A deticated Linux Hardware Company

[89c51]

The question is simple

would you support (prefer their products instead of white box or ie dell gateway ) a company that makes deticated linux hardware (imagine something like Apple but with linux) for desktop use (and laptops)???

also what architecture (x86 ppc sparc cell etc) you would like the products to have -answer this without thinking problems like flash codecs etc lets say those are solved-


ps i know there are companies out there that ship their products with linux but those arent (IMO) so good (quality design etc)

[Virogenesis]

If a company came along and offered me DRM free cpu and other products I'd go with them over AMD and Intel if they supported open source drivers then HELL yeah
Hopefully that answers your question.

[mostwanted]

I would sure love if there was a dedicated Linux hardware company that offered laptops in Denmark; I'm not interested in laptops with American keyboards since I don't really like having to remembr alt+ codes to be able to write in my own language, so the few websites that offer Linux computers aren't for me.

Desktops don't have to be from a dedicated Linux company since they generally don't pose as many problems as laptops do as long as you have the proper hardware components in them.

[fluffington]

Of course I'd support a dedicated Linux hardware company.

As for architecture, I don't really know anything about the chips, but I do want at least two cores.

[aysiu]

ps i know there are companies out there that ship their products with linux but those arent (IMO) so good (quality design etc) People seem to be pretty happy with System76 (http://www.system76.com), and that ships with Ubuntu preloaded:
review of system7 (http://demian0311.blogspot.com/2006/04/review-of-system76.html)
my new linux laptop (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=191984)

By the way, in case you're curious, I did a poll similar to this one (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=152433), and most people preferred to build their systems from scratch.

[fluffington]

By the way, in case you're curious, I did a poll similar to this one (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=152433), and most people preferred to build their systems from scratch.

I prefer to build my own desktops/workstations, but I'd buy a laptop (and probably will in the near future; my last one died fairly recently). I'd recommend the company to all of my friends, too.

[Slicedbread]

They would have to be really cheap, you can get a windows desktop for around $300 and a notebook for $500 and then install your free distro from there. I don't know if a company that specializes in building linux only pc's could deliver computers at those prices because they would be producing significantly less than their windows and apple competitors. The target audience would be proficient pc users and if they could build their own pc's for cheaper they would.

EDIT: Not supporting DRM would be a dumb move because audio/video feeds would still be encrypted regardless, you would just be stuck with no way to hear/view content.

[briancurtin]

i havent seen an affordable linux-based hardware shop, so im going big name for now. i saw sites with linux laptops costing like $3000 or something. my laptop, an HP, is 2 years old and better than any linux-based laptops on whatever site i saw that laptop at.

im buying a desktop soon and it will probably be from HP, or possibly dell but im not sure yet.

[mcduck]

By the way, in case you're curious, I did a poll similar to this one (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=152433), and most people preferred to build their systems from scratch.
Exactly. I might buy a prebuilt Linux laptop (and I'd probably still reinstall the OS myself) but never ever will I touch a prebuilt desktop machine!

Anyway, for the architecture I'd love to get a Cell-based machine, but PowerPC would be a great second alternative. Why? Because most of the things I work with need great amounts of floating point computing, and Cell should be a floating point beast, and PowerPC sure is..

[89c51]

thanks for the answers (if i had the money i would start the company the next morning :D :D )

as for my preference on how it would be i would choose PPC (those pasemi chips look good) for laptops Cell for Desktops and probably add small inovations like 8-10GB NAND for booting the system and stuff like that



to help continue the discusion

do you believe that a company like that would help boost desktop linux for the average consumer/user and do you believe that there is place in the market for something like that??? (with the apropriate (sp?) advertising etc)

[fluffington]

do you believe that a company like that would help boost desktop linux for the average consumer/user and do you believe that there is place in the market for something like that??? (with the apropriate (sp?) advertising etc)

I don't think desktop Linux is quite ready to be pushed in the mainstream yet. When it can play all of my multimedia stuff out of the box, I can configure my multihead display setup without ever touching the terminal, and I can install random apps off the Internet with just a click or three, it'll be a lot closer.

Not that I think that's all that far off. Multimedia support is pretty good (especially on 32-bit x86) after installing a couple packages, Autopackage (http://autopackage.org/) and Klik (http://klik.atekon.de/) are making headway in cross-distro compatibility, and I'm in the process of writing a utility for configuring the X server. Edgy also looks like it will finally add all the nifty stuff I've been waiting for, like 32-bit compatibility on amd64.

I think with a lot of minor improvements to the OS and a decent marketing campaign, though, a Linux hardware/software vendor could make some decent headway in the market. Maybe enough even for a couple of the big software companies to add Linux to their supported platforms.

Of course, I know a lot of people that use Linux over Windows or Mac OS simply because it isn't very widely-used on the desktop; they actively oppose a lot of effort to make Linux mainstream and would probably jump ship if it ever got really popular.