Oh man he’s going to be so pissed when he finds out what Intel have been doing for 50 years
This is why I just bought two framework laptops. They’re doing the exact opposite.
I’d make an argument for the opposite if we’re talking about the general field. The major OEMs are going head first into enshittification, while other companies are building for more open ecosystems.
For anyone looking for a list of manufacturers intentionally trying to make their hardware more compatible with open ecosystems:
- Framework
- System76
- ASRock
- Minisforum
- Slimbook (they make the KDE branded laptop)
- MNT
- GL.iNet (routers only so far)
- Penguin
- Supermicro
- Star Labs
- Pine
- Clevo
I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones that are deliberately building intentionally FOR mass compatibility, unlike HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS…etc.
This is not to say there aren’t some models from the major manufacturer product lines that aren’t widely compatible, but their main focus is not those products.
Hmmmmm, I’ll go with Clevo. Because I’m from Cleveland, and it’s called Clevo. It’s like the PC brand that was too drunk to spell Cleveland. Which is pretty on brand for this city.
They’ll get an upvote just for that explanation 😂
Framework is honestly the best thing on the market right now though, gotta say.
@Lost_My_Mind @just_another_person that’s a clevo comment
System76s’ (at least used to) use rebranded Clevo laptops with their own flashed motherboard firmware. I’ve replaced parts on mine with direct Clevo spare parts.
I had a rebranded clevo back in 2009. It worked great for a few years before the dedicated gpu died. It was a sleek design (especially for the time) too.
It’s one of those Chinese brands with nonsensical names
Unlike most, though, Clevo has been around for decades and many, many other brands rebrand and sell their laptops. If you’ve ever owned a laptop made by a semi-local manufacturer, it’s probably a rebranded Clevo.
What that says about the quality though, I don’t know. My laptops have all been non-Clevo-rebrands. But they’re an established company at least.
My read into this is that Pine is so good it’s listed twice.
Oops. Fixed.
Tuxedo Computers from Germany also make PCs specifically for Linux (you can run Windows if you really have to).
Waiting for my InfinityFlex!
I can say I’ll never buy another lenovo product again.
My laptop is, of course, broken at both hinges due to ridiculously thin and cheap plastic.
This is inexcusable and only exists to make a few rich people a bit richer.
Well, the rootkits were the last straw for me, a decade ago. Used to buy Lenovo religiously.
Very sad to see the downfall of a once great brand… old Lenovos will easily outlast any new Lenovo.
What are ASRock doing?
ASRock servers, minipcs and mitx industrial boards are highly compatible with Linux, and it’s intentional. Sometimes trailing chipset versions just to stay that way.
Interesting; I’ve associated them with just making cheap boards. Is that changing?
Lol. They are one of the few manufacturers that have made consistently solid products and components for decades. Feels like many have already jumped over to being terrible.
They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.
Less diverse?
Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the “same” mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.
The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.
But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of “instant boot mini-Linux environments”, and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)
This reminds me of how I often assume a lesser known brand is a “small player” in a given industry, only to later find out that they provide parts and/or services to all of the well known brands. Kinda like Mitsubishi in the 80’s. Their parts and tech were in everything but their name was mostly associated with cheap electronics and small cars.
I think one of the computers in my basement is an ASRock board, and it’s the flimsiest board I’ve ever had. Like the USB ports are really flexible.
Chill situation
Bang for bucks, ASRock is really good. I bought a mobo when the first gen of Ryzen came out and it is still rocking today. It supports up to Matisse series cpu. I paid like, 70-80 bucks back then. I had a lot of value out of it.
It is still living inside a home server and will be soon repurposed into an arcade cabinet.
I think my home server build will eventually be based on a used Asrock industrial mainboard. I’ve heard nothing but good feedback.
I remember them being a bit of a small upstart company years ago when I started paying attention to computer stuff.
They’ve been around since the 00s
Absolutely, but at least for the type of builds I was looking at, which were all gaming machines, Asrock kind of seemed like the more unpredictable budget option.
