System76 are turning 15 years old so to celebrate they're running a huge sale across most of their hardware and you can bag some huge savings.
The thing is, System76 have become in my opinion pretty essential to the Linux ecosystem. They've gone from tiny beginnings in 2005 selling hardware with Ubuntu tested and supported that all looked pretty generic and rebrands, to having their own factory and production line where they make custom cases for their Thelio desktop line (and eventually likely Laptops too). Not only that, they're also firmly committed to FOSS values too, with System76 continuing to roll out their Open Firmware and Open Source Embedded Controller to more devices.
Across this last year System76 have released a fair amount of new hardware too, they're always busy. New kit includes the sweet Galago Pro refresh which is back with Intel Xe and NVIDIA options along with what sounds like a better cooling system than a lot of others. There was also the insanely powerful Thelio Mega with four GPUs. Their Pop!_OS Linux distribution continues to do awesome things too.
With their big birthday sale going on there's an instant discount across much of their hardware, however there's discounts on upgrades too as they say "the more you upgrade, the more you save" and if you order during the birthday event which runs until January 4 they will send you a commemorative System76 birthday pin.
See their full specials page here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments
Quoting: chrI want to support them, but I also want an AMD GPU. :/From the regularity of roughly this comment every single time there's an article about System76, I gotta figure at this point they have to be leaving a bunch of money on the table by not doing some models with AMD.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: chrI want to support them, but I also want an AMD GPU. :/From the regularity of roughly this comment every single time there's an article about System76, I gotta figure at this point they have to be leaving a bunch of money on the table by not doing some models with AMD.
Either that or it is trivial to write amotional anonymous comments online without any backing in actions.
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Quoting: chrThat isn't an "or". Sure, many of the people who say they won't buy one because no AMD wouldn't buy one anyway. But this place represents a chunk of System76's core market, and if lots of people in that market say they're not going to buy things with NVidia it would be foolish to assume they're lying. It's not like it's impossible to buy a broadly similar laptop from someone else with AMD in it.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: chrI want to support them, but I also want an AMD GPU. :/From the regularity of roughly this comment every single time there's an article about System76, I gotta figure at this point they have to be leaving a bunch of money on the table by not doing some models with AMD.
Either that or it is trivial to write amotional anonymous comments online without any backing in actions.
A few years ago, NVidia was what Linux users were mostly going to be using unless they were total purists who didn't care about graphics performance because the NVidia drivers, closed though they might be, were far superior. At many price points the NVidia cards, too. But there has been a massive shift since then, and at this point not only do many Linux users prefer AMD, but it's clear that for many NVidia is a deal-breaker. Not only that, but the future looks like it will reinforce this trend. AMD drivers will continue to pull away in quality and ability to play well with other parts of Linux. Cairo is only going to become more important; NVidia's refusal to work with it is going to move from annoyance to major pain. And the closed nature of NVidia's drivers is just going to keep throwing up pain points. A lot of Linux users see that as the direction things are going, so while NVidia is still kind of competitive right now, if you want a card that's still going to be useful a few years of Linux upgrades in the future, many people see AMD as better.
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I don't know much about Cairo. I read the Wikipedia article, but care to share something about relevance to AMD or Nvidia or about Cairo's future importance?
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Quoting: chrI don't know much about Cairo. I read the Wikipedia article, but care to share something about relevance to AMD or Nvidia or about Cairo's future importance?Welllll, I'm not a technically knowledgeable person, I'm more interested in strategy and politics. But my take is this. Up until recently, display on Linux was run by X. This has some great things and was impressive in its day, but despite many efforts with some success to update it, it has become long in the tooth and so X developers eventually plotted its replacement, which is called Cairo. It probably isn't entirely a "Dump X and everything in it and put Cairo in instead" kind of thingie, they seem to be salvaging a fair amount of old stuff, but still--the end game is that display is being managed in a fundamentally different way.
This has taken bloody forever to do and even more of forever to gradually get integrated into everything else that needs to tell the system to display things--notably though not exclusively desktop environments and window managers, like Gnome, KDE, etc etc etc. And as this has moved along, it has been necessary to basically keep X going alongside Cairo, so everyone's still kind of using X so far even if they've started moving to Cairo. Which means so far it's sort of workable for NVidia to ignore Cairo (which they apparently have some kind of weird proprietary reason for doing).
But. More and more distros, more and more desktop environments, are getting the bugs and missing features worked out of their Cairo implementations. At some point they're going to start dropping X. At which point if you have an NVidia card, what you'll have is a graphics card which cannot talk to the piece of Linux running graphics. I gotta figure that's going to be a serious problem. At a minimum, X is going to be still available but kind of deprecated with less and less maintenance, while Cairo gets all the features. Plus, there are reasons they put all that masses of effort to do a new X-like thing, and some of those reasons are relevant to gaming; if you're stuck with a card that uses fallback legacy X instead of Cairo, there's going to be disadvantages to that even if X is still kind of there.
As you can see, that whole analysis and not a single mention of a technical feature; I don't really know about that stuff.
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Quoting: whizseI think you mean Wayland instead of Cairo?Oh, man, you're totally right. Computy stuff has too many names. And, you know, I may be exaggerating the difficulty; maybe they'll get support.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: whizseI think you mean Wayland instead of Cairo?Oh, man, you're totally right. Computy stuff has too many names. And, you know, I may be exaggerating the difficulty; maybe they'll get support.
Ahh I do have a (similarly vague) understanding of Wayland. Cool. Thanks for the summary anyway.
I think I remember reading that KDE has been doing new stuff only for Wayland for a while now to push it along.
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