Awesome news. I bought a Darter Pro back in March and the experience has been great. I was a little hesitant at first because I'm not a Linux expert, but their team puts a lot of effort into making sure stuff with Pop_Os "just works." It might not be quite as polished as a macbook, but it's a comparable product at half the price, plus I get to support open source. Thelio looks amazing and I'm excited to see what they can do in the laptop space.
The point is, now there is yet another distro out there as its own island, stealing resources and not contributing to the rest of the community (including Ubuntu)
What's stopping Ubuntu from just taking back the parts of Pop!_OS they want? Assuming they actually want anything from Pop!_OS to begin with.
To address your original point, I suspect it's more expensive and slower (at least, in the short term) to add features to someone else's distro than to fork it and keep building it out yourself.
Woops. I re-read my comment, and the "assuming they actually want anything from Pop!_OS to begin with" bit reads like an insult to Pop!_OS. My bad!
I just figure Canonical probably has a specific vision for Ubuntu (just like System76 surely has for Pop!_OS), so they don't necessarily want to pull in every feature from every downstream distro. The prevalence of purposed-focused distros is one of my favorite things about the Linux ecosystem.
I actually haven't used Pop!_OS yet, but it looks good and it's on my short list of distros to try. I didn't mean to imply anything negative about it.
So-called "Stealing" by creating a derivative work is specifically allowed, encouraged, and part and parcel of the nature of this kind of Open Source, community developed software.
I'll bet upstream is more-or-less welcoming of an additional (well funded?) stakeholder. The bug reports alone might be worth the effort, especially if System76 is triaging some.
I think you misunderstood me. Note my use of the word "resources"...
The number of FOSS contributers is not infitine. At some point we need to start working together instead of forking yet another marginally different copy.
I understand some diversity is good, but what popos adds could have been added to vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, if you feel that way) and benefitted many more.
When bugs get fixed in upstream projects, do they have to first land in Ubuntu and then filter down to Pop_os? Or does Pop_Os point directly at Ubuntu repositories?
> but their team puts a lot of effort into making sure stuff with Pop_Os "just works."
I don't personally use it, but I've heard of people actually using it on other hardware just because the system is supposedly so polished. And maybe because it has better support for proprietary firmware? I forget.
I installed it because it had great support for Nvidia drivers. It was painless when I installed it with my GTX1080 - IIRC I was able to get Keras-GPU working in minutes.
One of the reasons I didn't get a System76 machine was because of how Pop!_os is branded. Everything about its branding, from the name itself to even the footer background on the website looks like a complete joke to me.
Of course, maybe there is a demographic that is in to this sort of branding, but I bet it's more of a detriment to overall sales than anything.
Is the OS as full of seconds-long bouncy animations and bubble letter finds as the branding and website makes it look? If so, can animations be reduced or disabled?
That might actually be a reason to get a system76 machine, since I expect that the stock OS can be replaced with very few issues. Debian GNU/Linux is a lot leaner and meaner than Ubuntu or PopOS (which don't seem to differ significantly in their branding anyway).
(Even Fedora or CentOS are not nearly as comfortable to use in my experience, although they might be preferable in other ways!)
You can select either Ubuntu LTS or POP!_OS when building a System76 computer.
I built one with PoPOS (however you spell it) about 6-8 months ago and absolutely love it. I've previously used Xubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora and PoP!OS had a lot of the things everyone installed already taken care of and the UI is useful, but minimalistic.
Please consider adding an Ultranav-like pointing device and an API for the battery-controlling EC (start/stop charging thresholds - unless you already have that). FWIW those are the only things that are keeping me glued to the Thinkpad line.
I came here to say the same thing about the Trackpoint. That, the ruggedness, and the relative ease of repairs is why I have been using Thinkpads for close to 20 years.
Better performance for the same footprint as x86. Sadly they would not save much money as the POWER support ecosystem is manufactured in lower volumes so it costs more per chip.
