
System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances - jseliger
https://blog.system76.com/post/184439321333/system76-news-platinum-luxury-bonus-april-edition
======
tonysickpony
I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I
ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal
tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended
disappointed.

My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It
turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without
glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency across GUI frameworks. Surely I can
tweak them to my liking, but the rabbit hole goes very deep until it comes to
a satisfying result.

Pop!_OS is the first OS that stay out of the way, I barely notice the
existence of OS, and neither do I want to tweak it, and that is the way I want
from a distro. The workspace arranging and switching is a nice touch, making
it feel like home for tiling window manager users, coming from i3wm, xmonad or
whatsnot.

I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Pop!_OS
provides by far the closest experience I get.

~~~
jaabe
> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with
all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

~~~
Jean-Philipe
> This is why I became a Mac user.

Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and
every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had
crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message,
sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth,
or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get
me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're
pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a
decent software management. brew is miles away from apt.

So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a
complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent
keyboard and put Linux on it.

~~~
jaabe
The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys
really sucks on a mac keyboard.

Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left
fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make
it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.

~~~
craigsmansion
If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on
Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora
"tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from
the beginning even in between updates with _zero_ regressions in usability for
you personally?

If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach
"bullshit".

~~~
jaabe
I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”.

I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would
get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a
laptop with preinstalled Linux.

I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors
wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with
my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that.

Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A
more stable Linux distro might have been better.

My external displays never really worked without problems.

Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook
trackpads.

It’s a range of stuff like that.

I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to
use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why
I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but
the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend
my time on other things.

------
dotnetcorenoob
Do people actually buy laptop/desktop from system76? I tried to price a laptop
from them before and it was quite expensive compare to main stream vendors
like Dell.

Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.

~~~
morganvachon
I consider the cost acceptable given they don't just "slap Ubuntu on it". The
hardware is curated towards 100% Linux compatibility, and their custom OS
(admittedly an Ubuntu variant) is tweaked to suit the hardware. It's a good
marriage and to some it's worth the extra cost.

Look at it like you would a Macbook; Apple charges a premium but the benefit
the buyer receives from that extra cost is hardware and software that feels
cohesive and works perfectly together. I'm not saying System76 has reached
that same mark just yet, but it's what they are working towards and they have
made great progress in that endeavor.

With all of that said, there's something to buying a used or marked-down
Thinkpad and installing your distro of choice; you'll (usually) get a great
device with excellent Linux community support, and in my opinion the
industrial design of the Thinkpad series is more appealing than System76
machines. Personally I don't care for Lenovo because of their past malware
shenanigans, but they do make solid hardware.

~~~
HankB99
Have you purchased a Lenovo lately? I've not had good luck with them. Despite
2 returns for service my Thinkpad T500 remained with a loose charging
connector. My next Lenovo (notably not a Thinkpad) was a Y50 Ideapad. Audio to
the speakers failed, the housing developed cracks at the hinge. The Ethernet
connector broke (though used very little.) and now the SD card slot has
failed.

I'm giving Dell a try. You can buy them with Ubuntu factory installed or buy
with Windows and 'slap the distro of your choice' on it. I have an XPS-13 9370
and after nearly a year, the WiFi finally seems to be working reliably (using
Debian Testing.)

~~~
robocat
> WiFi finally seems to be working reliably

I got the XPS15 and installed Ubuntu 18.04 (best choice of laptop I could find
that had an i9 8950hk, although only Windows is officially supported).

I had heard it was best to replace the Killer WiFi with an Intel mini card.
However the Killer WiFi has been rock solid for me with Ubuntu (I have read
that Windows has more problems with Killer WiFi than Linux!).

Regular Linux BIOS updates from Dell from within Ubuntu 18.04 - I'm a happy
customer.

Edit: comment from elsewhere in this thread: "only three years ago I had to
replace the default wireless card in my Dell XPS 13 because the broadcom one
was flaky as hell in Linux"

~~~
voltagex_
Yep, replaced both the NVMe and the Broadcom wifi in my 9350. I'm not buying
this year's model as the Killer wifi is soldered down. Killer indeed.

~~~
ac29
For what its worth, I've had zero issues with WiFi on my 9380. The "killer"
wifi is just an ath10k:

    
    
      02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
      Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Killer 1435 Wireless-AC
      Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
    

As far as I can tell, its no different from any other Qualcomm Atheros WiFi. I
believe the "killer" differences are just in the Windows drivers.

~~~
voltagex_
That's interesting - the only other issue is that I then can't upgrade to Wifi
6 or whatever, but that's probably not an issue until a few years down the
track when all my other devices support the same standard.

------
droptablemain
I bought a Galago Pro (since discontinued) in 2015. It's still my daily driver
and it's held up very well. I even once dropped it from a second-floor
balcony.