Not at all. They have entire lines of gaming boards and GPUs.
They do now. The commenter was using past tense.
Oooh, didnt know asrock made minipcs, im gonna have to look into that!
The firmware they use is closed source though
Lol. 99% of all hardware manufactured uses closed source BIOS. It’s not a concern.
I’ll take a star labs laptop thank you
I want the pine products but every time I see the reviews it seems like they are not the greatest at the more common tasks.
At some point I want to get an MST if/when my system76 dies. But it’s a easy to repair so it will probably be a while.
If you’re looking for a general purpose device, go Framework. Look at their Refurb store. Very reasonable.
These brands selling their own refurbished products is great news.
It gives you the ability to still support them while not creating directly more e-waste and benefitting from a cheaper price.
Thanks but a friend of mine had bad experiences with it. Something to do with the power and hinges. Lots of costly repairs on the first year or so.
Hopefully they fixed the issue.
Never had an issue. What was your friend’s problem?
The power adapter died pretty quick witch caused a mobo failure if I recall.
I thought he was talking about locked-down bootloaders or something. Because that’s a real concern to me.
Can someone tell Scott that they added the driver for his laptop on November 29th? Almost a month before he made this post.
Further, from some light reading on the subject after searching around it sounds like since most stuff is moving to NVMe drives, Intel is indeed slowly removing ACHI from newer devices, which does mean you need those IRST drivers to boot and recognize disks.
I think it’s less companies trying to fuck us over and a hiccup in the slow but steady adoption and adaptation of new technologies.
EDIT:
Here’s the Intel Rapid Store Technology driver for the other PC he pointed out, too. This one was added in November 2023.
This seems like it’s a non-issue and maybe this guy just doesn’t know what the IRST acronym stands for?
Much ado about literally nothing. This is literally based on nothing but his own speculation based on his failure to find these drivers that literally exist and are available. Honestly should be removed as misinformation since both PCs he mentioned have IRST drivers available right now.
most stuff is moving to NVMe drives,
NO!!! GOD DAMMIT, NO!!! 2.5" SSD’s JUST NOW GOT CHEAP ENOUGH TO BUY!!! NO!!! FUCK ALL THIS PLANNED OBSOLETE CRAP!!! I’m going to keep buying SSD’s, and I have a whole little system. It’s like NES cartridges.
I buy the big ones as the slave drives, and the little ones as the OS drives. And when I want to swap out, I just turn off my PC, swap out one hard drive for another, and pristo bingo blammo I’m on a tottally different OS.
Okay that’s totally fine, SATA ports aren’t going anywhere for a while. And you can always add more via PCIe cards. Just buy regular size boards and you’ll be fine.
Are those PCIe cards any good? Because I used up all the ones on my motherboard and I can fit more drives in my case.
Yes, as long as you don’t get the bottom of the barrel cheap ones. Also make sure you have enough power for the drives.
Awesome, thanks!
No no, I mean the drives themselves. It’s already hard to find smaller drives.
Go try to find western digital blue 120gb 2.5" in new condition from a reliable seller who’s going to still exist in a year, and isn’t some ebay scammer.
It’s already impossible to find those. I fear if they move over to NVME they won’t make 4TB drives anymore in a 2.5" ssd either. And then there’s the whole issue of advancing the medium to made cards LARGER than 4TB.
I got a good system set up. I do not understand why I had to mad scientist hack this thing together like this. Eventually I need a dremmel, because Dell makes their front cases stupid.
But basically, I got inspired for this by my raspberry pi. I eject the sd card, I put a new SD card in, and the hardware is a totally different purpose. It could be a pihole. It could be a retro arcade. It could be anything. And with a quick swap, it’s anything else.
Well now I have that with an x86 board computer. But I need the drives to keep getting made.
It look like Nvme riser cables exist, so your mad scientist approach should still be doable, but you would have to continue doing mad scientist shit.
Nvme riser going to the front of the case, maybe even the top, and then get one of those rubber nipple nubs that exist for holding nvme drives in place, and bam, you can swap the drives pretty easily.
