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System76 Unveils 'Darter Pro' Linux Laptop With Choice of Ubuntu or Pop!_OS (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Today, System76 unveiled its latest laptop -- the 15.6-inch (full-HD) "Darter Pro." It is thin, but not overly so -- it still has USB-A ports (thankfully). The computer is quite modern, however, as it also has a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port. It supports Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS (64-bit), Pop!_OS 18.10 (64-bit), or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (64-bit) operating system. It comes in two variants, with the following processor options: 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8265U: 1.6 up to 3.90 GHz -- 6MB Cache -- 4 Cores -- 8 Threads, or 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8565U: 1.8 up to 4.60 GHz -- 8MB Cache -- 4 Cores -- 8 Threads, with either coupled with Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU, and up to 32GB Dual Channel DDR4 @ 2400 MHz, and M.2 SATA or PCIe NVMe SSD for storage. As for ports, there is USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3, 2 USB 3.0 Type-A, 1 x USB 2.0, SD Card Reader. The company says it will announce the pricing at a later stage,
For those who do not like the Ubuntu UI.
The same question can be asked for any distribution.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
does it support snap packages and crackle streams?
If I ever bother paying money for a laptop, its going to be a laptop with a separate GPU not dependent upon Intel Corp. My last laptop CPU was the Arrandale model, and the OS could not be upgraded to Windows 10, because Intel abandoned support for the CPU after 1.5 years. The problem was that the GPU didn't support advanced graphics primitives that became "expected" for Windows 10. Intel could have written an updated driver that would work in Windows 10, and ignored the obscure calls, or even made the API available for someone to write a 3rd party driver, but of course, they didn't.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Global warming is the topic! Why waste the last 10 years of your life fighting with Microsoft and/or Apple software when you can have a Linux laptop!
#DeleteFacebook
To let them integrate their hardware and make customizations that suit their customers? Why would a Linux distribution be a surprise? There are already like 300 of them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Out of curiosity, what OS are you running?
and the OS could not be upgraded to Windows 10
And nothing of value was lost.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The reason why System76 puts out its own spin on debian is strategic to the manufacturer. They want to be able to control (and provide support) for the OS, which is intrinsic to building a consumer experience. They don't want to be at the mercy of the whims of debian or ubuntu corp (or microsoft for that matter).
Also, anyone who claims to be technically competent should be aware that linux isn't efficient with laptop power consumption, because it requires driver support (from the chip manufacturer) and kernel/OS support for various sleep modes. If you want a laptop that runs for hours off of battery, you going to get that extra hour from running windows or macOS (because between Microsoft/Apple and the hardware manufacturers, they're plowing a ton of proprietary work into it). If you run linux, then you probably won't be able to run your laptop off of battery for as long. But with Pop!OS, System76 could be incorporating more of those power efficient features by negotiating with the chip manufacturers and the mobo designer/manufacturer, but some of that customized work probably also needs to be in the OS. (I have no idea if System76 is actually doing this.)
You're not satisfied with Pop!OS? Fine, that's still the manufacturer's responsibility. But they aren't putting out Pop!OS out of egotism.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
System76 makes linux laptops. Who cares if they fail to run windows - or the next version of windows? That is not what you buy them for. Perfectly fine for them to use components not supported by windows - as long as they support linux.
I hate Chicklet keyboard! It's like typing on concrete!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
The keyboard is not centered in front of the screen. The put it to the left to squeeze in a num pad.
Whatever you think about macbooks, they didn't compromise on the keyboard placement.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
If someone came out with a machine like this or the Oryx Pro that was completely compatible with macOS, they'd make a lot of people happy. Ship it with a common Linux distro so that it's good to go out of the box, but ensure all the bits play nice with macOS.
I'll never understand why System76, Zareason, Purism, Think Penguin etc keep only ever offering Intel/Nvidia crap.
Simply, you're utterly ignorant of the manufacturing business. They're not there to make a laptop that makes their customers happiest. They're there to make a laptop as cheaply as possible, and then charge as much as possible, while still satisfying the majority of laptop purchasers who are not you (geek). They need to have a relationship with the various chip manufacturers, because those manufacturers provide an allocation of CPUs at a price, and those manufacturers are going to favor the the company that gives them the best long term profit and jumps through their hoops.
