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.
Forgive me for asking, but what is different about this than Ubuntu 19.04? I looked through the POP!_OS (terrible name btw) promo page [1] and the majority of the things it's talking about are basic Gnome features shipped with Ubuntu?
That's a good question. Unfortunately I can't do System76 and Ubuntu guys justice here because I really don't know the work has been done in both distros.
From the user perspective, I would say
smoother hardware integration (I download the ISO with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, haven't encountered any graphic card comparability problem),
consistent theme across gtk and qt based applications ,
saner defaults and clearer setting structure,
good keyboard shortcuts. There are merely less than a dozen shortcuts that are not found in Ubuntu, but very easy to get used to. like win + up/down to switch between workspace.
I know all these can be accomplished by extensions, add-ons and themes. But they do feel different when it is out of the box and carefully curated.
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.
brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?
Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being correctly picked up in the Homebrew build process so it is trying to use a deprecated x264 API that has been built, which is causing it to fail however building the same software outside of Homebrew (same source tarball that Homebrew downloaded) builds just fine with libdvdread and x264 in ffmpeg support.
I'd report it further but the time last someone asked about it they were basically told to fuck off. Their rules for avoiding burnout state the following which really summarizes their recent change in policy:
> 1. Use Homebrew
>Maintainers of Homebrew should be using it regularly[...]
>3. Prioritise Maintainers Over Users
>It's important to be user-focused but ultimately, as long as you follow #1 above, Homebrew's minimum number of users will be the number of maintainers. However, if Homebrew has no maintainers it will quickly become useless to all users and the project will die. As a result, no user complaint, behaviour or need takes priority over the burnout of maintainers. If users do not like the direction of the project, the easiest way to influence it is to make significant, high-quality code contributions and become a maintainer.
Yet proposing a patch for this gets met with "create your own tap and stop bothering us". I'd love to help you, guys, if you weren't gigantic pricks about it!
Their formula does not disable libdvdread support, but their build from source process fails to detect it if it is otherwise installed. A build from the vanilla source tarball picks it up just fine. So this is not a "Homebrew decided to disable this option", it seems to be a "Homebrew's build process actively avoids searching for other installed software even when the authors of that underlying software enable support by default".
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.
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".
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.
It may or may not apply to your scenario since I don't know what your scripts were for, but in my experience as a long time Fedora user, the distro improved in a big way around the 24-26 era.
It's been roughly 10 years since I programmed on a Macbook (Leopard represent), and I did that on a Swedish keyboard so things might be wildly different, but I really really liked mac keyboards for braces and brackets.
Windows requires thumb acrobatics and Alt gr, whereas Macs used shift and option to modify "increasingly".
I'm a recent switcher. I got a Mac mini and installed my own 32GB RAM kit after delivery. I wish it played nicer with my Alienware 34" monitor (i dont know which side is to blame) but I know I don't miss Linux.
I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.
My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.
I have been a full-time Linux user since in got a bunch of Mandrake CDs in 2002 I believe (and a part-time user before that), an iOS user since the start, and a macOS user since last year, and I cannot honestly say that I prefer one over the other in toto, really.
I've been using Gentoo Linux as my desktop/work OS for more than 10 years now, and I have no more problems with it than I do with macOS.
My Gentoo/Linux complaint is that I cannot for the life of me get PDFs to print correctly. While my one main complaint with macOS is that macports and homebrew are pretty crappy compared to portage, in my purely subjective experience of course.
Otherwise, I really like using both, each for different things. They each definitely do different things better than the other, but I don't actually know how much of that has to do directly with the operating systems.
Anyway, they are both unix-y enough for me that it's fine for what I want.
It's always interesting to me to read about people having such bad experiences with mac or linux or anything else really, since that has never been my own experience. Even with Windows, which I really dislike, I've almost never had any bad technical experience with it. (Bad user experiences, sure.)
I don't know if I am just lucky or just have lower standards?
I don't doubt it's true, but it seems strange to me that because you have many choices, you go to a platform with no choice.
Just because there are many choices doesn't mean you can't make one and stick with it, I've been on Arch for almost a decade now and there aren't many compelling reasons for me to switch all this time later.
I'd think for many the same is true with Ubuntu LTS.
That may have been true at one time, but not anymore. In the 2007-2012 range, mac laptops were the best. After that, hardware stagnated until around 2015 then took a nose dive with the next design.
Likewise, the days of the legendary OSX (sorry, MacOS) stability are long-gone. The team has been slowly gutted over the years to work on iOS since it makes them more money. The security issues from a couple years ago show a design team ignoring reasonably security standards and not implementing any kind of testing or QA.
I only have one mac system left and that's simply for testing Safari. Modern Linux is much more stable in my experience.
This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.
> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.
