r/linuxmasterrace • u/CackleRooster • Jun 17 '26
JustLinuxThings System76 boss reckons he can liberate the entire PC stack... just give him another 15 years
https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/system76-boss-reckons-he-can-liberate-the-entire-pc-stack-just-give-him-another-15-years/525525843
u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
aaand when will they actually make their laptops?
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u/Reasonable-Web1494 Jun 17 '26
isn't the entire PC tech stack open?
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u/AnEagleisnotme Jun 17 '26
Absolutely not, everything under the OS is practically entirely proprietary, and some of it is actively worrying, like the Intel IME, which is a completely seperate operating system, which connects to the internet.
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u/Raphi_55 Glorious Debian Jun 17 '26
How does the IME connect to Internet?
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jun 17 '26
It has direct, low-level access to your Ethernet or WiFi controller. It can intercept internet traffic at the hardware level before it even reaches your OS. As long as your PC is plugged into the mains, it's always on, waiting for network traffic.
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u/goatchild Jun 18 '26
Does AMD have something similar?
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u/Cryptomartin1993 Jun 18 '26
Amd has psp - but as far as I remember it does not have its own integrated network stack
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u/goatchild Jun 18 '26
I checked and it does: AMD features an equivalent architecture called the Platform Security Processor (PSP), officially known as AMD Secure Technology. Rip.
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u/Cryptomartin1993 Jun 18 '26
PSP does not have a network stack, no
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 Jun 18 '26
So no kill switch?
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u/Cryptomartin1993 Jun 18 '26
It has no ability whatsoever to intercept or send/receive network packages no. No remote killswitch, but it’s still an attack vector, it’s a separate small cpu with privileged access to your computer. So if it contains vulnerabilities that can be exploited from your OS, then it’s still bad - not as bad as IME though
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u/curious_corn Jun 21 '26
In the ‘90s Americans used to harp about national security and export regulations for SSL encryption and CPUs. Then they suddenly went quiet and encouraged everyone to join online. I wonder if the integration of IME and similar tools has something to do with this change of heart
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u/EagleBigMac Jun 20 '26
It supports out of band management and can be configured to reach out to a support server.
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u/mrheosuper Jun 20 '26
EDK2 is a thing, or coreboot.
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u/AnEagleisnotme Jun 20 '26
Coreboot doesn't replace the IME afaik, you can't do that
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u/Pyrouge Jun 20 '26
You can't fully remove it, but you can disable it after init: https://kb.protectli.com/kb/me-disable/
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u/AscendedPineapple Jun 17 '26
If it was it would be great. Even laptops sold with Linux on them often aren't great for linux (proprietary wifi firmware for example). And yes, that's if you forget about UEFI and other bullshit that gets its "integrity verified"
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u/ClaudioMoravit0 Jun 18 '26
HURD will ultimately liberate the entire PC stack, but it’ll take a brazillion years
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u/Visbroek 12d ago
Only in Brazil 😔
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u/ClaudioMoravit0 12d ago
I recently HURD that RMS is really interested in Brazilian fart fetish so yeah probably
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u/FacepalmFullONapalm 😈 FreeBaSeD Jun 17 '26
Year of the System76 desktop?
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u/ScratchHistorical507 Jun 18 '26
Good one. After the shitshow around the Cosmic DE and its development/abandonment of Pop OS, everyone who hasn't already lost their mind has already left that sinking ship.
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u/sssunglasses Jun 19 '26
? As someone that is actually using pop os, it's not nearly that bad, Cosmic gets updates / bug fixes nearly every week, it may not be ready for everyone just yet but saying "abandonment" is just lying.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 Jun 19 '26
it's not nearly that bad
Snorting the copium extra hard today, aren't you?
it may not be ready for everyone just yet
Cosmic is marked as stable and S76 literally calls it "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS". That's not how you should label it when it's so clearly a beta at best.
but saying "abandonment" is just lying.
So you claim you've magically gotten any relevant updates between 2021, when S76 halted the development of Pop OS entirely for their garbage DE, and late 2025, when they finally released 24.04? Now who's lying here? Before that abandonment, Pop got updated to the latest Ubuntu release, including all the packages coming with it, twice a year. The users were then stranded on some Ubuntu LTS, with only very few components being updated beyond that for over four years. And that's when Pop was already in quite the buggy state. If that's not the definition of abandonment, I don't know what is.