As with all processors you can underclock it to reduce power demand. And since power is proportional to the square of the frequency you don't have to underclock it very much to get a good benefit in terms of power.
Which is great if you're going to design your own high-performance CPU core, which uhhhh very few organizations in the world are capable of.
If you're a downstream consumer, especially so far downstream that you're just buying a pre-made chip and putting it onto a board like System76 would, the ISA royalty means very little to you.
My impression is that POWER is more suitable for desktop computing. Many people would like access to a non-x86 portable device (with, say, 64gb ECC RAM and great I/O.)
I don't know how well the POWER line has progressed since say 2004ish and ARM sure is coming up, but if you intend to use a lot of (fast) I/O and virtualization on your portable workstation laptop it seems to me that POWER would be a great alternative, although surely at a nice price premium over the various ARM ISAs.
ARM on the other hand seems to thrive on the other end of the spectrum--low power consumption and inexpensive. Wouldn't most solutions require that you cram the IO subsystems into the silicon SoC package?
I reckon this kind of thing would eat your power/cost advantages back into the x86 realm.
> ARM on the other hand seems to thrive on the other end of the spectrum--low power consumption and inexpensive
Tell that to the Fujitsu people building the A64fx chip. (Which by the way turns out uses HBM for system memory. I was dreaming of AMD doing this!!) Or even just to Marvell/Cavium :)
I mean, it does thrive in low-power applications, but it's by no means tied to them. A lot of companies going for ARM in the datacenter now: Marvell, Ampere, Huawei, NXP, Mellanox… and Amazon!
> I don't know how well the POWER line has progressed since say 2004ish
Well, IBM has been building big, powerful and relatively expensive chips. NXP has been slowly sort of getting off the POWER ISA and embracing ARM more.
> Wouldn't most solutions require that you cram the IO subsystems into the silicon SoC package?
Huh? The whole point of "SoC" is cramming everything onto the one package. It's the most efficient way to do things, and everything from the Raspberry Pi's Broadcrap chip to the biggest AMD EPYC is a SoC. Most desktop systems aren't 100% True™ SoCs as they require a chipset/PCH, but that chipset is very minimal these days.
>Tell that to the Fujitsu people building the A64fx chip. (Which by the way turns out uses HBM for system memory. I was dreaming of AMD doing this!!) Or even just to Marvell/Cavium :)
I hear ya, but aren't those efforts kind of like very high-performance controllers for other equipment? Surely the Cavium stuff isn't processing frames directly on the host cpu, instead they leverage the ISA to add support for specialized subsystems, (At requisite cost) right? Plus the advantages that the datacenters are chasing down with this architecture are density related, which is to say a lot of little things doing little jobs.
How much of the datacenter push is replacing general purpose, hot cores, with specialized lower power devices? Who's running The Cloud on arm yet? How many ARM cores are we gonna cram into a laptop? (I would like many, please.)
Wrt the Fujitsu effort, it seems like an interesting development, but I don't envision that platform hitting desktops. Its possible, but where are the units? You can already buy a Talos II today.
>The whole point of "SoC" is cramming everything onto the one package. It's the most efficient way to do things, and everything from the Raspberry Pi's Broadcrap chip to the biggest AMD EPYC is a SoC.
Yes of course. But this bloats the power and heat budget of the SoC by more than a little.
The biggest AMD EPYC SoC (I really disagree with this generalization of SoC but I understand what you mean) is a huge piece of silicon and not the same kind of ARM ISA lego game. Growing an arm die with specially designed HPC subsystems to that size, also including 128 PCIE lanes, and 10GbE, probably means some really expensive ISA purchases or in-house development, if looking at Fujitsu gives us any clues.
AMD and Intel are already experts at managing the power and heat budgets. Reproducing these efforts looks like another steep engineering cost to my eyes.