Same here. For me the answer was KDE Neon. I have like one or two grievances with KDE Neon currently. One of them being that OBS Studio often stops responding when I try to exit it. But for my use-cases KDE Neon has been the best desktop experience I have had in the 10 years since I switched to exclusively using Linux and FreeBSD. Along the way I have gone through a few different distros.
Nice pick. I think we went down different path in the maze of linux distroes. But I'm glad you find something you find fit. I like KDE base softwares better than gnome based counterparts.
Time is always money one way or another. Time is ever so precious.
Even if you disagree, if a pentester uses Kali Linux (a Debian-based rolling release distribution), and they get paid for it, yes. Even then, Kali Linux regularly breaks, so a solution is to run it on VMs with snapshots (or communicate to each other when it breaks, or use a microSD card for a working version).
There's also a clear advantage: you get the newest versions of software much quicker than an OS which updates every half year (or a LTS version which gets updated less often).
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.
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.
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.)
Anything here will be Anecdata at best, but I've bought 3 refurb t420 and t420s; these are 8 years old now and still daily drivers for all my family members. The t420s in particular is my all-time favourite laptop of last 20 years, as it's thin and portable, but still modular (t420 is significantly thicker and more old-school portable), easy to upgrade and maintain, and with great keyboard with standard layout.
I have also used regularly a t450 and t470 for work, and last year bought an anniversary t25 as a Xmas gift for myself :).
Prior to that, I've used T530, T410, T60p, T41, T30, etc.
My boss has been put on notice that a Thinkpad is a "condition of employment" for me - I cannot imagine using anything else.
All of them have been absolutely positively rock solid. No issues as daily drivers for a travelling consultant - lots of plugging and unplugging, moving, backpacks, etc.
Mostly various Windows versions, but T450 and T470 are RHEL full time, and I have a T61 with Lubuntu as well.
That being said, for any brand, there'll be people with good and bad luck/experience. You have to look at your preferences, and stats...
Same here. Although for work I prefer a workstation with enough cores for compilation.
Just bought an X230, put OpenBSD in it and it is just perfect in the summer house. Put a SIM card in it and connect to the internet from everywhere. Superb keyboard, fast, small, durable, everything replaceable.
I also have a T25 at home for development and can't say anything bad from that either, albeit a bit too big for carrying around.
X220 and X230 always seemed like smaller than modern T25/T480, but far thicker, almost as thick as the T220 of that generation. Can you comment on that? I'm extremely interested but not willing to trade width for thickness :|
(my ideal complement to current stable would be a 10" or 11" think 8GB linux-compatible... and while dreaming, with a trackpoint. The whole netbook market seems to have bloomed than disappeared - but if ever there was a place to use the little red nubbin instead of tiny trackpad, that was it I think:)
They are thick and sturdy. That's what I like about them. Thick, but with a 35W CPU that can do miracles. Utilitarian piece of hardware so far away of thin modern laptops, I just like them a lot.
Thx! I agree with utility part,I just found t420s so much more usable than t420, while retaining modularity and maintainability. Feels easier to lug around than x220/230,if it's less heavy etc. Hmmm...!
I have one of the supported cards[0], so it's quite straightforward:
Check the APN from your operator's settings.
- Try the card first in a phone. Preferably turn on the SIM lock and change the PIN code.
- Insert the card to the laptop, boot.
- `doas ifconfig umb0 apn your.apn.com`
- `doas ifconfig umb0 pin XXXX`
- `doas ifconfig umb0 up`
- Confirm the gateway from `ifconfig umb0` when it appears, should say inet and it's the second IP.
- When gateway is visible, `doas route add -ifp umb0 default XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX`
- Confirm the DNS works, but you should now be able to access internet.
Sometimes when you turn off the power or suspend, you might need to enter the PIN to the card, turn the device up and set the route again. A player automates this with a script. :)
You can store the settings to `/etc/hostname.umb0`.
I have purchased two Lenovo T580 laptops within the last year, and both worked flawlessly with Fedora with zero tweaking. Both machines are running great so far. An older Lenovo I've had for a few years did have a hard drive die, but Lenovos are so easy to service that it was cake to replace the drive. If anyone from Lenovo is reading this, thank you for making it so easy to service the laptop for a user.
I have had a few Dells and I think hardware-wise it is the best, but that dual video card setup never worked quite right. Also until Fedora 29 came out (with a newer kernel) the only distro that I could install was the stock Ubuntu that came with the laptop (which didn't have full disk encryption, unfortunately).
I would recommend a Lenovo T580 or Dell XPS 15/5520. I think the Dell hardware is actually nicer than Apple, which is a high compliment.