Before Ryzen, only a fucking moron would buy an AMD laptop, because they have to run hotter & use more power in order to match the performance of an analogous Intel CPU. Even now, there's no consensus that Ryzen cpus, specifically made for laptops, can run as power efficiently as Intel. Ryzen only hit the market maybe 3 years ago. No major manufacturer is going to jeopardize their CPU allocation with Intel for a company that makes inferior laptop CPUs and can't even ensure they can deliver X CPUs to them per quarter, or be producing a laptopable, competitive CPU two years later. Then you have to design a laptop around AMD hardware. Even now, I don't think AMD has a laptop CPU based on Ryzen until their 2nd generation, which only came out a year ago.
As long as AMD is committed to putting out a competitive laptop CPU, they will eventually show up in laptop products. But it doesn't happen overnight, and it certainly doesn't happen in less than a year.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Of course there was. Like it or not, laptops are going to be most power efficient on a Microsoft OS, because they own the Wintel market. One day that may change, but not until hardware chip manufacturers are designing their chips to be power efficient under linux, while linux kernel developers are incorporating those power saving features, and glibc, gcc, and GUIs are mandating power efficient code into their products. "Nice tweak, does it interfere with sleep mode 3X? Then it doesn't get put into the codebase."
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
And linux works fine under my old laptop with the Arrandale CPU. But I obviously can't use updated code that expects a graphics hardware primitive that the CPU can't deliver. And it doesn't run 2 hours on battery.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
From TFA: "When people come to me for advice on buying a computer that comes with a Linux-based operating system pre-installed, my first suggestion is always System76. While other companies, such as Dell, also make great laptops running Ubuntu, for instance, System76 stands above the rest by also offering its own operating system -- Pop!_OS (which is based on Ubuntu). In other words, System76 has better control over the overall customer experience."
My own "overall customer experience" with the Thelio that I recently bought was this: It came with Pop!_OS, which I dutifully tried out. Its quirks and limitations were so irritating that within three days I gave up on it, wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu MATE, and everything has been running smoothly since then. Great hardware. I have no idea what they are trying to do with Pop!_OS, though.
The sane thing to do is to just use Ubuntu
It is an Ubuntu variant.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
He may have been going for "Oh, you can't upgrade to Windows 10. Intel did you a favor."
Meaning, if you are looking to "upgrade" you are coming from somewhere - Windows 7 or Windows 8.
If it's Windows 7, it's arguable that Intel really was doing you a favor. Windows 8 had a horrific interface but the OS underneath wasn't bad. ClassicShell fixed the UI problem.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I take it you don't remember all of the abandonware distros put out on the netbooks, nettops and cheap desktops a decade ago that where all dead within a year only to be replaced with XP Starter edition.
Nope, don't remember that era, even though I was in my thirties at the time.
There is a reason Dell, HP Zareason, Puget Systems and many others use Ubuntu, they don't have to go through the hassle of maintaining an entire distro, they just provide packages and patches to Canonical and they add it to the repos.
You are aware that Ubuntu uses its base OS off of Debian packages? Ubuntu then tweaks whatever is coming off of Debian, including incorporating proprietary binary code into Ubuntu distributed packages. Its possible that I am wrong, but I believe Pop!OS is running off of Debian distributions as well.
The real reason why System76 wanted to get off Ubuntu was that Ubuntu for the past decade has been ineptly tilting at technical windmills where Ubuntu originally wanted its own Unity desktop, that had nothing directly to do with Gnome or KDE, and then their own rendering layer (Mir?), and eventually just gave up on all of it last(?) year. A lot of Ubuntu users abandoned Ubuntu in the past decade because of this, and System76 decided they couldn't risk losing their customer base being dependent on a poorly(?) managed OS distributor. System76 wanted to standardize its OS in a manner where they weren't dependent upon the whims of Ubuntu, and they're chasing business customers, so they know they don't have to provide the ultimate consumer experience.