One additional mention, and of coursethank you for your time: Seems you might be interested by some other ARM ISA datacenter efforts, check out the RockPro64 Arm cluster that Pine Microsystems has created to host their online services. Ctrl+F "cluster" in the following link. I don't know where to find more detailed information yet. https://www.pine64.org/2019/11/05/brave-heart-edition-pineph...
Outside of the server realm, ARM ISAs aren't standardized and require a fork of the Linux kernel to support each individual board configuration. The consumer ARM space is a mess when it comes to Linux support.
There is only one ARM ISA. Well, okay, multiple (32 vs 64 bit, microcontroller vs unix-capable) but vendors don't change the ISA. (Apple has been allowed to introduce some extension for using a coprocessor (?) recently but that's it.)
The different crap between vendors is just the various onboard devices on the SoC, nothing to do with the CPU cores that implement the ARM ISA.
The "consumer" space is indeed not good, but there's only so many SoC vendors (and most of them rely on Synopsys DesignWare blocks for all the things) and mainline Linux supports most of them really really well.
The real fun time is for us in the BSD world, we're too small for e.g. Rockchip to care about us and contribute like they do with Linux :(
This is such good news. Pop_OS is fantastic, but I've never been super impressed with their laptop hardware. The world really needs a way to buy a high-quality laptop that's running Linux, and supported.
What has kept me from seriously considering them, however, is the absence of AMD-powered systems from them. I understand the ubiquity of Intel-based hardware, but I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available.
If they're going to go their own way in terms of hardware design, I would hope that they at least opened a line of dialog with AMD to explore that option. AMD is dying for a good laptop OEM, and System76 has the good sense to make it into a well designed package all around.
I hope to see something develop in this direction.
> I understand the ubiquity of Intel-based hardware, but I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available.
Because it's hard enough to deal with a single silicon vendor, so they're looking for the one with the most bang for the buck and that was, before Ryzen, definitely Intel.
They might be ramping up with AMD now (or not, I don't know), but when you don't have pre-existing business relationships that takes a while before you're even at the stage of building prototypes. That space is rather complicated.
They support Ryzen with their Thelio desktops so ... maybe. That said I recently wanted to get a Ryzen laptop and could not find one that seemed worth buying. I am not sure if AMD really offers a truly competitive laptop chip yet. I wound up building a custom desktop with a 3700x and am running Pop_OS on it. Like it so far ... just cannot travel with it. Would definitely be interested in a laptop, was about to buy the Galaga but decided to build a desktop because I wanted to try the AMD processor.
> I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available.
Intel has been mired in an anti-trust lawsuit in the EU for a decade now, on charges that they offer deep discounts to OEMs on the condition that they don't ship products from competitors (read: AMD) in volume. Such a program would put substantial pressure on OEMs to avoid AMD, since they'd still need to ship a large number of Intel-based products, and losing those discounts would mean their Intel-based products would end up substantially more expensive than their competitors'. The only way to get out of the trap would be to ship nothing but AMD-based products, and demand for Intel is still strong enough that doing so would essentially be committing suicide.
All of which would explain why you don't see many AMD-based products from OEMs on the shelves, despite AMD's clear superiority in the latest generation.
When AMD manages to release a laptop chip from the latest generation (zen2) then it will be found in laptops. And there is no AMD superiority, they simply finaly managed to catch up to Intel
This explains the dearth of options with other OEMs. This should not be a major factor for System76 who, with all due respect, arguably should hardly be a blip on Intel's radar.
> "AMD's clear superiority in the latest generation."
IS that true even for laptops? For my new desktop I did indeed get an AMD, also because of Intel's recent technical problems and backdoors, but for a laptop I could really not find anything good that used AMD, and I was lead to understand that for laptops, Intel is still best for some reason. (Do AMDs run too hot? I don't know.)
