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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

good to see linux being sold in laptop out of the box. this means, hopefully that bugs that the linux community was used to, because everyone knew it and didn't bother fixing are getting fixed because linus managed to break Pop os in the first command.

stuff like what kde is doing with their "15-Minute Bugs" are great initiatives. this will definitely help the overall linux software become more rugged and idiot friendly

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> good to see linux being sold in laptop out of the box.

I remember knowing that if I got an IBM ThinkPad, it probably had good Linux driver support.

I still make the assumption that Lenovo ThinkPads have better Linux driver support because hackers prefer them. But I honestly have no idea if that's true any more.

Various, generally older, ThinkPads are popular in the *BSD communities too.

Better than average but the majority of laptops use the same hardware and drivers. A bad wifi chip here or an odd fingerprint reader there are the majority of issues.

Mine needs an unofficial wifi driver or the connection will just die every 20 minutes, and the NVidia Optimus hardware is a nightmare.

I like the laptop overall but I'll never touch NVidia stuff again. Drivers are among the things I just don't want to deal with.

It is good to see it but a bit ridiculous to see companies marking up the pricing just to install an OS which is pretty simple to do with almost any hardware.

It's an added context switch. It takes a small amount of time and the end user has the convenience of not needing to do it, the end user chooses to pay for that.

disclaimer: I've never touched a s76 machine.

I would never run an OS that was pre-installed as the install image can't be verified.

Honestly, I've only ever run the pre-installed OS on one machine from them (my gaming Thelio). I buy them for the support both after- and before-purchase. I.e. because they do great support and provide machines that actually support Linux.

I used to not have the option of buying Linux hardware, and it was terrible. I don't understand why anybody does that to themselves these days, and I sincerely hope we never go back to having to buy Windows hardware, slapping Linux on top of it, and hoping that enough devs had the _exact_ same hardware to minimize the glitches.

Windows hardware like the Surface?

That’s the whole point of it. You get excellent tested comparability and support. For Linux users like me it’s worth the money. I can have Linux and not worry about if my hardware is compatible with the default install.

You are paying for support and to make it easy.

But scale, as they sell more one assumes the markup will decrease.

System76 also adds custom, open source firmware (https://support.system76.com/articles/open-firmware-systems/) and ensures the hardware works by coordinating with the ODM and writing custom drivers if necessary (https://support.system76.com/articles/system76-driver/)

Pretending to be a system integrator by buying proprietary Windows hardware and slapping Linux on it is a mug's game.

They were going to start building their own laptops at one point. I'm not sure what happened with that. Of course, nobody except Apple really builds their own hardware these days either (hence the term ODM).

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