Linux PC Maker System76 Plans To Design And Manufacture Its Own Hardware (liliputing.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Liliputing: System76 is one of only a handful of PC vendors that exclusively sells computers with Linux-based software. Up until now, that's meant the company has chosen hardware that it could guarantee would work well with custom firmware and the Ubuntu Linux operating system... Starting in 2018 though, you may be able to buy a System76 computer that was designed and built in-house... CAD files for System76 computers will be open source, allowing anyone with the appropriate skills and equipment to build or modify their own cases based on the company's designs.
"We're prototyping with acrylic and moving to metal soon," the company says in a blog post, adding "Our first in-house designed and manufactured desktops will ship next year. Laptops are more complex and will follow much later."

Comments

Cases, not electronics

[Gravis Zero]

I RTFA and the source article and I didn't see anything to indicate they would be designing their own electronics. Instead, it seems like they will be building their own computer cases. Frankly, computer cases are far less important than the electronics that reside inside them. Having the CAD files to customize is nice but when their is a backdoor in every new x86 chip, it's kinda like putting on sunblock to protect your skin from the sun as you stare down a civilization ending 10000 meter tsunami wave.

Baddly worded summary

[DrYak]

The summary is badly worder.

The thing is :

up until now System76 were selling
- laptops which were simply re-branded laptops from other brand, to which they changed firmware and OS to a more free option
- desktop which were mostly of the shelf beige-boxes
i.e.: they were selling mostly 3rd party hardware

starting from next year, they also want :
- laptop that they make themselves (well, most likely they will be still produced in china. but the idea is that the models are now made by System76. Not Lenovo models with an alternate firmware and OS).
This is interesting because in the end it will enable them to better choose the component inside the laptop for Linux compatibility (avoid too much weird embed controllers)
- desktop designed by themselves too. (that won't be a much big change from the current beige box trend. A motherboard is still a motherboard).
but at least it will help with brand identity and will also help testing their design pipeline on a smaller scale before tackling the laptops.

Their blog post make it clearer (I swear I didn't click TFA's link ! I just clicked last week, when it was on Phoronix. Am I still /.-worthy ? :-D )
Sadly the summery sounds like you need desktop cases specially made compatible with Linux.

Microsoft tax

[DrYak]

I understand wanting to support the Linux community, but I thought one of the "big advantages" of Linux was that it was cheaper? Yet here, even without the Microsoft tax, it costs a lot more.

The thing is, unlike your custom self-build linux workstation, linux laptops not only come *without the Microsoft tax* (making them a bit cheaper), they also come *without the Bloatware/Crapware bonus* (making them not heavily subsidized by "Punch the Monkey to win big prizes !" and "Let's siphon all your data straight to all the marketeer we an find".

They also don't come with the *integrated by chinese almost-slave labour rebate*.
Laptop tend to be complex and weird (embed controllers, etc.) which requires a tiny bit of adaptation to make them linux-worthy.

- When you buy a big popular brand like Lenovo's Thinkpad Ts, Dell's Lattitude, etc. someone else would have done the debugging already (see ressources like Thinkwiki) and by that time it'll probably be upstream in vanilla kernel and standard distros. So you can probably just pop in a CD of Ubuntu or Linux Mint and it will install flawlessly.

- When you start with less popular manufacturer, you'd be in for a few small surprise : screen not turning on, kernel crashing at boot when trying to enumerate hardware, UEFI-Secure refusing the signature of your bootloader's shim, etc. You could be needed fixes in the firmware and/or workaround patched in the kernel. It might something really simple (just hacking a bit some settings).
But even that "simple" will by done by some who isn't paid in cents per day range.

So it adds up to the costs.