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Comment by ipodopt | Hacker News Reader

A brick respects your privacy but it is not a very useful computation device.

I bought a laptop from them and after about 6 months of struggling with PureOS I installed Ubuntu and it has been smooth sailing. One software issue I had with the PureOs install was a hard freeze during the booting about 60% of the time.

I hope there is a newcomer to privacy crowd that is willing to air on the pragmatic side of things. Like somewhere between apple and purism.

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System76 also sells laptops with a Linux OS, Coreboot BIOS, and a "disabled" Intel Management Engine. (There's no true way to disable it, but any dangerous parts are removed, rendering it useless)

System76 is not a newcomer, though - they've got 15 years of history. I've bought from them and found the experience to be superb.

The ME side is not so clear anymore. Pre-nehalem, it could be truly disabled. Up to skylake, it could be "cleaned". Up to cometlake, it could be "asked" to disable itself. From tigerlake onwards, it is quite essential since tigerlake removes S3 sleep, and ME is needed for efficient modern standby.

It is true that they are more pragmatic. But still no dice for me. Perhaps, I should be more careful what I wish for, haha.

Both System76 and Purism have a "We teach you to fix it" support attitude. So when you run into trouble you are going to have to expend effort. They both have their share of bugs.

All I want is something that gets out of my way and works. I don't need the latest specs. As long as they hit a reasonable base the more ethical the better. I do software development on Linux. I don't feel like that is a big ask to have a trouble free Linux laptop.

And I knew this when I was making my purchase. At the time Purism was advertising a "luxury" laptop experience coupled with the equivalent price tag. But I got it and 7 days later it wouldn't boot because of a rather nasty software bug (which I am not sure has been resolved [I think it is a rather nasty race condition since its happens indeterministically]) due to their specific configuration. They also lied about the battery life on the website (I get less then two hours and they adv. five hours). And the WiFi doesn't really work no matter what you do as the chassis severally attenuates the signal. Which for me, as a "digital nomad" in SA at the time really really hurt.

If I where to do my laptop purchase again ATM I would get a Dell. Something like this:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

... you said you installed ubuntu and smooth sailing.

you realize pop_os! is just ubuntu with extra features, right? anything that works on ubuntu will work on pop.

and that the dell support staff will have no clue what to say if you call them on the phone and ask them about linux?

In my experience you get the best results by going for hardware that's known to be compatible and use either Linux Mint(or maybe MX Linux) if you don't want to bother to touch the system, or something Arch-based if you want to be able to just install anything and have it work. In the long term I chose the latter and now after 2 years it's the longest time I've not reinstalled Linux, and I've had fewer issues than with Windows 10 and distros like Ubuntu. One or two times a year it's had problems but nothing a few quick googles couldn't fix. For development it's great because I get almost all the libraries and utilities in the current version right from the package manager.

All that said when you want Free software you'll have to make sacrifices unfortunately.

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