System76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware
I'm very excited for this. I have a pretty nasty love/hate relationship with my personal Thinkpad P51. It's a fantastic device on paper, and the build quality is great to match, but... I try to boot Linux and I remember why Linus once gave Nvidia the finger all over again. Even on Thinkpad, issues you wouldn't see with nearly any Linux desktop system crop up when Optimus is thrown into the mix. Nouveau actually outperforms proprietary Nvidia drivers in certain circumstances, which had me extraordinarily confused.<p>It would be nice to boot into a laptop actually designed to use Linux from the ground up. And I don't mean what Dell does - I'm grateful for what they do, but I really want unmodified Linux to work as well on my laptop as it does on nearly any desktop I've built. System76, with both properties that they are going open with firmware and designs, AND building entirely for Linux, seems perfect to me.<p>I wonder a lot about their stated goal of a completely open compute platform. Sure, there's ISAs like RISC-V on the horizon, but I get the feeling many components like GPUs are quite far away from having open source equivalents that can act as drop-in replacements. There's a whole lot more than raw computation in modern CPUs and certainly more in the motherboard. Id still be moderately pleased with a "mostly" open platform, which is better than today where your choices are basically Lemote Yeeloong or something useful but nearly entirely closed off.