I agree, that looks like it could strike a good relationship for System76 and AMD. Vast, rambling, inexpert conjecture about some of the roadblocks:
The Intel offerings for mobile are very well developed and cost effective. Apple alone pushes quite a bit of development in this segment, in part because lots of us nerds out there with a commit history are running that hardware. Intel can supply powerful, integrated, shrink wrapped subsystems, etc already tailored for mobile form factors. Their marketshare here is crushingly dominant.
Conversely, the AMD mobile platform relies on realtek and others, eliciting howls from grumpy users with certain numbers of greying beard fibers. AMD doesn't supply the ethernet, wifi, storage in this fashion, requiring the integrators to do more work. Making a change will likely be costly, perhaps even riling the, now merely sated, Intel naga from its E-Commerce/Big Data fed slumber, into a veritable springtime of onerous contract terms and volume requirements.
Then there is of course the video subsystem wicket. I have encountered a bunch of anecdotal people that I mentally associate as BSD users who simply prefer the Intel UHD graphics. They like counting on the low power, and simple functionality, as do I. I recognize that AMD has improved by vast geologic scales in the last decade on the drivers and opensource front. I don't fully understand why the graphics haven't enveloped the world. Seems like everyone is happy with Intel UHD-whatever and Mali, or just take what comes and complain if it is buggy.
Additionally there is a mentality of "At least Intel works properly!" that is still floating around a bit, which I don't exactly understand fully. It seems useful to myself, now, to pause and reflect on Intel's ongoing hardware security vulnerability uh--management. Certainly a masterclass of disclosure and mitigation.
Finally, wrapping my afghan around these poor old bones here on my Internet enabled armchair, I wonder what life would be like if the CPU market were more like the automotive industry, and Intel were producing Taxis and Uber vehicles. Would this kind of systemic defect not have been completely ruinous? Much different industry of course, but one thing makes me chuckle--maybe those banks shelling out for those 30 year old Mainframe support contracts had the right idea all along.
Yes they do. I got a Thinkpad recently with a Ryzen 3500U and it's quite competitive to the competition from Intel. Yes, it's more power hungry than Intel, but the iGPU is much better than Intel's and I don't need to fuss with a dedicated card on Linux. I play games, compile software, etc, and it's a great machine, with my only complaint being poor microphone support (fixable in software).
I buy AMD for compute power and cores, and my laptop works far better for CPU intensive tasks than a comparable Intel based laptop. My main complaint is that I wish I could buy something with an extra battery (Lenovo T series used to have a second battery option) and more than 4 cores in a 14" form factor.
System76 developer here. We do offer several AMD option on our Thelio line (and they're less expensive than the corresponding Intel options, generally speaking).
Most vendors will likely wait for the Zen 2 mobile offerings before choosing to offer AMD lineups. There are some right now using Picasso (Lenovo has several), but it’s a smarter play to wait for the better chips that more closely compare to consumer expectations for mobile devices next year. I believe it’ll be worth the wait.
I’m personally hoping/waiting for a Zen 2 system with full fledged USB 4 support. If newer Bluetooth and WiFi can be included, that would be awesome. Maybe a Radeon dGPU, too.
That's very encouraging to hear! I hope that this does end-up extending to your laptop line. At least you're participation in this thread means S76 knows HN folks are paying attention to this detail.
I completely understand how the current AMD APU chips are not necessarily competitive in compute or in energy efficiency (as mroche points out).
Almost all of my company's engineers develop in Linux, and several have requested System76 laptops. The frequent clunkiness and caveats around switchable graphics that we've experienced from other OEMs has led us to purchase those laptops without dedicated/switchable graphics just to avoid potential headaches.
Just to put a thought out there: If the upcoming Renoir APU line is as performance-competitive as it is hoped to be (Zen 2 plus slightly-upgraded Radeon Vega graphics), we would likely make future laptop purchases seeking that hardware. It would be great to be able to still purchase them from System76, but I do understand that is several years away.
Either way, you guys are fantastic. Please keep fighting the good fight!
