I bought a System76 laptop. They're headquartered in the same city where I live. In the "special instructions" section of the checkout process, I put, "I'm buying this because Apple took away my escape key."

This note came today.

That is pretty cool!

The party is on my birthday, if only I could go☹

Their stuff looks really nice, really wish I could get the cheapest one in exchange for my flimsy Inspiron (I've come to really hate the AMD GPU hybrid graphics in the damn thing).

On a side note, I'd really try to visit them, even briefly, if an invite like that came through.

Wholesome post

@theKarlisK What's the problem with AMD hybrid graphics?

@theKarlisK

Oh I'm definitely going!

@Teabagging4Life I got to use AMDGPU-PRO drivers, which, don't have a proper open source driver apart from on fedora and ubuntu... and those drivers crap out on me crashing my kernel. Propietary drivers can't even get installed because they're just too old and seemingly incompatible with any kernel version I try. Meanwhile, the regular AMDGPU opensource drivers, while they sorta work, produce screen image deffects and are constantly vomiting error messages in kernel log... indicating that they are not suitable for my card. Meanwhile on Windows 10 hellhole - I have none of this BS.

@theKarlisK how odd. The amdgpu drivers give me 60+fps in 4k gaming without much complaint, and generally only dumps to syslog when I do something stupid (mistyped 1020% overclock). Try the and staging kernel, and see if that makes any difference.

TIL about system76.
Nice.

How cool! I've been considering to buy System67 laptop a year ago but I'm not using Linux all the time anymore sadly

@cyclic3 I'm currently attempting to set up Antergos, will quite probably just permanently disable the AMD gpu and rely on the Intel HD 620... fuck AMD and this mess - I'm done with it. My only reason for trying to get it to work was to get Blackmagic Design DaVinci working.

@theKarlisK stupid question: have you looked at the arch and Debian wikis on mixed gpu systems. My friend recently got an optimus laptop, and the wikis are the only reason I succeeded

@cyclic3 I've found Arch linux resources to contain much more info (sometimes may need some adjusting to align with the distro at hand, but a lot of the time I find it to be accurate enough) especially when it comes to configurations, for example, the Arch linux wiki page on nvidia cards helped me adjust my nvidia on the desktop PC to work ideally.

@theKarlisK If the Nvidia drivers were as good as the amd ones, I would probably ditch my card now. But they aren't so I won't. Even I, author of the SO post 'how to add xorg-edges PPA to debian' find the Nvidia drivers obstructive.

@cyclic3 the nvidia driver have been kicking tail on my desktop - it didn't flinch when I went from Windows 10 to Fedora and later over to Manjaro ... I initially had some roadbumps that I wrote off on drivers not being fresh enough on Fedora, but I eventually found out the opengl libraries and Intel mesa drivers were interfering and causing performance issues... I've also been tweaking my nvidia xconfig throughout it all and even started reusing the same config file now that I've jumped over from Manjaro to Antergos. For the most part, I'm very happy with ffmpeg having easy access to the GPU acceleration on my nvidia card as well as DaVinci working just fine, which, I can't say about the AMD gpu that I can't remove from my laptop.

@theKarlisK I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but have you asked on U&L SO?

@cyclic3 I kinda didn't need to - I managed to go through questions posted by other people to identify and in some cases replicate the results ... most of those questions were left unanswered or were "fixed" by installing Ubuntu 16.04 and then installing the propietary drivers, or just by giving up and installing Windows 10. I could give it another shot and ask this on Arch forums (yeah, feck SO - I can already see the question closed as "already answered").

@theKarlisK I feel you, AMD hardware is horrible.

@Noob I can't say that the hardware itself is horrible (it is hit or miss with quite some models) - their driver support has been absolutely shit tho.

@theKarlisK their drivers are bad, because it's really hard to write software for their hardware. 💡

@Noob Can't disagree there.

Been using pop_os for the last three releases, I love it.

I entered a contest from then vut I did not really apply since I am in Mexico, they sent me stickers anyway.

Those dudes rock.
How's the machine?

@theKarlisK you know about the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable to force an application to use the dGPU, right?

Gets around a lot of fuckery on my [Raven Ridge + RX560] hybrid graphics.

@tullo-x86 in Fedora (which, just like Ubuntu, suppostedly has better AMDGPU-PRO support) it offered me an additional option to run applications on the discrete graphics card, however, that didn't do much because the drivers themselves were borked, or at least - OS crapped out every time I tried to run anything on the discrete graphics and reverted to the Intel iGPU.

@bahua update?
How did the party go?

@qwerty77asdf

They're not exactly party animals, but I had a brilliant time all the same. I took a friend(my wife was for some reason not interested. Go figure!), and we tracked down their office in a maze of industrial suburban buildings. Their office used to be downtown, in a pretty prominent location, but they moved earlier this year to their current location so they can start fabrication of their hardware, which wasn't possible in the space they previously occupied.

Anyway, they had beer and food, which, if everything else had been a bust, would have been good enough for me. The party was thrown to celebrate, among other things, the launch of their Thelio line of desktop machines. Given the need and the wherewithal, I would like very, very much for my next desktop to be a Thelio. We got a tour of the production facilities, including the bender and the laser cutter. They're using 3D printers to manufacture some very specialized internal parts as well. The people who work there were extremely helpful and enthusiastic to chat about their line of products. This wasn't a sales pitch-- they're just genuinely excited to be working on this stuff.

As a YouTuber I watch and enjoy once said, these people are my tribe. I had a great time.

@bahua wow, sounds awesome!

@bahua really great follow-up update, totally jelly on how you got to see their 3d printer and laser cutter. Also good to know their hardware ia genuinely made by them (the finished product I mean) and not one of those "made in Taiwan, assembled in China, packaged in California - there for 100% American".

Damm that is cool!