I'm a huge fan of this Sputnik release because it means there is a "Macbook" of the Linux world now.
At that, it is insane how much of the hardware in this thing is anti-freedom, and how much barely works. I have a Clevo 740su notebook which is what the System76 Galago Ultrapro is based off (I just got the model from another vendor because it was in the middle of a wave of bad customer service reports from system76) and everything worked out of the box (with a replacement to the broadcom NIC, I love the Atheros 9462). None of this multitouch patching or bios updating so the audio works or other nonsense. Only downside is that it does not have working keyboard resume from suspend, I have to hit the power button. Probably not the end of the world.
I hope in future releases the Sputnik guys have enough sway in the general XPS 13 hardware selection process to get fewer poorly supported parts. The amount of hacks necessary to make a computer shipping with Ubuntu work is distressing.
I'm more and more surprised by my MacBook Air 11'' 2012, where everything worked flawlessly under Linux mainline when I purchased it back in 2013.
It's really sad that even a device which is selected with Linux in mind requires a patched kernel.
If you look into stuff which is not only supported by Linux, but also has good power management the list of devices is tiny. Essentially there's no laptop where everything just works. This is absurd.
Things work pretty well using Intel components, but they're including things such as TPM which worry me quite a lot.
I think there's an enormous opportunity for a startup that produced good ARM - Coreboot devices as open as possible and with developers in mind. The Pyra guys are doing something similar to handheld devices. Perhaps they could scale up.
> Essentially there's no laptop where everything just works. This is absurd.
Like I said though, my Clevo 740su did work perfectly out of the box. I don't have to fuck with the trackpad, my sound worked, my pic works, webcam works, battery life is alright considering the SOC (I get about 4 hours idle and 2 hours load). The only missing thing is keyboard resume, which is barely a blip on my radar.
There are combinations of parts that work perfectly out of the box in Linux. It is just nobody is putting them all together on average, and Dell seems to rather brute force unsupported hardware rather than field parts with comprehensive support. They exist, you just have to use them instead of their belligerent competitors.
Macbooks are always strange, because there are dozens of hackers who will spend night and day reverse engineering each new Macbook to work on the Linux kernel. You don't get that kind of hobbyist support for pretty much anything else.
Well, modern MacBooks are much less well supported, but I see your point.
I think we need some company that cherrypicks components for Linux. Dell could do it. They already have a gazillion models, why not a Linux specific one? I still applaud their XPS model though. It looks pretty amazing.
At that, it is insane how much of the hardware in this thing is anti-freedom, and how much barely works. I have a Clevo 740su notebook which is what the System76 Galago Ultrapro is based off (I just got the model from another vendor because it was in the middle of a wave of bad customer service reports from system76) and everything worked out of the box (with a replacement to the broadcom NIC, I love the Atheros 9462). None of this multitouch patching or bios updating so the audio works or other nonsense. Only downside is that it does not have working keyboard resume from suspend, I have to hit the power button. Probably not the end of the world.
I hope in future releases the Sputnik guys have enough sway in the general XPS 13 hardware selection process to get fewer poorly supported parts. The amount of hacks necessary to make a computer shipping with Ubuntu work is distressing.