System76 Announces American-Made Desktop PC with Open-Source Parts

Bryan Lunduke — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 15:01:36 +0000

Early in 2017—nearly two years ago—System76 invited me, and a handful of others, out to its Denver headquarters for a sneak peek at something new they'd been working on.

We were ushered into a windowless, underground meeting room. Our phones and cameras confiscated. Seriously. Every word of that is true. We were sworn to total and complete secrecy. Assumedly under penalty of extreme death...though that part was, technically, never stated.

Once the head honcho of System76, Carl Richell, was satisfied that the room was secure and free from bugs, the presentation began.

System76 told us the company was building its own desktop computers. Ones that it designed themselves. From-scratch cases. With wood. And inlaid metal. What's more, these designs would be open. All built right there in Denver, Colorado.

We were intrigued.

Then they showed them to us, and we darn near lost our minds. They were gorgeous. We all wanted them.

But they were not ready yet. This was early on in the design and engineering, and they were looking for feedback—to make sure System76 was on the right track.

They were.

Flash-forward to today (November 1, 2018), and these Linux-powered, made in America desktop machines are finally being unveiled to the world as the Thelio line (which they've been teasing for several weeks with a series of sci-fi themed stories).

The Thelio comes in three sizes:

Thelio (aka "small") — max 32GB RAM, 24TB storage.
Thelio Major (aka "medium") — max 128GB RAM, 46TB storage.
Thelio Massive (aka "large") — max 768GB RAM, 86TB storage.

All three sport the same basic look: part black metal, part wood (with either maple or walnut options) with rounded side edges. The cases open with a single slide up of the outer housing, with easy swapping of components. Lots of nice little touches, like a spot for in-case storage of screws that can be used in securing drives.

In an awesomely nerdy touch, the rear exhaust grill shows the alignment of planets in the solar system...at UNIX Epoch time. Also known as January 1, 1970. A Thursday.

Go to Full Article

Review: System76 Oryx Pro Laptop

Robert J. Hansen — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Robert J. Hansen

Can "by hackers, for hackers" sell laptops? System76 sold an Oryx Pro to Rob, and he's here to tell you about it.

I should start by saying that although I'm definitely no newbie to Linux, I'm new to the world of dedicated Linux laptops. I started with Linux in 1996, when Red Hat 4.0 had just adopted the 2.0 kernel and Debian 1.3 hadn't yet been released. I've run a variety of distros with varying degrees of satisfaction ever since, always looking for the Holy Grail of a desktop UNIX that just plain worked.

About 15 years ago after becoming frustrated with the state of Linux on laptop hardware (in a phrase, "nonexistent hardware support"), I switched my laptops over to Macs and didn't look back. It was a true-blue UNIX that just plain worked, and I was happy. But I increasingly found myself frustrated by things I expected from Linux that weren't available on macOS, and which things like Homebrew and MacPorts and Fink could only partly address.

My last MacBook Pro is now four years old, so it was time to shop around again. After being underwhelmed by this generation of MacBooks, I decided to take the risk on a Linux laptop again.

Oh my, an awful lot has changed in 15 years!

System76

System76 is a Denver-based firm with a "by hackers, for hackers" ethos. It's not the first outfit to have tried to deliver on this promise, nor will it be the last. It follows in a long line pioneered by Red Hat and VA Research, and it will continue in the future with businesses yet to be founded. At this moment in history though, System76 seems to be doing a pretty good job of maintaining that standard.

Inquiries

My initial contact with System76 came by visiting the website and requesting a quote for one of its third-generation Oryx Pro models. The sales staff were responsive, polite and didn't seem to have their personalities obliterated into uniform perfection like the Stepford Salesforce of Lenovo or Dell. I also never caught a whiff of a hard sell from any of them. On three occasions just before being able to put down my hard-earned dinero on an Oryx Pro, my life went sideways, and my laptop fund went to pay for strange emergencies that arose out of nowhere, but the System76 sales staff were cheerfully uncaring about this. The impression I got was they believed they knew were going to miss a sale right then, but whether they missed it forever depended on how they behaved in that instant. It's an enlightened view from which more vendors could stand to learn.

Go to Full Article