~~~
dragosmocrii
It will serve you well for many years to come. My gazp6 from 2011 still runs
solid

------
darrmit
I love the idea of System76 and Coreboot and keep checking in on them every
few months but the story seems to remain the same - horrible battery life. I
can’t see dropping over 1k on a laptop that barely lasts 4 hours out of the
box.

~~~
bwat49
The new darter pro gets decent battery life, I get around 7 hours on mine. It
has similar hardware to the galago pro, but with a 54 whr battery instead of
35 whr.

Their other models do have poor battery life though. The galago pro is
especially egregious, I don't know why anyone would buy a 13 inch laptop that
only gets 3 hours of battery.

~~~
cbsmith
I actually had considered it at one point. Sometimes the reason you want
something small & compact is you don't need to run it for that long.

------
shmerl
What's the story with AMD and coreboot? Why can't AMD support it? Their whole
AGESA is a glaring blob.

~~~
benchaney
Neither intel nor AMD supports core boot. Community efforts to add core boot
focus entirely on intel because of market share (although intel is also plenty
hostile to floss in this regard).

~~~
bravo22
Not sure about the support. Intel employees regularly submit to coreboot repo.
I know at least for the Atom based designs that I've been involved in Intel
provides reference designs using coreboot and supports it.

~~~
wahern
AMD is a sponsor of coreboot according to
[https://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors](https://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors)

Personally, I think the fundamental issue relates to IP. If the hardware
design is made transparent by amazing and freely available documentation you
invite infringement claims, particularly from IP trolls. (Threats from
competitors are probably more existential, though, at least for large
companies.) Often time companies will say that their products contain third-
party IP that they cannot disclose, but that's just a roundabout way of saying
neither the company nor its suppliers want the hassle.

There are other reasons, too. For example, if you can't consistently provide
such documentation it can make you look worse than if you had never bothered
as it makes you appear unreliable. But I think the IP issue is what makes it a
simple decision, notwithstanding whether the threats are actually substantial.

~~~
monocasa
I think it's that DRM doesn't work if they don't have a place that the user
doesn't own, combined with that core is also used for system init because it's
in the right place and you already want similar crypto you'd need for DRM for
secure boot.

There's not really any interesting IP in those cores from what we've seen.

~~~
wahern
But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing
code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or
convoluted setup is useless.

If the issue is why Intel, AMD, NXP, etc aren't more transparent with their
references, DRM doesn't really explain any of that. The only reason that makes
sense to me other than sheer neglect is fear of IP infringement claims, a fear
that any developer contemplating releasing their source code has surely
struggled with. The patent landscape is a fscking field of indiscriminate
landmines.

The "obviousness" test for patent eligibility is farcical. Just because the
implementation of some driver seems obvious and straight-forward doesn't mean
there doesn't exist a patent. Because of how technology develops--path
dependency, foreseeable constraints--the vast majority of implementation
details (including patented details) are obvious as understood by engineers,
even if they've never encountered them before. But in practice obvious has
effectively come to mean novel; were it any other way the vast majority of
patents would never issue. And without omniscience you can never consistently
know ahead of time whether something is novel or not; not if you're doing
anything worthwhile. (Copyright is predicated on novelty, but copyright law
permits independent development; patent law does not.)

Patent claims usually turn on minute implementation details. (A result, no
doubt, of the surfeit of patents. Were it otherwise patents would stop
industry completely rather than slowly bleeding it.) I'm not a patent lawyer,
but I know that in general (in the U.S.) any claim needs to make a prima facie
showing, which over the past several decades SCOTUS has required provide
increasingly direct evidence. In as much as you raise the costs of discovering
the evidence necessary to make a prima facie case, you've reduced your
exposure to lawsuits.

If you're intent on targeting a particular company, and especially on
targeting a particular company with a particular patent, opaque
implementations are not much of a hurdle. But if you have a mountain of
patents, the transactional costs of matching those patents to particular
instances of [potential] infringement are quite significant. You not only need
to expend effort to reverse engineer, but also effort to craft an argument to
convince a court that your discoveries are legitimate. If an implementation is
open it's much cheaper to accomplish both. Remember, labor is the single
biggest expense in the Western world, and these types of activities are the
epitome of labor intensive tasks. Reverse engineering a binary blob may be
easy conceptually, but its absolutely costly in terms of labor, especially
when it comes to pinning down the details in a way that matches particular
claims in a patent.

The reverse is also true: if you have a mountain of products and components
with significant exposure to infringement liability, opaqueness can
substantially reduce your risk and effective liability. Even if exposure
merely scales linearly with market or company size it suffices to explain the
behavior of large companies, but I doubt it scales linearly. For one thing,
larger companies are juicier targets, all else being equal, from the
perspective of an individual claimant.