Nothing in the forbes article suggested they'd prioritize anything like that. Talking about wood grains and rounded corners, the priority seems to be more function following form.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't expect anything resembling modern classic thinkpad replacements from system76 at this point. It's more like hipster machines incorporating wood and leather.
Aspect ratio and bad arrow design are my only gripes with laptops from System76. Actually, afaik there are almost no laptops which nail these and have a good/first party linux support.
Been curious about people's opinions on non-16:9 displays. Assuming they share the same pixel width, would you prefer working on a 4:3 or 3:2 laptop. 4:3's will offer the most resolution, but will result in taller systems.
Good luck to the team on this endeavor. I have never had a chance to use a laptop / workstation from them, but they must be doing something right since they have been around for a while now and that the community has nothing but great things to say about them.
I'm pulling for System76 in principle, but I've never been able to take the plunge on one because their chunkier Clevo/Sager-based designs have always paled aesthetically in comparison to the Dell XPS 13 line. Maybe that will finally change when they can design their own.
It seems the Darter Pro has the same keyboard as my Clevo PA70ES. Same layout, same hotkeys on the numpad. Any way to confirm that it's the same model? My keyboard's USB data:
idVendor 0x048d Integrated Technology Express, Inc.
idProduct 0x8910
bcdDevice 0.01
iManufacturer 1 ITE Tech. Inc.
iProduct 2 ITE Device(829x)
I'm asking because I wrote a user space driver for the keyboard LEDs. If it's the same model, maybe they'd be interested in taking a look at it:
Recently I was looking at their laptops, but with a resolution of only 1920x1080, unless I wanted to buy one of the thicker laptops, was a deal breaker. Perhaps once they start making their own they will bump up the resolution, but until then I will wait.
Popping in to note that if anyone is on the fence about the Oryx Pro, it's a fantastic machine, I love mine! System76 was a fantastic company to deal with.
After some initial troubles with the cooling system (I sent the laptop back and it was serviced under warranty), I've been chugging along the last few months.
I should note that the fans can get pretty loud (from what I read on reviews other laptops like the Lenovo X1 Extreme are even louder), so while it is portable, it might be a little bit intense to use at a coffee shop/coworking space.
What problem did you have with cooling? Mine has been working fine, but i can't help but feel terrified when looking at temperatures while gaming. It's been holding for 2 years though, so i guess it's fine...
Mine was DOA -- it would overheat within minutes of being started up, a cooling unit wasn't starting/working at all.
Yeah, I see high temps while gaming, but nothing crazy actually (~80C).
I actually have a second smaller laptop as a sort of redundancy just in case, but if it's been good for you for 2 years maybe it's fine. I do have the newer model they just started making so I assume your model is shaped different as well.
I just want a decent keyboard, non-soldered RAM, and a second battery with a quality 14" screen where everything works reasonably well out of the box on Linux. I don't care if it's a bit heavy or thick, I just want to have a good typing experience with high performance CPU options that don't get thermally throttled too bad.
Building a sleek laptop is all the rage these days, and everyone seems intent on convincing us that you can have a good keyboard in a thin package. Go the opposite way and make the best working experience possible and then work out how to make it easy to carry. As long as it's not ridiculously heavy (say, <5lbs or so), I'd consider buying it if it had a better typing experience.
81 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadHardware companies trying to write software usually ends in disaster. (Yes Lenovo, I'm looking at you)
Since Pop_Os is derived from Ubuntu, you could argue that this is just what they did.
To address your original point, I suspect it's more expensive and slower (at least, in the short term) to add features to someone else's distro than to fork it and keep building it out yourself.
Nothing. Everything we create here at System76 is open source, either GPL or some form of permissive license.
(Edit: To be clear, I'm just answering your rhetorical question, not insinuating anything about the tone of your post for sure.)
I just figure Canonical probably has a specific vision for Ubuntu (just like System76 surely has for Pop!_OS), so they don't necessarily want to pull in every feature from every downstream distro. The prevalence of purposed-focused distros is one of my favorite things about the Linux ecosystem.