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"
Yes, I think they fixed the Killer problems on Ubuntu first and pushed their changes upstream. That may be why it works on Debian (It's only been a week.) I can dual boot Ubuntu but for reasons not immediately obvious to me DNS queries were frequently timing out, making web browsing pretty slow.
I think that Debian is getting the firmware updates too, though for the last one it didn't apply so I just booted Ubuntu and it worked w/out issue. (It uses EFI which is another benefit of that.)
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.
If anyone else has a problem with a loose charging connector on T500... It looks like the T500 DC-in jack isn't mounted on a PCB, but is on a cable with a connector, and the jack is held in place wrt the chassis partly with a screw. So it might've just been the whole jack part wiggling within the chassis, and just needed a little tightening. Or just needed an $8 eBay part swapped in without soldering. Those old ThinkPad models had "Hardware Maintenance Manuals" ("HMM") PDFs that IBM/Lenovo freely shared, with step-by-step instructions for disassembly and reassembly. (Though I understand sending a new unit back, and also not wanting to possibly void warranty.)
I have purchased 4 lenovo laptops from different generations from x220 to t440p and they have always been rock solid build wise over several years of use. I replaced recently my cpu fan on the x220 but it was the oldest model from the bunch and now it works perfect again.
Kind of funny, but you might consider getting a refurbished ThinkPad from a couple of years ago. If you're ready to replace some parts, a T440p will be fast and good for years to come.
I got my X230 and it's so fast I really question the need for the new CPU generations...
From what I can tell, Thinkpads are in a slow decline. So it's not so much that I expect to buy a better one, but that they'll be about the same as everything else. If they aren't already.
Slapping ubuntu on an OEM laptop gets you absolutely no support from the vendor. If you're OK with that, more power to you if you want to go that route.
System76 does much more than just pre-install the OS. The below comment is from a system76 developer:
"System76 laptops aren't rebranded. Clevo is a manufacturer of standardized chassis models for OEMs who lack the sales figures to warrant high volume orders. The individual OEMs get to benefit from lower prices because every OEM is pitching in together to allow Clevo to design and commit high volume orders of chassis on their behalf.
Using a Clevo chassis does not make your laptop a rebrand, in much the same way that a Gigabyte motherboard or Vivo desktop case does not automatically make your custom-built PC a rebranded Gigabyte/Vivo desktop. They manufacture the chassis (incl. battery and motherboard), and then distribute these to OEMs, who then select the components to assemble the chassis with. This also has the benefit of giving the customer a highly serviceable laptop.
This really isn't all that different from what Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc., are all doing. Many of them are even getting their laptops manufactured in the nearby vicinity of Clevo in a similar fashion. They're just a step closer to the designing stage of their chassis models, because they are able to purchase high volume orders by themselves. They still often outsource firmware development to third parties, rather than writing their own firmware for the hardware they sell.
In comparison to other Clevo-based sellers, System76 also goes the extra mile to select Linux-compatible components during assembly, writes patches to fix drivers in Linux for the hardware selected, flashes custom firmware on them, and are now even driving the process of writing open source firmware for them. You're not going to find Clevo writing open source firmware."
Yes. System76 is definitely expensive, but their customer service is the best I've seen for any product period. They have a super snappy site with real people you can talk to in Denver and ask off the wall questions about the hardware and OS. To some, having that kind of support is worth a markup rather than trolling through Ubuntu forums and asking StackExchange answers. My last few Linux machines were all repurposed Windows computers though. It's also nice to help support Linux on desktop this way.
The build quality is not MBP standards, but support has been great (replaced a keyboard no questions asked when a key failed, helped me debug some updates that I screwed up) and the price premium is higher than total DIY, but certainly nothing in the range of say, Apple hardware.
PopOS is pretty nifty and I like it more than stock Ubuntu. I also like the amount of work they are doing to advance the Linux ecosystem hardware wise, software wise, and evangelism wise.
I could quibble about some of the laptop tradeoffs (heavy AF and pretty awful battery life and fan noise) but I knew those going in, and decided they were worth it for a dev machine that mostly lives plugged in on my desk.
I purchased one about 2 years ago. I am generally happy with purchase, but certainly don't feel like I saved any money. I did need to reinstall the operating system (and have since switched to Manjaro). The fan is loud and battery is lousy, but the hardware has not deteriorated other than the connection to the monitor needed tightening. They also don't void the warranty if you open up the machine and tinker, which was a bonus because I wanted to install my own second SSD. I also really like the look and the keyboard is excellent. Plus a good number of ports including usb-c and Ethernet which wasn't as common two years ago.
You say you installed Manjaro, that probably explains your battery woes. Pop!_OS does alot good battery optimisation, I generally wouldn't recommend getting a System76 laptop if you don't like it out of the box.
