[Discuss] My HP Pavilion's HD bit the dust and it is 13 years old, so instead of replacing the disk again, I would like a new laptop. But I would like to pay <$300. I do not expect the best or the biggest. I have been told that some computers do not l

[Richard Pieri]

On 6/2/2015 11:05 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> System76 is peachy. They don't design their hardware, but they
> specify it and maintain drivers for everything that they sell.

Which is essentially zero work for them if they pick the hardware right 
which is not difficult. Get a main board with Realtek audio, Intel LAN, 
Intel WiFi/BT (but not the Killer series), Intel ACHI chipset, and be 
careful about the GPU selection if you want to use open source drivers. 
Intel and Realtek and Nvidia/AMD do all the work and System76 gets the 
credit.

This isn't a knock on System76 as such. I'm just saying to look to the 
ODM rather than the OEM. System76 buys the same kinds of bare-bones 
Clevo chassis that Sager and Mythlogic and other OEMs buy, chassis that 
work with vanilla Debian if you use the non-free firmware installer.

I recently bought a Clevo P750ZM from Mythlogic, no OS (Mythlogic is one 
of the few vendors that offer the option) although they offer Ubuntu for 
most/all of their notebooks. Vanilla Debian 8 with the non-free firmware 
package works just peachy down to the Intel RST RAID set.

-- 
Rich P.