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

Re:What a weird add

[Hognoxious]

Which of those can you prototype in acrylic?

That one.

Nice to see

[poor_boi]

I live in Colorado where Sys76 is based. The original post may read like an ad, and my comment may sound like a shill, but check my post history. I'm not shill, I'm a real life Sys76 customer. Sys76 is committed to Linux on well-designed desktop/laptop systems. They have a legit business that focuses on systems designed for HPC and deep learning. I don't think they're super focused on mainstream consumer audience right now. From what I've seen they're really on the prosumer/commercial side of things -- looking to cash in on the deep learning craze, and put capable hardware and OS stack in the hands of interested people who want form-factors that fit into daily life. I'm impressed with their last-gen offerings, and I really look forward to what they'll be doing next.
tl;dr: real company, real product. Keep an eye on this.

Re:Baddly worded summary

[hey!]

I suspect this may enable them to lower their prices or increase their margins.

Linux support on popular high-end hardware is close to flawless -- or becomes so after that hardware has been out for a year or so. But if you start looking at the plethora of low end laptops, especially, you are in for a world of minor headaches. I find it takes me about a week of research to get a cheap, relatively new laptop working flawlessly. Sometimes the fixes Google turns up for your model don't work because you have a different revision number. Most people, if they attempted to install Linux onto a recent, low-end laptop, would find a lot of things not working, like sound, or keyboard special keys. It's not rocket science to fix, but for them it might as well be.

This is not what 99% of the world signs on for when they buy a laptop, so it makes sense for someone to have a business that does this for people. But if you're in the business of doing that, you have to pay yourself for your labor. That means you can compete at rock bottom prices because that's where you're starting from in your costs; and in any case starting with a better quality device minimizes the work you have to do dealing with stuff like broken ACPI firmware.

Which means when you count the cost of your value added, it's really hard to sell a rebranded laptop at a competitive price. Selling high quality rebranded hardware at relatively high prices and small profits may be a way to bootstrap your business, but the only way to get serious volume sales at a profit is going to be to have a computer manufactured to your specifications.

Re:Baddly worded summary

[LWATCDR]

If they are going to produce X/86 desktops then they would be dumb to produce their own motherboard.
Lots of companies already make very good X/86 motherboards for both Intel and AMD. What can they do better? Even if the want to tweak the motherboard OEMs can do that for them.
Now if they intend to build their own motherboards....
Well that could be the death of the company. They would have to compete with people that make good products already.