~~~
monocasa
> But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing
> code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs
> or convoluted setup is useless.

DRM for a general purpose device needs way more than that. You need a full
'Trusted Execution Environment' to run the code that uses those keys.

~~~
shmerl
Trusted execution doesn't need blobs, no? I.e. you can have secure boot with
perfectly open booting. DRM is only used _against_ the user, not for making
things secure for the user. That's why DRM is relying on blobs.

------
hughes
The exclamation point in "Pop!_OS" is making me uncomfortable.

~~~
mises
I've heard good things about it, but oh, that name... it makes it sound like
an early-2000s kids' toy. Just name it Pop OS. And get rid of the underscore
if you want to be user-friendly to the average person.

~~~
droidist2
You're talking about the toy "Bop It" aren't you?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF91cJQQONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF91cJQQONs)

------
bgorman
If System76 had all their laptops come with Coreboot I would strongly consider
buying from them next time I refresh my laptop.

~~~
akvadrako
Coreboot is just not that relevant anymore. There is no clear line between
hardware and software, so CPUs contain lots of totally closed software and of
course totally closed hardware. That means you aren't really gaining much by
moving that line 1% closer to total freedom, but it takes lots of effort.

------
bizkeep478
I wish System76 had better build quality. I've been looking for a Linux vendor
to support. They seem to be an EVGA reseller with terrible customized cases.
Even the new woodgrain case feels janky and cheap.

------
tracker1
Aside: page doesn't load with uBlock enabled...

~~~
thekyle
I have uBlock Origin installed and it works fine with the default lists.

~~~
tracker1
To my recollection, I never changed the install... unless a new google profile
login to chrome carries settings from another, previous chrome install for the
plugin. Because if I did change the lists, it was literally years ago, and I
wouldn't have added an esoteric option.

I only know it didn't render when I came in... disabled uBlock Origin, and it
did render.

------
ladzoppelin
Do these have 4k screens and work with 4k monitors?

~~~
xur17
The highest res I see is 1080p, which seems fairly low, especially for their
15 and 17" screens.

------
Lowkeyloki
This is cool and all, but I can't help but cringe when I see a corporate
entity using Tumblr for official communication.

~~~
ProAm
What would be better? Twitter?

~~~
thekyle
Maybe Medium or running their own WordPress install?

~~~
lone_haxx0r
Medium is much, much worse than Tumblr. It's always full of annoying banners,
a useless popup appears whenever you select text, and visually it's nothing to
write home about. Just look at this [1] atrocity and determine how much of the
screen area is devoted to absolutely useless crap.

[1] [https://u.teknik.io/SJxU2.png](https://u.teknik.io/SJxU2.png)

------
nwah1
I admire the efforts to get coreboot support, and love their open hardware
initiatives, but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome.

There was no need for them to create their own distro. That is a huge expense
just to reinvent a wheel that has already been reinvented ten thousand times.
And in the end most of their users will probably just load up the one they use
already.

~~~
cs702
_> but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome._

Many free/open-source advocates have been complaining about NIH syndrome for
years and years and years... to no avail.

Consider, for example, the situation with window managers and desktop
environments. Off the top of my head, we have Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE,
Openbox, dwm, Gala, KWin, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, JWM, and Ratpoison -- to
name only 12 of the remarkably large number available for Linux. I suspect
there are well over 100 window managers/desktop environments for Linux
actively used in the wild today. And that's just _window managers /desktop
environments_.

The number of people who have complained over the decades about this
proliferation is... quite large. The number of words that have been written
and spoken in waste, and the number of flame wars that have raged on, over
which particular choice is best is also... remarkably large. Search for "Gnome
versus KDE" or "Unity versus Gnome" if you want to see some examples.

I've come to accept this is _The Way_ of free/open-source software.

On the flip side, some people love all this variety and choice.

~~~
asveikau
I am often reminded that there are multiple personality types showing up in
many things, such as software.

To my personality type, I would wonder why you _wouldn 't_ want a replaceable
window manager, and I consider a reaction like yours to be the product of some
kind of odd software design authoritarianism.

But we're not both right or both wrong, this is just a point where we differ.

PS: a bunch of those desktop environments you cite are not actually window
managers.

~~~
cs702
Thanks. Corrected!

