System76 Still Aiming To Be The Apple Of The Linux Space With Software & Hardware

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 19 August 2019 at 06:58 AM EDT. 64 Comments
HARDWARE
System76 continues doing much more work on software these days as well as expanding their own hardware manufacturing capabilities. This is much more than they did a decade or even several years ago when they were just selling PCs/laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu. As summed up by System76 founder and CEO, Carl Richell, their end game is much more Apple-esque.

Following their announcement on Saturday of their new System76 Firmware Manager project, Carl tweeted, "This work continues our transition from a hardware company shipping a distro to a hardware company providing an integrated, holistic hardware and OS product. Still a lot of work ahead of us but manufacturing, open firmware, and Pop!_OS are pulling together."

They have continued investing in Pop!_OS and making their own software engineering contributions around Coreboot support, firmware management on Linux, and various customizations to GNOME and other components in the stack. On the hardware front, since last year they've been manufacturing their own line of desktops with the impressive high-end Thelio desktops and ultimately they've said they want to expand their own manufacturing capabilities to potentially even spin their own laptops in the future.

System76 has been on this more exciting trajectory the past 2+ years, but in case you've doubted their intentions, Carl's statement this weekend sums it up that they are certainly trying to be much more like Apple of the Linux space with delivering integrated software/hardware products.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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