Thanks for the suggestion. PopOS was not yet created when I purchased mine, it came with Ubuntu 16.04LTS. I used Ubuntu up until a couple months ago and decided to make the switch instead of upgrading to 18.04. Honestly I think my battery life has improved slightly but I haven't performed any benchmarking and my evaluation may be biased.
Yes, I just bought a Darter, (their new laptop model), after considering others, including Dell. I am very happy with the purchase. A decent case, fantastic keyboard, and PopOS on this machine is beautiful and trouble-free. Also, System76 provides excellent service and support.
I bought my 3rd system76 laptop/desktop a few weeks ago. Every time I shop around, I try to find something comparable, esp in terms of flexibility (their build-your-own feature is excellent)...but I can't.
>Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.
So far, yes. Once they start shipping coreboot, the balance changes. They provide something that no other OEM (other than chromebooks and purism atm) do.
I have used System76 systems and I have to say I didn't enjoy the experience. Dell has Project Sputnik although when I tried it out, the OEM Ubuntu OS (a fork of Ubuntu) didn't factory reset correctly wiping out the ability to recognize the GPU.
There's LAC Portland and they were super friendly, I might try to buy a computer from them if my computer dies (and ask for debian or something).
My machine was early 2018, the Oryx Pro. It's the thick version. Suspend either suspends properly or NO-OPs. I stuck my laptop into my bag with some dry gym clothes and my books. Realized 30 minutes later the damn thing was running at full power and my bag was too hot to touch. Five more minutes and Caltrain would have been on fire.
They have the newer thinner versions of that laptop (we use them at work), but they have no enterprise-grade support and they all have different quirks (I mean at least have the same quirk, right...?!). If you're trying to replace a keyboard during business hours, and you're a high-level engineer charging hundreds of dollars per hour, and it takes a long time to change the keyboard and learn one skill one time, it will cost the business a pretty penny.
I'd get the Dell Precision 5530 or XPS 13 w/ Project Sputnik for a business setting. It's Dell, and it's the highest-level laptop they sell, so at least they'll take the machine back if it doesn't work (I believe the XPS/Precision line follow a special QA process from other commodity stuff), and I don't think Project Sputnik will disappear anytime soon (actually expanding IIRC).
When I bought one they were just straight Sagers, not even rebranded. No customization that I could see. At the time some important features were not supported including Linux' own suspend-to-disk.
Keyboard was so terrible and wifi dropped out in so annoying ways that I end up smashing mine (I reused the CPU and other components in a barebones later). This was 2013, though.
I worked for a startup that bought machines from System76. 2 out of 3 were defective and it was next to impossible to get technical support, though this was 7 years ago.
My laptop had a bad video chip.
My manager's desktop had either a bad SSD or a bad SATA bus.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They support it to the extent it is required to support due to contractual obligations for chromebooks or other vendors who may have similar deals with Intel. I doubt if Intel actually sees coreboot as something worthwhile outside of a shim to load FSP. To that end, they have also create a BSD licensed project called slimboot (more like shimboot) which exemplifies that approach better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I ended up having the opposite experience; I went and installed Pop on my non-System76 workstation.
It is basically just Ubuntu, with a custom desktop environment (that is actually perfectly fine although optional), but more importantly, ppas for up-to-date NVIDIA drivers and CUDA.
It's sort of like if a machine learning person installed Ubuntu on their workstation, did all the configuration work to get it working with their GPUs, and then turned that into a distro.
I don't think it's unusual that a hardware vendor would want to provide an OS that is absolutely guaranteed to work on the hardware they're selling--that's just protecting your customers. Ideally it shouldn't even be necessary if all of your components have well-supported drivers, but this is Linux we're talking about--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.
As good FOSS citizens, they would be encouraged to try to upstream all of their tweaks to GNOME or Ubuntu instead, but that's no guarantee that the changes would actually be accepted. Isn't that how Unity started in the first place?
It is to make the best product they can and avoid pitfalls of supporting millions of existing distros. If you had put in a lot of effort in making the hardware, would you just say to your buyer: "just download and install any linux os" and deal with the endless user problems that will, as a rule, appear? No, you provide the best system you can so everything works as smoothly as possible so the users are happy and do not call support or (god forbid) return the goods.
It's marketing speak. They hardly have their own distribution on a technical level. System76 can use this to prevent any non-developer UI mistakes like material design getting into the mix from upstream.
Configuring Linux userland's components to work together in a way that isn't garbage for what you're trying to do is an absurdly complicated task, that's why there are so many Linux distros: maintaining a distro is pretty much the only way to avoid doing all that work over and over again. It's a significant flaw in the Linux ecosystem.
> 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.
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.
I actually enjoy having choices. That's part of why systemd's feature creep to swallow everything bothers me. It represents choice being taken away from the administrator of the system.
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.