I actually haven't used Pop!_OS yet, but it looks good and it's on my short list of distros to try. I didn't mean to imply anything negative about it.
I'll bet upstream is more-or-less welcoming of an additional (well funded?) stakeholder. The bug reports alone might be worth the effort, especially if System76 is triaging some.
The number of FOSS contributers is not infitine. At some point we need to start working together instead of forking yet another marginally different copy.
I understand some diversity is good, but what popos adds could have been added to vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, if you feel that way) and benefitted many more.
(/s)
I don't personally use it, but I've heard of people actually using it on other hardware just because the system is supposedly so polished. And maybe because it has better support for proprietary firmware? I forget.
Of course, maybe there is a demographic that is in to this sort of branding, but I bet it's more of a detriment to overall sales than anything.
Is the OS as full of seconds-long bouncy animations and bubble letter finds as the branding and website makes it look? If so, can animations be reduced or disabled?
(Even Fedora or CentOS are not nearly as comfortable to use in my experience, although they might be preferable in other ways!)
I built one with PoPOS (however you spell it) about 6-8 months ago and absolutely love it. I've previously used Xubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora and PoP!OS had a lot of the things everyone installed already taken care of and the UI is useful, but minimalistic.
I check the system76 laptops every once in a while only to see if they added a pointer yet.
If you're a downstream consumer, especially so far downstream that you're just buying a pre-made chip and putting it onto a board like System76 would, the ISA royalty means very little to you.
I don't know how well the POWER line has progressed since say 2004ish and ARM sure is coming up, but if you intend to use a lot of (fast) I/O and virtualization on your portable workstation laptop it seems to me that POWER would be a great alternative, although surely at a nice price premium over the various ARM ISAs.
ARM on the other hand seems to thrive on the other end of the spectrum--low power consumption and inexpensive. Wouldn't most solutions require that you cram the IO subsystems into the silicon SoC package?
I reckon this kind of thing would eat your power/cost advantages back into the x86 realm.
Tell that to the Fujitsu people building the A64fx chip. (Which by the way turns out uses HBM for system memory. I was dreaming of AMD doing this!!) Or even just to Marvell/Cavium :)
I mean, it does thrive in low-power applications, but it's by no means tied to them. A lot of companies going for ARM in the datacenter now: Marvell, Ampere, Huawei, NXP, Mellanox… and Amazon!
> I don't know how well the POWER line has progressed since say 2004ish
Well, IBM has been building big, powerful and relatively expensive chips. NXP has been slowly sort of getting off the POWER ISA and embracing ARM more.
> Wouldn't most solutions require that you cram the IO subsystems into the silicon SoC package?
Huh? The whole point of "SoC" is cramming everything onto the one package. It's the most efficient way to do things, and everything from the Raspberry Pi's Broadcrap chip to the biggest AMD EPYC is a SoC. Most desktop systems aren't 100% True™ SoCs as they require a chipset/PCH, but that chipset is very minimal these days.
I hear ya, but aren't those efforts kind of like very high-performance controllers for other equipment? Surely the Cavium stuff isn't processing frames directly on the host cpu, instead they leverage the ISA to add support for specialized subsystems, (At requisite cost) right? Plus the advantages that the datacenters are chasing down with this architecture are density related, which is to say a lot of little things doing little jobs.
How much of the datacenter push is replacing general purpose, hot cores, with specialized lower power devices? Who's running The Cloud on arm yet? How many ARM cores are we gonna cram into a laptop? (I would like many, please.)
Wrt the Fujitsu effort, it seems like an interesting development, but I don't envision that platform hitting desktops. Its possible, but where are the units? You can already buy a Talos II today.
>The whole point of "SoC" is cramming everything onto the one package. It's the most efficient way to do things, and everything from the Raspberry Pi's Broadcrap chip to the biggest AMD EPYC is a SoC.
