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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I have high hopes for System76 and their endeavors on laptops. While I’ve heard mixed things regarding some of their older laptops, I think there’s a lot of room to at least offer truly unique products. I actually considered buying the Thelio, just because it would look nice in the living room as an alternative to my current HTPC setup. (Not exactly rational, but it really does look nice.)

I know support for AMD Zen in Coreboot is currently pretty limited, but for example I’d love to see a mid to high end Ryzen laptop with Coreboot. Though even if it happened, I’d be kind of sad to leave Lenovo and their TrackPoint pointing stick...

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Why don’t they include a keyboard with a pointer stick? Seems like a no brainer given their market segment is thinkpad junkies.

Compaq, toshiba, and other companies seemed to be able to include them in 90s laptops by just using a different color bud (like green).

No idea. I’ve never liked any non-Lenovo pointing sticks I’ve tried, though.

One possibility is that none of the manufacturers they’re rebadging from offer this feature.

Keep asking them, I do.

So far they say there isn't enough demand.

I'd totally give it a try right away, well assuming 3 buttons of course!

Does System76 design these machines themselves, or are they rebadged? They might not have control over what the keyboard is.

Until recently, system76 simply rebranded hardware produced by Clevo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clevo

Link to an old HN thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039414

Link to an article from Linux magazine stating that System76 are still mainly Clevo (Sager) rebranders.

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/System76-To-Desig...

I am in the market for new laptop and my 3 key desires are: AMD Ryzen 5 + pointer stick + USB power connection

The current only option for me is Thinkpad, but I truly wish others would jump into that space.

I hate touch pads.

I also want to see Coreboot shipping on Thelio. To me, OOTB Coreboot has become their prime differentiator. I run their Pop! OS on my Ryzen rig, but UEFI is a nightmare.

I do suspect Coreboot is a less solid option on desktop. Aside from pretty much no desktop Zen support today, desktops tend to have more flexibility for the end user, and the minimal nature of coreboot could perhaps backfire there.

How much does coreboot care? It needs to support the specific motherboard+CPU, but after that it's not like coreboot needs to handle most hardware. Excepting of course storage (USB, SATA, etc.), but that should be equivalent to laptop difficulty, and possibly network cards for network booting, which I grant might well be harder in desktops.

But mostly I'd expect coreboot to need fairly minimal hardware support and then just pass off to the real OS with proper drivers.

Coreboot still uses UEFI since that's what the motherboard uses to boot the OS.

Huh?

Coreboot supports multiple payloads[1]. You can in fact run Coreboot without UEFI - for example by using a SeaBIOS or GRUB payload.

When you are running Coreboot, it is virtually the first thing that executes on the processor, probably after some burnt-on initialization code. At that point it can do whatever. I suspect most people using Coreboot are not using it to launch Tianocore, the UEFI payload, but I guess I don’t know.

The only logical reason I can see to need UEFI would be to load drivers and/or option ROMs that need a UEFI environment - but nothing stops you from implementing drivers/initialization yourself, reverse engineering notwithstanding.

[1]: https://www.coreboot.org/Payloads

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