Very niche requirement, but to each their own.
You could just get one big drive and partition it to have multiple OS or whatever it is you need. Then pick which one you want to boot from when you start up. Did they get rid of that ability? I haven’t messed with anything like that in years.
2.5" drives aren’t going away any time soon either, but they’ll mostly be the thick server drives.
Yeah, but that would go in the back of the PC. Mine is sticking out of a port that’s meant to be used as the CD Rom tray. Mine has 2 of them, and the second one has always been abandoned. So now I pull the flap down, and I can stick it in.
Also, there’s no cables. You just insert the drive into the enclosure, and close the enclosure door until it clicks. All the wires are connected to the enclosure, not the drive.
I’m kind a excited about these NVMe PCI bays. I have a short-depth wall-mount rack in a closet for my networking gear, and I found I like having a “front IO” server chassis in it:
However, I’ve never been able to find a chassis (even a 3U or 4U one) that had both front IO and external drive bays for hot-swap. But now we’re at the point where I can finally achieve what I want by using the card slots for the drives!
(Now I just need to be able to afford the cost.)
It’s the same with NVMe, what do you mean.
Have you ever opened a 2.5" sata ssd? half of the box is empty, it’s just there so you can screw it to the case on the other side. I hope that form factor will die soon. We need nvme in m.2 format for everything small, and 3.5" for servers. 2.5" should disappear.
What they need to do is take that mostly empty 2.5" drive, and cram it full of flash chips. Why have we been stuck with 8TB as the largest consumer drives for a few years now? I can understand it a bit for NVMe due to the physical form factor, but there’s no excuse for 2.5" drives. It doesn’t seem that complicated. For example, all Samsung would have to do is take the 2.5" 8TB 870 QVO, double the number of chips in it, then sell it for twice the price. I’d buy one.
Presumably the demand isn’t there, £1200 is a lot for a consumer drive and spinning rust is 1/3 the price.
Demand might be low, but on the other hand the cost to develop and manufacture a run of the drives may not be too high either.
I do have to say the increase in flash memory prices haven’t helped. A year ago I bought the Samsung 8TB drive for $300 (US). If they had a 16TB model for $600-$700 I would have bought it.
2.5" should disappear.
NO! I JUST BOUGHT LIKE $600 WORTH OF DRIVES AND EQUIPMENT TO MAKE MY COMPUTER A FRONT LOADER!!! And I’m going to buy several 4TB drives in this form factor…just over the coarse of the next few years. Maybe like 10 of them in 5 years.
I don’t said your devices will stop working, you misunderstand the whole conversation. Form factors change all time, I have here a 5.25" 8 MB HDD next to me. “Planned obsolescence” that I can’t use a 30 years old component? You can hardly buy a motherboard with floppy or IDE/PATA ports. Do you also miss them?
I mean, it’s expected that new devices won’t have all the old ports, like USB killed all the serial and parallel and other terrible single use ports, thanks god. You can always buy dongles, like, I have IDE-USB converter so I can still use my old devices. I recently bought a laptop IDE-m.2 converter, so I can use m.2 sata SSD in a Win-98 era laptop. Where is this obsolescence, I could work it around easily. SATA won’t disappear, and 2.5" to 3.5" adapters are cheap as hell, as it’s just a plastic frame.
I’m still using the 5.25" drive bays in my computer…
spoiler
…to hold 3.5" drives, LOL
2.5in is rather common in servers these days.
The consumer grade 2.5" drives may be half empty, but the enterprise grade ones are mostly heatsink so they don’t thermal throttle within a minute of heavy use. M.2 drives are way too small. It was fine for SATA speeds, but not for the PCIe 5 NVMe drives.
Wait, you’re swapping hardware to switch to a different OS? Why? Just make a dual boot system
You say “dual”. Whereas I’m thinking more like…20-30 different OS’s. Maybe 50. Could eventually be 100. This may eventually sprawl across multiple PC’s. I’m very early in my days of mad scientist swapping. I just made Linux Mint yesterday, and tonight I’m going to try all these:
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-systems
Except for the ones that cost money. Plus, I like the idea of inserting cartridges like an old school NES. It’s just satisfying.