Yes of course. But this bloats the power and heat budget of the SoC by more than a little.
The biggest AMD EPYC SoC (I really disagree with this generalization of SoC but I understand what you mean) is a huge piece of silicon and not the same kind of ARM ISA lego game. Growing an arm die with specially designed HPC subsystems to that size, also including 128 PCIE lanes, and 10GbE, probably means some really expensive ISA purchases or in-house development, if looking at Fujitsu gives us any clues.
AMD and Intel are already experts at managing the power and heat budgets. Reproducing these efforts looks like another steep engineering cost to my eyes.
One additional mention, and of coursethank you for your time: Seems you might be interested by some other ARM ISA datacenter efforts, check out the RockPro64 Arm cluster that Pine Microsystems has created to host their online services. Ctrl+F "cluster" in the following link. I don't know where to find more detailed information yet. https://www.pine64.org/2019/11/05/brave-heart-edition-pineph...
The different crap between vendors is just the various onboard devices on the SoC, nothing to do with the CPU cores that implement the ARM ISA.
The "consumer" space is indeed not good, but there's only so many SoC vendors (and most of them rely on Synopsys DesignWare blocks for all the things) and mainline Linux supports most of them really really well.
The real fun time is for us in the BSD world, we're too small for e.g. Rockchip to care about us and contribute like they do with Linux :(
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
IBM POWER9 is too power-hungry and huge. I'm pretty sure it only comes in a massive socketed form-factor.
NXP QorIQ is too weak.
What has kept me from seriously considering them, however, is the absence of AMD-powered systems from them. I understand the ubiquity of Intel-based hardware, but I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available.
If they're going to go their own way in terms of hardware design, I would hope that they at least opened a line of dialog with AMD to explore that option. AMD is dying for a good laptop OEM, and System76 has the good sense to make it into a well designed package all around.
I hope to see something develop in this direction.
Because it's hard enough to deal with a single silicon vendor, so they're looking for the one with the most bang for the buck and that was, before Ryzen, definitely Intel.
They might be ramping up with AMD now (or not, I don't know), but when you don't have pre-existing business relationships that takes a while before you're even at the stage of building prototypes. That space is rather complicated.
Intel has been mired in an anti-trust lawsuit in the EU for a decade now, on charges that they offer deep discounts to OEMs on the condition that they don't ship products from competitors (read: AMD) in volume. Such a program would put substantial pressure on OEMs to avoid AMD, since they'd still need to ship a large number of Intel-based products, and losing those discounts would mean their Intel-based products would end up substantially more expensive than their competitors'. The only way to get out of the trap would be to ship nothing but AMD-based products, and demand for Intel is still strong enough that doing so would essentially be committing suicide.
All of which would explain why you don't see many AMD-based products from OEMs on the shelves, despite AMD's clear superiority in the latest generation.
IS that true even for laptops? For my new desktop I did indeed get an AMD, also because of Intel's recent technical problems and backdoors, but for a laptop I could really not find anything good that used AMD, and I was lead to understand that for laptops, Intel is still best for some reason. (Do AMDs run too hot? I don't know.)
The Intel offerings for mobile are very well developed and cost effective. Apple alone pushes quite a bit of development in this segment, in part because lots of us nerds out there with a commit history are running that hardware. Intel can supply powerful, integrated, shrink wrapped subsystems, etc already tailored for mobile form factors. Their marketshare here is crushingly dominant.
Conversely, the AMD mobile platform relies on realtek and others, eliciting howls from grumpy users with certain numbers of greying beard fibers. AMD doesn't supply the ethernet, wifi, storage in this fashion, requiring the integrators to do more work. Making a change will likely be costly, perhaps even riling the, now merely sated, Intel naga from its E-Commerce/Big Data fed slumber, into a veritable springtime of onerous contract terms and volume requirements.
