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I would like Framework to go the System76 route and adopt a Linux distro that they can very finely tune for the Framework laptop. Macbooks have the benefit of M

I would like Framework to go the System76 route and adopt a Linux distro that they can very finely tune for the Framework laptop. Macbooks have the benefit of MacOS being completely vertically integrated. I don't see Framework putting this level of effort in, even on the OEM Windows side of things like other OEMs such as Dell do. Their software needs to be better.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
It’d be nice, but keeping a team of engineers capable of that sort of low-level work can’t be cheap, so it seems unlikely.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Pennywise, pound foolish, unfortunately, but more than that, companies that do hardware and software well are few and far between, and the ones that do tend to be highly valued. AMD famously does value software much, or pay their software developers relatively well.
  - asoneth 1y ago
    Is it pound foolish, or just a rational business decision? Let's say they ship 100k laptops per year. Let's say they could meaningfully improve battery life with a team of half-dozen excellent software engineers, which would cost on the order of a few million a year. For the sake of argument, let's say ~$3M/yr. That increases the price per laptop by ~$30 on average. That's a premium I'd pay for improved efficiency, but judging by the comments here and elsewhere, the premium they're already charging above the raw component prices seems to be at the upper end of what most people are willing to pay. It's fiendishly difficult to become the next Apple, Tesla, Nintendo, or Valve with thick enough margins on your hardware (or services) to afford excellent software engineering teams, so it makes sense that so few hardware companies attempt it, and many who try eventually give up.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      It's a much more interesting question when framed with numbers! But let's say they ship 500k main boards (since it doesn't need to be a totally assembled laptop to benefit), and it only costs $300k, not $3 million (and a couple laptops) to the right eastern European software developer to perfectly tune some Linux config files. Then it's only $1.50 per laptop, and they could arguably just eat that cost. Framework doesn't have to spend enough to be the next Apple (nor do they have the resources to be), they just need to spend enough to not be so desperately far behind Dell. The explanation makes sense in isolation, it just seems like a local maxima if you zoom out.
      - asoneth 1y ago
        Sure, it totally depends on specifics! Only Framework knows how many mainboards they sell per year and can make an educated guess at how many of them end up running Linux. Also, note that Framework already employs at least one person[1] working full time on Linux compatibility and support, so at least some of the low-hanging fruit may have already been picked. I'm sure they could spend an additional $300k, $3M, $30M, or more on improving Linux efficiency. I can't estimate what the benefit would be at each of those levels, nor do I know what the price impact would be, nor the sales impact. I don't know what they currently spend on Linux support except that it's at least one FTE. We don't have enough information to answer or even meaningfully estimate most of these questions. I'm not saying they're making good decisions or bad decisions with respect to Linux support, I'm just saying neither of us have enough information to know. [1] https://matthartley.com https://matthartley.com who was previously at System 76
    - the_real_cher 1y ago
      I think almost anyone on earth would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life on a modular, repairable, hardware up gradable, Linux box. Apple at the moment has zero competitors for upscale laptops and this would make System76 the only other alternative for a quality hardware machine. The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers. It would be the default goto box for a modern alternative to Mac much like Lenovo used to be a decade ago before MBA enshittification set in there. Battery life is the ONE thing preventing myself and many others from pulling the trigger on a System76 and I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro for an alternative to a macbook with equivalent battery life but linux. Plus PopOs is open source so there could be cross pollination with the Linux team on battery life optimization which would reap massive benefits for the Linux ecosystem as a whole and push more people towards Linux. Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed
bigyabai 1y ago
Funny thing is, a lot of the System76 tweaks aren't specific to their system (or OS) at all. One popular example is the system76-scheduler, which you can install on pretty much any hardware or distro for the same responsiveness improvements: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.
- 9283409232 1y ago
  You may be misunderstanding me or I'm not explaining myself properly. I don't want them to vertically integrate in the same way that Apple does, I want them to invest more on the software side by selecting a distro and building around it. If they can piggyback on popOS then great but they need to invest in software.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing. What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.
const_cast 1y ago
I don't think this is what makes Apple jump ahead of the competition. M-series is a low-wattage SOC. I recently bought a lunar lake laptop, which is a similar design but x86. I'm easily getting 12+ hours on Linux and performance is superb. Turns out all it takes is putting everything on the chip and then running it at 15 watts. Which, I think, also proves you do NOT need ARM for such low wattage with acceptable performance. You just need really new production lines and the right chip design.
- vizzier 1y ago
  Not entirely convinced its just hardware as we're seeing from the now direct comparisons between windows and steamos. [1] Linux based SteamOS is thrashing windows in both gaming performance and using less battery to do it. https://www.techspot.com/news/108059-steamos-significantly-improves-performance-battery-life-lenovo-legion.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108059-steamos-significantly-i...
  - const_cast 1y ago
    I would agree it's not just hardware, software also plays a role. Tons of background services connected to the internet are going to drain battery like crazy, we learned this with mobile phones a decade ago. However, I'm not convinced MacOS is much better than Windows here. I'm sure It's a little bit better though - I've never seen MacOS pinned at 100% CPU usage doing seemingly nothing.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

