System76 Will Start Designing and Building Its Own Linux Laptops in January 2020

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.

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.

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).

Hardware companies trying to write software usually ends in disaster. (Yes Lenovo, I'm looking at you)

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?

I check the system76 laptops every once in a while only to see if they added a pointer yet.

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.

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.