitors is enough to put the oryx pro in a category of it's own. I looked around for a bit and no other company had the combination of ports, dual monitor support, OS alignment, ridiculously powerful specs, and price (even if it's kinda high). The only thing that could possibly put me off is reliability or maybe weight/bulkiness, but it's almost an ultrabook form factor.
- Animats 8y agoAt our facility, we take in US-sourced sheet metal, aluminum extrusions, and other raw materials. ... We use components that we source outside the US, like the motherboard, memory, and drives. So these guys just make the case. What's the point? You're not going to get a more secure machine that way.
- celrod 8y agoOver on Phoronix, folks seem to have been much more excited about the Talos II by Raptor Computing Systems. They come with IBM POWER9 CPUs. "The Talos™ II mainboard is the first modern (post-2013), owner-controllable, workstation- and enterprise-class mainboard. Built around the brand-new IBM POWER9 processor, and leveraging Linux and OpenPOWER™ technology, Talos™ II allows you to secure your data without sacrificing performance. Designed with a fully owner-controlled CPU domain, you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Talos™ II mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode. This is an unprecedented level of access for any modern workstation- or enterprise-class machine, and one that is increasingly needed to assure safety and compliance with new regulations, such as the EU's GDPR. " https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html While also not 100% open, it sounds like a lot more important bits are. The Talos machines sure are pricey though.
- chrsw 8y agoPeople claim to want open hardware and the security you get from not being forced to trust a variety of companies. But then when it's time to put their money down suddenly freedom is too expensive. This is exactly why we've arrived in this position in the first place.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoTalos is following the Tesla Master Plan. You can't afford a Tesla Roadster? That's fine, the people who can will buy it, that covers the R&D and the next model will be cheaper.
- nine_k 8y ago
- baybal2 8y agoElectronics manufacturing is already some of the most automated industry around, second only to microelectronics. Human labour adds just few percents to the end product's value, it can easily be doubled and tripled without the market ever noticing. The opinion that it never took of in USA because of Chinese undercut you on labour doesn't hold water. No, automation will not do nothing about America giving you 100 times more reasons to not to do manufacturing there other than the cost of labour.
- rooam-dev 8y agoAny chance to get a >= 15" model with a centered keyboard? In not so distant future maybe? :)
- matart 8y agoThis would be amazing! Not a fan of the numpad on my laptop.
- justinjlynn 8y agoThese systems still rely on closed, untrustworthy x86 hardware and mainboard implementations. I'd hardly call it more open than anything Purism provide, except perhaps for the custom case and backplane (which isn't much, in terms of the system design) That said, it's a step forward. I look forward to seeing what System76 do next.
- justinjlynn 8y agoI forgot to mention - If you're looking for a far more open source system (you get mainboard schematics, firmware is open source, complete documentation all the way down to the processor configuration registers, and the last device firmware blob (non-cpu-loaded mainboard device, assuming you don't need the optional SAS controller) - the built-in ethernet chipset - is almost completely reverse engineered) you might take a look at the Talos (and soon Blackbird) line of systems from Raptor Computing Systems. Though, do note that it's relatively expensive and it's POWER9 (PowerPC 64 endian-switchable). Also, if it's important, the mainboard and processor are fabbed in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries#Acquisition_of_IBM's_chip-manufacturing_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries#Acquisition_of...
- bo1024 8y ago- I agree that eliminating those closed components is a good goal - I think we should avoid setting the main bar for system76 at purism or vice versa. I say this as a big Purism fan, reading this post is very exciting for all fans of openness in computing.
- justinjlynn 8y agoOh, I agree. The bar shouldn't be set any lower than completely open systems. Unfortunately, while they remain on x86 - and Intel and/or AMD refuse to manufacture chips without the Management Engine or the Platform Security Processor or provide documentation - they'll always be less open than alternative architecture implementations like RISC-V's SiFive or OpenPOWER's IBM POWER and their vendors/integrators like Raptor Computing Systems.
- Uhrheber 8y agoAnd then the NSA intercepts your shiny new open hardware on the way to the customer, and inserts some nasty closed source spying device.
- deno 8y agoIf you’re targeted by NSA you are going to lose anyway. Sanity, if nothing else.
- dragosmocrii 8y agoI bought a Gazelle Pro in 2011 and the thing still works great(paid 1600$ at the time). I only upgraded the RAM from 8 to 16 GB and put in an SSD. Last year I was considering buying the Oryx, but since the Gazelle works so great, I don't see any need for new purchases. I never had any issues. Only game I played was LoL, and it worked smoothly at highest settings.
- hosh 8y agoHow are the trackpad on the system76 laptops? Any as good as the MBP? or at least as good as the Dell XPS13?
- jimnotgym 8y ago> Then we tried finding factory space in Colorado. That was much harder than expected and it took a full year. This is amongst the things stacked against people trying to do business in the UK. I know a distributor that wanted a small warehouse with office space. They had the capital to buy and build. But in the ex- industrial that land of the UK no land could be found, despite the acres of tumble down old factories! There is a government controlled project for anyone wanting to build a huge factory, but nothing smaller. One of the problems in the UK is land-banking and a tax system that encourages you to invest in land and leave it as wasteground.
- kirvyteo 8y ago> UK is land-banking and a tax system that encourages you to invest in land and leave it as wasteground. How and why does that work?
- pjc50 8y agoA good summary: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-housing-crisis-developers-not-building-land-banking https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-... The Guardian argues that it's effectively cartelisation of building land by restricting the rate of building. There is a discussion of whether or not planning permission is a limiting factor - I think this is the main reason why you get almost no individual building in the UK, it's a lot of work to get the approvals so it's only worth doing on a big site for lots of houses. There's no regular tax on unused land, and there is a tax on selling it, so there's a big incentive to just sit on it. I'd much rather see those two positions reversed. Not to mention the whole pseudo-property-tax system for funding local government needs drastic reform.