It’d be nice, but keeping a team of engineers capable of that sort of low-level work can’t be cheap, so it seems unlikely.

fragmede 1y ago
Pennywise, pound foolish, unfortunately, but more than that, companies that do hardware and software well are few and far between, and the ones that do tend to be highly valued. AMD famously does value software much, or pay their software developers relatively well.
- asoneth 1y ago
  Is it pound foolish, or just a rational business decision? Let's say they ship 100k laptops per year. Let's say they could meaningfully improve battery life with a team of half-dozen excellent software engineers, which would cost on the order of a few million a year. For the sake of argument, let's say ~$3M/yr. That increases the price per laptop by ~$30 on average. That's a premium I'd pay for improved efficiency, but judging by the comments here and elsewhere, the premium they're already charging above the raw component prices seems to be at the upper end of what most people are willing to pay. It's fiendishly difficult to become the next Apple, Tesla, Nintendo, or Valve with thick enough margins on your hardware (or services) to afford excellent software engineering teams, so it makes sense that so few hardware companies attempt it, and many who try eventually give up.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    It's a much more interesting question when framed with numbers! But let's say they ship 500k main boards (since it doesn't need to be a totally assembled laptop to benefit), and it only costs $300k, not $3 million (and a couple laptops) to the right eastern European software developer to perfectly tune some Linux config files. Then it's only $1.50 per laptop, and they could arguably just eat that cost. Framework doesn't have to spend enough to be the next Apple (nor do they have the resources to be), they just need to spend enough to not be so desperately far behind Dell. The explanation makes sense in isolation, it just seems like a local maxima if you zoom out.
    - asoneth 1y ago
      Sure, it totally depends on specifics! Only Framework knows how many mainboards they sell per year and can make an educated guess at how many of them end up running Linux. Also, note that Framework already employs at least one person[1] working full time on Linux compatibility and support, so at least some of the low-hanging fruit may have already been picked. I'm sure they could spend an additional $300k, $3M, $30M, or more on improving Linux efficiency. I can't estimate what the benefit would be at each of those levels, nor do I know what the price impact would be, nor the sales impact. I don't know what they currently spend on Linux support except that it's at least one FTE. We don't have enough information to answer or even meaningfully estimate most of these questions. I'm not saying they're making good decisions or bad decisions with respect to Linux support, I'm just saying neither of us have enough information to know. [1] https://matthartley.com https://matthartley.com who was previously at System 76
  - the_real_cher 1y ago
    I think almost anyone on earth would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life on a modular, repairable, hardware up gradable, Linux box. Apple at the moment has zero competitors for upscale laptops and this would make System76 the only other alternative for a quality hardware machine. The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers. It would be the default goto box for a modern alternative to Mac much like Lenovo used to be a decade ago before MBA enshittification set in there. Battery life is the ONE thing preventing myself and many others from pulling the trigger on a System76 and I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro for an alternative to a macbook with equivalent battery life but linux. Plus PopOs is open source so there could be cross pollination with the Linux team on battery life optimization which would reap massive benefits for the Linux ecosystem as a whole and push more people towards Linux. Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed

bigyabai 1y ago

Funny thing is, a lot of the System76 tweaks aren't specific to their system (or OS) at all. One popular example is the system76-scheduler, which you can install on pretty much any hardware or distro for the same responsiveness improvements: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.

9283409232 1y ago
You may be misunderstanding me or I'm not explaining myself properly. I don't want them to vertically integrate in the same way that Apple does, I want them to invest more on the software side by selecting a distro and building around it. If they can piggyback on popOS then great but they need to invest in software.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing. What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.

const_cast 1y ago

I don't think this is what makes Apple jump ahead of the competition. M-series is a low-wattage SOC. I recently bought a lunar lake laptop, which is a similar design but x86. I'm easily getting 12+ hours on Linux and performance is superb. Turns out all it takes is putting everything on the chip and then running it at 15 watts. Which, I think, also proves you do NOT need ARM for such low wattage with acceptable performance. You just need really new production lines and the right chip design.

vizzier 1y ago
Not entirely convinced its just hardware as we're seeing from the now direct comparisons between windows and steamos. [1] Linux based SteamOS is thrashing windows in both gaming performance and using less battery to do it. https://www.techspot.com/news/108059-steamos-significantly-improves-performance-battery-life-lenovo-legion.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108059-steamos-significantly-i...
- const_cast 1y ago
  I would agree it's not just hardware, software also plays a role. Tons of background services connected to the internet are going to drain battery like crazy, we learned this with mobile phones a decade ago. However, I'm not convinced MacOS is much better than Windows here. I'm sure It's a little bit better though - I've never seen MacOS pinned at 100% CPU usage doing seemingly nothing.