System76, the company known for their Linux hardware and the Pop!_OS Linux distribution recently announced their new Firmware Manager.
Supporting their own Pop!_OS as well as other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, their firmware tooling is aimed at easing the update process for users. Developed due to a "lack of options for graphical frontends to firmware management services", since previous tools for LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) relied on GNOME Software or KDE Discover "which is not viable for Linux distributions which have their own application centers, or frontends to package managers".
They've created a GTK application for other distributions to use, as well as widget library with it integrated into GNOME Settings. They do say that the core of the framework is "toolkit-agnostic", enabling frontends to be written in any toolkit. System76 said their new Firmware Manager project supports updating from both LVFS and system76-firmware, along with being compatible with Wayland.
You can see the full blog post here.
Talking about it on Twitter, the System76 CEO Carl Richell said "This work continues our transition from a hardware company shipping a distro to a hardware company providing an integrated, holistic hardware and OS product. Still a lot of work ahead of us but manufacturing, open firmware, and Pop!_OS are pulling together.".
What are your thoughts? Seems pretty handy to me.
I hope at some day System76 starts selling in Brazil. I would like to buy from them but importing makes it cost much more than reasonable due to shipping and brazilian customs taxes.gotta dream big, I guess.
I bought a Dell XPS13.
I almost bought a Galago Pro, but initially they refused to ship with a UK keyboard and after a bit of complaining they said they could do it at a $80 surcharge.
I bought a Dell XPS13.
That's incredible. I had the exact same experience in 2016. They didn't have a UK keyboard on the top end notebook model, and I ended up buying a Dell XPS13 Dev Edition instead. So expensive, but an incredible laptop. I'd still like to support System76 at some point though. UK shipping and localisation is an issue though.
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