So Pop!OS is very basic, its GUI is theirs, build off a lot of other linux windowing code, and they can ensure that their business customers can have a working laptop that works the same way four years from now. Don't think of System76 leaving a stable linux distribution; think of System76 leaving the Ubuntu base product for the Debian base product (that Ubuntu is based on), and Pop!OS tweaks off of Debian, rather than Ubuntu. In any case, I don't care. I just don't like anyone (or company) being pilloried over fanboy ignorance.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Anyone with the balls to name an OS project Pop!_OS. Hands down the stupidest name for a project ever.
Why would you have ten years left to live, I have heard of no one who can make those guarantees. Climate change or not, you could be dead tomorrow or a week from now. How ever, if you do own a low lying seafront home, yeah, it will probably be dead, 'er', wave washed rubble within ten years, underwater front, it's a thing, get used to it. Definitely sell and do not buy, let some other sucker let their investment drown and 'DIE'. There is always stilt homes and amphibious vehicles, drive one of these https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to you home from the shore and back (it's Russia and that makes it much funnier). This is not a pro-climate change comment, it is an ATV comment ;D (it's a /. thing).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Not true at all, in fact one great big fat lie. For a computer to be efficient, it has to be efficient in the environment it is used. Just doing internet, and some spread sheeting and word processing, the majority of the market, than Linux is factually the most efficient OS. Want to play computer games, well, technically, "The operating system is Orbis OS, based on FreeBSD 9." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is the most efficient. In a business environment it depends upon the main packages you use in that environment. In the server environment Linux absolutely craps all over Windows. How about TVs, the smart TV, well there again, Linux with an Android TV layer absolutely wipes out windows, windows does not even appear. How about phones, well, M$ has rolled over and is playing dead ants, so zero efficiency there. Down to tablets, well, that is Apple and Android, windows is nowheresville in that environment. So down to laptops, well, Chrome is eating into Windows as is Apple so, a battlefield and a toss up which one to go with. All that is left, they tiny shrinking ever getting limper, desktop market (excluding smart terminals), M$ desperately clinging on to a shrinking market because it can not expand because that are a pack of privacy invasive anal retentive control freaks and their customers hate them.
Windows is dying because M$ are a pack of dicks, how is MSN doing M$, how small is that market share, and it is all down to your dickish attitude.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I take it you don't remember all of the abandonware distros put out on the netbooks, nettops and cheap desktops a decade ago that where all dead within a year only to be replaced with XP Starter edition.
Here in Huezil, around that time, I recall that OEMs got a tax relief for PCs sold with free software -- but it had to have local support. So we had those short-lived distros like Satux and Fenix. Not that it mattered, almost everyone just ran pirated XP on them.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Yes, that: 10 is a headache, stay on 7 while you can.
Circumcision is child abuse.
how is MSN doing M$
Man, I remember that, talk about a wasted opportunity. They had Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Lync, Skype, Skype for Business, Teams... and you just wonder, what talks to what? What's the difference? Just make one goddamn chat program, make it good and polished and available in every platform. But instead they lost focus and people stopped using it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
They're not there to make a laptop that makes their customers happiest. They're there to make a laptop as cheaply as possible, and then charge as much as possible, while still satisfying the majority of laptop purchasers who are not you (geek).
How many non-geeks are purchasing Linux laptops from System76, or speccing them for their employer? Answer, statistically nobody. Linux users care more about security than average.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
sure it's of value if you need 10 for some reason like compiling applications for it.
oh well at least windows phones dead so nobodys asking to make apps for that.. still. it's better than windows 8. and for the record I had to update to windows 8 because microsoft made(for no technical reason at all, mind you) mandatory to have windows 8 to be able to compile/develop windows phone apps.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This just seems like an advert.
Maybe it's different over there in the States, but here in Europe there are plenty of companies selling bare-bones laptops (by the likes of MSI and Clevo) without an OS installed. As components these days are largely standard (same chipsets, same CPUs, same GPUs), Linux runs just as well on them as it does on companies who make a point of mentioning Linux.
Buy one of those, boot up Ubuntu from a memory stick and bam, all done.
(I guess if you want someone to install Linux for you at the factory your options are more limited, but if you're thinking of Linux rather than Windows I'm sure you're more than capable of booting from USB and installing it yourself!)
