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Comment by kkarp | Hacker News Reader

Next reseller of the same OEM laptop ordered somewhere in China.

Check the right side of this laptop: https://stationx.rocks/products/spitfire

and compare with Galago pro: https://system76.com/laptops/galago

sides: https://screenshots.firefox.com/0I2YsDmIvbKuYbr3/stationx.ro... and https://d1vhcvzji58n1j.cloudfront.net/assets/products/galp3/...

and I've seen this model at least on two other resellers.

View on HN

A reply from System76:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...

Thank you, this is an excellent perspective to have in the conversation and changed my mind.

Riiiight... who knew that Clevo and Sager relied on System 76 to design and develop their systems (/s). It's a good story, but I don't believe it for a minute.

I don't think it says that.

They're saying that System76 works with Clevo and Sager. As in they give them specs and Clevo/Sager get back to them with prototypes. System76 develops firmware for the prototypes across several internal iterations and with some back and forth between them and the manufacturer.

This is a process that would take years, and depending on the contract it is very likely that Clevo/Sager would have all liberty to sell the chassis they developed from the specs System76 gave them.

My first "industry" job back in 1996 was working for Eurocom Laptops in Ottawa, Canada. I think they're still around..

They were/are a Clevo reseller (back then the company was called Kapok), and our leadership and hardware team went to Taiwan for quarterly meetings - along with other territory partners - to have round-table discussions to help the factory decide what to put in upcoming models, and so on..

So I would believe that this is in fact still the process that happens to this day..

The factory (Clevo) focused on sourcing parts and assembling the units, but even back then they leaned pretty heavily on their retail/B2B partners to help them figure out what machines they should be building.

If System76 is moving enough units for them, you can bet they are asking them for input and guidance on what to put in their machines.

So am I right in thinking that System76 are working on firmware and drivers for clevo/sager laptops, but then not committing them upstream? Or are they simply not open sourcing them at all?

..."we put in the effort to file the bugs, track them, write the code, and get it upstreamed."

I just grepped git log on the Linux kernel and there are three commits that even so much as mention system76.

So right now I'm leaning towards reseller and this is a bunch of bull.

The two commits:

https://pastebin.com/raw/2XBD1E9K

> Once that has been determined, designed, and goes into production, we start on firmware.

So you use coreboot. Right? Because if you don't, where is this firmware development going on?

Seems like they’re dreaming if they expect someone to buy an $1000+ laptop from a company they’ve never heard of.

To some extent, yes. But the demo that I occupy (male, 30s, software developer, linux enthusiast, seeker of high quality hardware that is highly compatible with linux), is desperate and hungry for this.

Yes, to be honest, I'm quite excited by it.

If only they did plain arch linux (just hard drives partitioned sensibly and graphics drivers installed, maybe X installed) and a nice thin 15 inch version...

Actually, I'd rather like purchasing the notebook with an empty disk, then have the supplier maintain a page in the Arch wiki on what drivers I need etc. (These pages already exist for some models, but only as a community effort.)

When you say "just hard drives partitioned sensibly and graphics drivers installed, maybe X installed", I hear "probably wrong bootloader, probably wrong partition layout, probably wrong FS choice" and so on and so on ("wrong" in this particular case meaning "not what I prefer").

After all, Arch is a distribution for tinkerers who want their system their way.

Yes this would be an amazing offering that I don't think I could resist.

You make a very nice point. Even an AUR package that just installs the drivers would be great!

I thought that was IBM think Pads

Don’t forget Dell’s ”Project Sputnik” XPS13 Developer Edition. My sister (!) has been using one since 2015 and it’s rick solid.

Exactly. I've been using a Thinkpad for my Arch build for years and it's stellar. Does IBM need to shit on Apple like that too? Or are these guys straight out of high school?

My XPS 13 9360 was $900. Arch runs like a dream on it.

I spent $1300 on a System76 laptop about 5 years ago and have been extremely satisfied* with it.

* Except for the Nvidia hardware, which never really worked right. I'm using unaccelerated (?) Nouveau drivers as the least bad option.

That's what stood out for me about all the StationX except for the Spitfire: they have nVidia GPUs. Having dicked around with nouveau and nvidia/dkms with various nVidia chips I will never buy anything with closed-source/binary-blob. It's just not worth my time.

>for linux users

>with nvidia graphics

Wow. What were they thinking? I'll have to assume every other decision they made is about as moronic.

You don't get a line of laptops off the ground overnight. AMD/ATI linux drivers not sucking is a fairly recent development. If were making this decision ~5 years ago, Nvidia would be a reasonable choice.

I spent about $1000 on a Sager 6 years ago, and was very happy with it (including the Nvidia hardware; it was tough to get running in Optimus mode, but works well now).

Last year it had a spate of corrupted video output, with red static all over the screen. Went on for about a week, and I bought a new laptop...then the problems with the Sager disappeared. All well. I think it's still the most maintainable laptop that I own.

While I think the unbridled hyperbole on the StationX website is absurd, I will say that when it comes to Linux laptops, having all the components work correctly with Linux (and it be stable!) is probably the hard thing to make.

I don't know if these guys do that part well, but if they actually make it work flawlessly (and if their competitors don't do as well), then the cost difference might be worth it.

Frankly, I haven't found any new laptop of any OS to work great all the time. It's like we've moved back in time about 15 years. Everything sucks in some way.

My previous laptop was a custom build, but last time I just did some searches, confirmed that a HP Pavillion works fine (at least this model does) with Ubuntu, and went to my local PC store and picked one up.

It's not like I can just pick up any random model and expect it to work, but the process is a lot better than it used to be.

>I will say that when it comes to Linux laptops, having all the components work correctly with Linux (and it be stable!) is probably the hard thing to make.

Not really that hard in 2017, just go all Intel (CPU/GPU/WiFi/etc), and you're pretty much set.

I just wish I could opt out of the management engine. ;)

I've got an HP that works more reliably and completely under Linux than under Windows 7 (granted, it was shipped with Windows 10). It was a pain to get the proper versions of Intel drivers and Mesa working together for optimal GPU capabilities, though.

The touchpad is stupidly large, and I suppose it took some tweaking to get that working comfortably, too.

Chassis are definitely similar, but specs do not line up at all. Screen is full HD for these versus 3200x1800 for System76 for example. System76 seems to be cheaper too.

So it is like all those Ubuntu-based distributions that have OS in the name, but in the hardware world?

Thank you ! This is gold. People dont notice this easily and upvote this post.

Downvoted because: see siblings.

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