Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtvwill | Hacker News Reader

Hmm I wonder how many employees s76 actually has? because in the reply from s76 it hints towards a rather larger company than 21 people.

"System76 is also focusing on several other time-intensive efforts (like building a US-based manufacturing plant, designing in-house products, and building a well-received GNOME-based OS for both System76 customers and any interested users)"

Like shit if they are designing and building a manufacturing plant with 21 people in house whilst also maintaining normal business selling and maintaining hardware... My hat goes off to them...for either being amazing or being so crazy stupid to think they could pull it off!

View on HN

Building a US-based manufacturing plant is an SVP endeavor with another company offloading 90% of the design work. Been there, done that.

Designing in-house products is what they already do, and have done prior to Pop! so this shouldn't take user level app developer time that could be spent on better support for their users.

Building yet another distro is a waste of time and effort and only undermines goodwill with their users (I bought a Galago Pro to run Arch, and Pop came out 6 months after I received it -- I don't want yet another vendor controlled os). When Pop came out, they retargeted efforts around supporting only that system, leaving user choice by the wayside. The end result is that it burned me in the form of a missed firmware update that killed my battery, and customer support responses that boiled down to "run Pop!".

It's one thing to want to do something crazy -- it's quite another to hurt your customers in the process.

I'm literally on the factory floor right now, working with our designers and CEO on upcoming product designs. There's an area populated with a few dozen iterations of unreleased prototypes from the past couple of years, a couple of 3D printers running for prototype parts, as well as a laser cutting acrylic for new prototypes chassis today.

We're doing this work in-house, right here in Denver, Colorado.

I'm sorry you had a poor experience with support. We do still offer a choice between Ubuntu and Pop!_OS right from the site, but we also are focusing our efforts on making better products. And a large part of that (which we hear from our customers every day) is in the software experience. You're always welcome to install whatever you want on your machine, and we'll do our best to help you out with that.

How about focusing on making your firmware updates deliver via the existing, well established lvfs instead of some "not invented here" home grown bullshit, so I can use the distro I want, not Ubuntu or that other thing I never heard of before without being denied those updates?

That sounds like a massive oversell of LVFS.

The site has barely been up 3 years given the notice at the bottom, while System76 have been selling preinstalled Linux computers for over a decade.

Eh, that's not that surprising. Making your team or company sound larger than it is in an effort to sound more legitimate or established is a time-honored tradition.

What kind of manufacturing plant is the question. Competing with Intel and a processor design and fab house is obviously beyond all but the largest companies. I suspect even designing a motherboard is beyond a company of their size (or even an order of magnitude larger). However it probably makes sense for them to do final assembly so they can integrate quality assurance steps where required. Take a case somebody else made (their design), a bunch of other components (mostly off the shelf, but some custom), and screw them together. At several points along the way power up the system and run some tests.

I don't think I can share intimate details, but we are designing the products, manufacturing the chassis and some internal components, and assembling the products all in Denver, CO.

Come on, don't be silly, only the world's largest 5 or 10 companies build their own processors; look how long it took apple to build their own arm. They will use an amd or intel cpu and put pieces together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com