It depends on the laptop vendor. Some companies (Apple in the extreme) participate in the design. Some companies take what manufacturers offer. But they aren't the same complete board, with exact specs, or else one could figure out the generic board Dell gets, and buy a replacement board direct from the manufacturer. The mobo board maker doesn't take the responsibility for CPU allocation from Intel; they leave it to the laptop seller. They just give a rough number to their manufacturing capacity, and its up to the laptop seller (or some other conglomerate) to hit up Intel for CPUs. The way, the laptop seller controls its inventory and sets the order size, not the manufacturer. (There will be exceptional cases as well.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
What do you want me to say? I have no proof laptop manufacturers will deliberately cripple AMD based products. I will say its quite possible in order for the laptop vendor to fit a pricing niche, they will deliberately do stupid things to cripple an AMD product, so it stays in the low price niche, and not compete with a higher margin product, which happens to be Intel based hardware But AMD probably is just as much to blame, because they can't produce enough of a particular CPU for the manufacturer to adjust their pricing product lines. (Remember, until recently, Intel could guarantee they could put out a zillion CPUs of varying capability, and AMD is stuck figuring out their price point.)
Its up to AMD to figure out how to best showcase their products, probably by partnering with a specific large vendor, guaranteeing a competitive price point, and supervising the design. But to this day, AMD CPUs will run hotter and consume more power; they just aren't as IPC(?) efficient as Intel products.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Just doing internet, and some spread sheeting and word processing, the majority of the market, than Linux is factually the most efficient OS.
Citation please.
Want to play computer games, well, technically, "The operating system is Orbis OS, based on FreeBSD 9." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], is the most efficient.
Yeah, gamers care about hardware efficiency, not what games are available to play on it. (Duh.) That's why Steam on Linux "owns" the gaming market. /s
In a business environment it depends upon the main packages you use in that environment.
I'll let the PlayStation4 penetration in the business market speak for itself. Again, you need to provide citations for you to claim "proof" or "fact".
In the server environment Linux absolutely craps all over Windows.
Yup, and when I need to buy a standalone server, I will probably run linux on it. But I was talking about laptops.
Yeah, let your fanboy flag fly, and use Trump style arguments to persuade the technically inclined. "Fuck the corporate power."
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Debian moves at a glacial pace, I have tried to use it in place of Ubuntu a few times, it was always a massive hassle trying to get things patched up enough to work where Ubuntu already had those packages and just worked.
Back in the 1990's, Slackware was my OS. Loved the damn thing to death. But (besides management issues based on Volkerding's health and at the time, his one man band approach), the fact that it was minimally "tweaked" became a huge problem for me, because I literally had to follow the "soap opera" of a lot of subpackages, and had to configure everything to make it work the way I wanted to (particularly for my laptop). So, at some point in the middle "aughts", I gave up on mastering everything and switched over to Ubuntu. (Of course, I never completely abandoned Windows, and it became my goto OS around when Windows 8 was released (but I always stuck to Windows 7 until Windows 10. Lately, I've been seriously thinking about only running Windows 10 for games, and abandoning my former casual interest in the Windows ecosystem.)
Why do I bring this all up? Just to say I understand completely what you mean about Debian. But I presume Pop!OS is working off the Debian unstable branch. Debian's management team is totally committed to open source and public domain, so of course its hell trying to get Debian working the way you want it to. Ubuntu's original mission was to focus on the user experience, so they totally run roughshod on Debian's distribution, including Debian no-no's like freely available proprietary binaries. Unity & Mir never bothered me, because the dogfood was never forced fed to the masses, and I ran stock or Gnome Ubuntu LTS when I bothered. (I totally get going to MATE, though, I used to do Solaris administration.)
When any company is looking to target Linux they only look at 2 distros, [...]
As I suggested previously, fuck System76's approach. I just don't care; I haven't bought any of their laptops (yet). I do like the fact that they realize they can't depend on the amateurish chaos that is linux, and feel they have to get their hands dirty with their own tweaked distro. It may put them into the position where they'll eventually be optimizing their products with power saving features and handing some of the modifications upstream to the larger linux community. That is where I really hope they'll eventually go (and thus I'm not going to crucify them for their attempt). If Pop!OS happens to be no good for a lot of their customers, fine, its System76's fuckup and their sunken costs and sales; I don't own stock in their company. But stop crucifying this company for not following one's "true" religion (not you, other posters), and realize its their fucking money, not yours.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon