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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

So many product lines for such a small company. Laptops, Desktops, Servers. Not even Apple is able to effectively manage this many different products.

I don't know much about them, but from my first impression it looks like a company with lack of focus. I'm not sure how they will be able to create killer product in any of the segments they're trying to compete in.

Based on my above observation (admittedly superficial), I would never buy anything from them. I would not trust the quality nor their ability to be able to support it.

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Note that they're primarily rebadging existing products, while apple is far more involved in the design and manufacture of new products.

Also note that their niche is shipping Linux preinstalled devices. If they did have a killer mass consumer product, they'd have a difficult time coping with consumers expecting and demanding windows on PCs.

Most consumers don't demand Windows, they don't even care what OS is installed.

> Not even Apple is able to effectively manage this many different products.

That's funny, because Apple is the exception, it has far fewer products than any large PC or phone manufacturer. Apple is hyper-focused, much to the chagrin of people who'd like to buy an updated Mac Pro workstation.

Or an XServe.

As someone who has had to try to manage XServe in a datacenter environment... no thanks!

I can see how they would be nice if you were in a mostly Mac creative department or something though.

They assemble machines at a small markup. This is essentially the business model of a bicycle store. The quality is very much related to the quality of the underlying system.

I bought one of their laptops years ago and liked it; I eventually bequeathed it to a sister-in-law, who seems to like it well enough.

I probably won't buy their stuff again, because I only run Debian these days, but I think that they're a decent company and I recommend them to folks who want to run Ubuntu.

Out of curiosity, where do you go for pre-built Debian systems, or completely OS-less systems? I would think that merely having the promise of Ubuntu support out of the box would make it better to install Debian, than on some random Windows machine.

> Out of curiosity, where do you go for pre-built Debian systems, or completely OS-less systems?

I've been pretty happy with Zareason so far, although these days one does often have to contact them ahead of time to be sure Debian will run fine.

> I would think that merely having the promise of Ubuntu support out of the box would make it better to install Debian, than on some random Windows machine.

I'd have thought so, too, except that getting Debian onto my System76 laptop was no fun at all. Ubuntu really is tolerant of non-free software, binary blobs and other things that I'd like to get away from.

Makes sense. System76 will make Linux work, but not blob-free Linux. Which makes it no better than Windows for you. It's not "harder" or "easier" per se, but having Ubuntu guarantees nothing over Windows.

I often forget that other people have different use cases than myself. Thanks for the insight :)

If all you need is a linux laptop, desktop or server, what kind of killer app does the company need to provide besides a system with supported components?

You a very much mistaken in your assessment.

System76 is neither OEM nor ODM. In fact, they are not a manufacturer at all - they assemble and ship systems designed by others.

I own a meerkat mini PC from system 76. Bought it almost two years ago and it's great.

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