- growlist 8y agoI wouldn't trust the Guardian alone.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
- CodeArtisan 8y ago>We’ll continue to open source more functionality. Eventually, all that will be left are proprietary hardware initialization bits and convincing Intel and AMD to open up there. We think there’s reason for optimism. Intel contributes lots of code to Linux and AMD graphics drivers are open source already. Maybe open hardware is next for them. Let’s keep pushing. Even if AMD would like to, they probably could not because of cross-licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-licensing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236705/dex102.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
- hawski 8y agoI may sound like a broken record, but I'm hoping for a laptop with NXP's iMX8M. The same SoC that will be in Purism Libre 5. Mainline kernel with open source GPU drivers. Etnaviv may need more work, but with more hardware available it will be easier, as more work could be shared.
- jbf1001 8y agoI've not heard of Purism before. Have you ever owned any of their products and how was your experience?
- stamps 8y agoI have their latest Librem 13. I bought the base model and upgraded it with 16gb of RAM (wish I could have done 32gb), 1TB NVMe, and a 1TB SATA SSD. So far it is great. I've been using it as my daily driver for about 6 months with Manjaro. I get about 8 hours of battery life unless I'm running my Windows VM needed for some work tasks. Otherwise it's just firefox, slack-cli, thunderbird, and webstorm.
- agumonkey 8y agoWeren't patents designed because they were beneficial to society (and to people who had ideas) ? I think these days patents are mostly high resistance and very few social value.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoIts because the old system prior to patents was the guild system. The biggest problem with guilds was the massive amount of information lost. So the balance was "tell is how you did it clearly, and you get protections for 20 years-ish". Turns out the description of what and how is easily games with horrendous legalese language.
- agumonkey 8y agoThis is why I believe that open hardware could be a solution nowadays. 100 years ago, a patent had lots of benefits. Today there's more side effects than social value. We could share, solve, enjoy more buy having a bit of reusable open parts and machines.
- yoginth 8y agoWoah!
- luord 8y agoI was having doubts on buying a System76 machine next, this lessened those doubts significantly.
- holmberd 8y agoI hope they have a better battery this time around.
- bovermyer 8y agoI've been eyeing a Meerkat for awhile now. Is there going to be a Thelios equivalent?
- swlkr 8y agoI'm pretty excited about system76 and purism, hoping for a linux based alternative to the macbook pro
- mevile 8y agoIt's awesome that they're doing all this within the US but I tried to design an Oryx yesterday I just wanted a nice graphics card, 32gb of ram and the 1tb ssd and it quickly approached Apple prices. I understand the underlying components aren't cheap but I don't think companies that aren't operating at Apple's scale, who has some of the brightest engineering hardware and software minds in the world, have any business charging close to $3k for a laptop for similar specs. I'm guessing the cost is due to being based in the US. I just want a nice laptop for a reasonable cost, I'm not concerned where it's built. Where a laptop was made doesn't make any difference to how I use it or what it does for me. If System76 is close to Apple prices for similar specs I might as well just buy a Macbook Pro.
- cwyers 8y agoScale provides, well, economies of scale. If you want to buy from a smaller outfit, then expect to not get economies of scale.
- illumin8 8y agoThere is a reason Apple charges those prices. Components like 16GB dual channel DDR4 SO-DIMMs, Nvidia 1070GTX w/ 8GB RAM, 4K HiDPI/retina displays, and NVMe SSDs that can do 3500MB/sec. are not cheap. Here's an interesting exercise: Go to Newegg or Amazon and fill your shopping cart with all of the components you want in your system, then compare the price of all the components separately with the system price you get for a well engineered system that runs Linux flawlessly. If you are looking for 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD in a laptop, you are by definition an early adopter, and should expect to pay an early adopter penalty. If you want the sub-$500 notebook you're going to get the technology that early adopters were buying a few years ago.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoI'm not a hardware design guy. I did work as a QA engineer at Transmeta, a 90s/00s CPU company for 2.5 years. My sense of things was the hardest part of delivering CPUs was the manufacturing, not the design. Building a chip took several weeks, debugging hardware was hard, and thr feedback loop was relatively long. The best designed chip could be damn slow if manufacturing was not optimal at every step. I'd guess there's not much risk in opening up the chip designs, and it might even make chip design cheaper, faster, and higher quality. Building a fab that can build chips sounds hard no matter what you do. Am I speculating in the right direction?
- pkaye 8y agoIt all depends. If you are using existing IP, then the design part might be shorter. Conversely if you are using a proven process from a contact fab, you just need to follow their design rules and they will do all the manufacturing work for you. But companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia push the boundaries of everything. They have separate teams working in parallel on different aspects (design, fab, etc) and generations of products.
- wmf 8y agoThis thread isn't about CPUs, but... the hardest part of delivering CPUs was the manufacturing, not the design Now you basically have to outsource the manufacturing to TSMC and they are very good at what they do so in some sense that's not hard because you aren't doing it.
- moocowtruck 8y agosystem76.. i recently dropped 2600 on one; after a few months of use I can't say i'm that impressed, and running linux on it is still not that great.. I've since put windows 10 on for better performance and functionality..which i didn't think would be something i'd end up doing.. but here i am.. next time it's unlikely i'll go with them again; one killer feature i bought this was for the nvidia card, and it's difficult to even type when that thing gets going because the keys get so hot my fingers are like touching hot coals really i wish i could get my money back