Then there is of course the video subsystem wicket. I have encountered a bunch of anecdotal people that I mentally associate as BSD users who simply prefer the Intel UHD graphics. They like counting on the low power, and simple functionality, as do I. I recognize that AMD has improved by vast geologic scales in the last decade on the drivers and opensource front. I don't fully understand why the graphics haven't enveloped the world. Seems like everyone is happy with Intel UHD-whatever and Mali, or just take what comes and complain if it is buggy.
Additionally there is a mentality of "At least Intel works properly!" that is still floating around a bit, which I don't exactly understand fully. It seems useful to myself, now, to pause and reflect on Intel's ongoing hardware security vulnerability uh--management. Certainly a masterclass of disclosure and mitigation.
Finally, wrapping my afghan around these poor old bones here on my Internet enabled armchair, I wonder what life would be like if the CPU market were more like the automotive industry, and Intel were producing Taxis and Uber vehicles. Would this kind of systemic defect not have been completely ruinous? Much different industry of course, but one thing makes me chuckle--maybe those banks shelling out for those 30 year old Mainframe support contracts had the right idea all along.
I buy AMD for compute power and cores, and my laptop works far better for CPU intensive tasks than a comparable Intel based laptop. My main complaint is that I wish I could buy something with an extra battery (Lenovo T series used to have a second battery option) and more than 4 cores in a 14" form factor.
eg https://altex.ro/laptop-asus-zenbook-14-um431da-am030-amd-ry...
I’m personally hoping/waiting for a Zen 2 system with full fledged USB 4 support. If newer Bluetooth and WiFi can be included, that would be awesome. Maybe a Radeon dGPU, too.
Almost all of my company's engineers develop in Linux, and several have requested System76 laptops. The frequent clunkiness and caveats around switchable graphics that we've experienced from other OEMs has led us to purchase those laptops without dedicated/switchable graphics just to avoid potential headaches.
Just to put a thought out there: If the upcoming Renoir APU line is as performance-competitive as it is hoped to be (Zen 2 plus slightly-upgraded Radeon Vega graphics), we would likely make future laptop purchases seeking that hardware. It would be great to be able to still purchase them from System76, but I do understand that is several years away.
Either way, you guys are fantastic. Please keep fighting the good fight!
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't expect anything resembling modern classic thinkpad replacements from system76 at this point. It's more like hipster machines incorporating wood and leather.
https://system76.com/laptops/darter
https://system76.com/laptops/galago
I have one of the chunkier ones. The roominess of its insides make me happy whenever I open it up (e.g. to clean it up).
Thankfully the Thelio is absolutely beautiful, so I still have high hopes for their in-house designs.
IMO, the XPS laptops don't really look a ton different when viewed from that angle.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x
I found a WMI driver in their repositories but it doesn't match the way my keyboard works:
https://github.com/pop-os/system76-dkms/blob/master/system76...
After some initial troubles with the cooling system (I sent the laptop back and it was serviced under warranty), I've been chugging along the last few months.
I should note that the fans can get pretty loud (from what I read on reviews other laptops like the Lenovo X1 Extreme are even louder), so while it is portable, it might be a little bit intense to use at a coffee shop/coworking space.
For those interested, shameless plug to where I rambled about the experience, and getting Arch installed (which isn't an officially supported OS but worked fantastic): https://vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the-syste...
Yeah, I see high temps while gaming, but nothing crazy actually (~80C).
I actually have a second smaller laptop as a sort of redundancy just in case, but if it's been good for you for 2 years maybe it's fine. I do have the newer model they just started making so I assume your model is shaped different as well.
Building a sleek laptop is all the rage these days, and everyone seems intent on convincing us that you can have a good keyboard in a thin package. Go the opposite way and make the best working experience possible and then work out how to make it easy to carry. As long as it's not ridiculously heavy (say, <5lbs or so), I'd consider buying it if it had a better typing experience.
I'll have to buy another I guess =D