That sounds like a nightmare to manage and keep up to date. I would consider using VMs or some other method instead of trying to multiboot dozens of OSes across different physical drives and devices.
Dual boot is a misnomer, you can put as many OSes on a disk as you like
And like your link says, you could even run them in virtual machines
It’s like NES cartridges.
In the sense that the card edge connector plugs directly into a slot on the motherboard instead of being connected via a cable, M.2 drives are more like NES cartridges than 2.5" drives are.
Excuse me, Scoot Blickerdon, that would require people suffering technology struggles actually research their issues and do the legwork to fix them themselves.
Kinda ironic to hear it from you, all things considered.
(It’s still up, by the way, because Nate Silver might be stupid but having worked for a large media organization he understands how copyright law works.)
I’m hoping your right. It’s probably more nuance than a simplistic article. But it did seem like it was true at the time the article was written.
It might be me but I’m finding the big companies like Dell are doubling down a bit on their property drivers and at the same time, other companies that are simply open souring everything, if just for the “free” bug/features the community is willing to add to their platforms. It’s a strange duality to live through.
I understand that but this article is literally nothing but his own speculation because he tried and failed twice to find drivers, one of which has been available a month before he posted this, and the other available over a year before he posted this. It’s not malicious, but its misinformation based on fear-driven speculation about bad corporations. I fucking hate corpos too but this is dumb. We don’t need to make shit up out of fear of bad behavior.
This is literally already turning into an anti-corporate circlejerk because of a misunderstanding. It’s kind of like when Bernie Sanders supporters at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 were completely convinced the Cisco WiFi routers around the arena were noise generators to drown out their cheers for Sanders. It’s dumb and unhelpful and makes us look stupid.
No, not slowly. They’ve been accelerating toward this.
That’s why I think computers should be like in year 2000. Not because I’m some luddite, but because you can’t increase complexity indefinitely without laws of the market changing. Today’s general-purpose computer systems are so complex that they encourage behavior that wouldn’t be competitive then, because then there were more choice and the industry was much easier to get into.
There are things one can live without.
Especially funny, because new cultural phenomena involving computing are as applicable today as they were in year 2000. What was added since then seems to be about, well, that amount of gaslighting, propaganda and primate instinct abuse made real by centralized social media, and about everyone carrying surveillance devices.
Not everything is progress, some things are just experience. I think wisdom may be in losing that.
This also won’t be unprecedented, supersonic passenger airliners are not operated today, and creation of an actual space colony seems much further than it was even 20 years ago, and unification of the Earth into one huge federated state has not happened after Cold War ending, and we don’t carry around devices with nuclear batteries.
Such airliners were in operation. Such a colony was being seriously devised. Such a political project … I guess, was more of a propaganda device both on the Western and on the Soviet sides, but many things done and attempted hint that it wasn’t all dreams. Nuclear batteries exist.
So. Computers produced in a few enormous God level foundries, with technology far harder to achieve than nuclear shield, centralized to a few companies, with processes approaching theoretical physical limitations, being the necessary element of our daily lives. I don’t think that’s a good idea by any measure, if you forget what you know about our world and just read this sentence and imagine some alternative one.
Slowly? No.
Yes, Yes, Yes & Yes
Dell blocking the BIOS is a bit slim to claim “PC hardware companies”, but they definitely are. HP’s crap too in this regard.
Cramming more and more stuff into a SOC leads to this for sure but it’s hardly the only factor. Built-in obsolescence also plays a heavy role.
Why is this entire Lemmy community just weird leading-title BS articles about nothing?
Because you’re not contributing to the betterment of it.
I think this is pretty much a non-issue. If the Windows installer is broken, that’s not necessarily Dell’s fault. And you could just install a different OS with NVMe support… I’ve stopped switching everything to “legacy” and AHCI a long time ago…