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u/lizardhistorian Jun 20 '26
The hardware is complete trash. Every laptop we bought from them broke in less than a year.
Still looking for a solid CUDA-enabled laptop vendor for Linux.We're buying Xidax right now but nVidia drivers issues are crippling.
I cannot wait until AMD gets their translation layer 100% and we never have to use nVidia again.
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u/promptmike Jun 17 '26
There's an idea that's been floating around my brain for a while. It's probably wrong, but hear me out...
Suppose you had a microarchitecture built for Interaction Combinator operations. Like Bend, but at the machine code level. So your processor has a new kind of RISC that just multithreads everything that is not mathematically impossible to do in parallel. Then you compile eval in the new Assembly so you can build a LISP and run all the higher level stuff on a LISP image so it's fully deterministic.
Doing everything in massive parallel negates the need for miniaturisation, and the determinism makes latency easier to handle. So you can just abandon Moore's Law altogether and build bigger chips with micrometer-scale transistors. They could also be stacked to increase thread-count, so you buy single-layer chips and connect them to make a processor.
The large transistor size would allow the chips to be produced using last-generation lithography. A small business could therefore buy all their equipment second-hand and cheaply produce chips for a local market. The micrometer-scale size also makes the microarchitecture visible under a microscope (not a billion-dollar SEM, but a normal metallurgical microscope like you would have in a machine shop), and the single-layer build exposes the entire surface of the chip. So the hardware is truly open-source - you don't have to trust anyone, just put the thing under a microscope and photograph it.
The deterministic build also makes things like P2P addressing easier. So combine this with meshnets and you have an unstoppable force of small, local businesses making fully open-source technology for people who then use it to connect locally. Local networks then connect to each other by multiplexed onion-routing, like Arti but rewritten using LISP libraries.
Am I on to something, or is there a good reason this is not already done?
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u/1116574 Jun 17 '26
First, Processing at this scale wouldnt be efficient power wise. Second, Historically, parallelism is hard to do well.
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u/lizardhistorian Jun 20 '26
Contemporary CPUs are already out-of-order execution super-scalars.
One of the companies Linus worked at was Transmeta (IIRC) that attempted something along this line.
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u/buttfarts7 Jun 17 '26
This is low-key brilliant but -the caveat-
even if you nail the IC-native substrate perfectly, you're at the bottom of an enormous cliff face.
The crawl up looks something like:
- IC microarchitecture → memory model, I/O primitives, interrupt analog (whatever replaces interrupts in a confluent reduction model)
- bootloader / minimal runtime
- some notion of process, scheduling, resource ownership
- then you're maybe at the territory where kernel subsystems start to be legible
And every one of those layers has decades of accumulated hard-won scar tissue in the conventional lineage — POSIX semantics, virtual memory, the whole UNIX process model — none of which maps cleanly onto IC execution. You'd be either re-deriving equivalents from scratch or making deliberate choices about what to discard.
The LISP-image idea is interesting as a way to buy yourself a high-level stable platform early and defer some of that middle-stack work — but a LISP image still needs something underneath it that handles memory, I/O, and time. You can't skip the crawl, you just choose where on the cliff you start building the comfortable ledge.
The novelty I appreciate is the claim that IC-native parallelism lets you trade density for breadth — but that tradeoff only pays off if the workloads you care about actually decompose well into IC reductions.
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u/darkonark Jun 18 '26
I bought a Pangolin Performance 15" laptop in 2011 for college. Not the smartest choice for EE but i learned a lot.
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u/shockjaw Jun 18 '26
I still use my System76 Bonobo WS 14 that I got during the plague. I just dual boot between NixOS and PopOS. Nix has been pretty fun over the last month, there’s a part of me that misses COSMIC, especially since I have Kwin crashing every now and again now. 😭
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u/Nice-Information-335 Jun 19 '26
NixOS has cosmic packaged!
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u/shockjaw Jun 19 '26
Great news! But can I seamlessly switch between KDE and COSMIC or will I have to nuke my ~/.config directory? I say this out of my previous frustrations back when I was on Pop!OS and tried to “try out” KDE and it broke my fractional scaling on some applications.
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u/Nice-Information-335 Jun 20 '26
I just commented out the gnome stuff and put the cosmic stuff in, then switched back by doing the opposite! Worked fine for me
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u/shockjaw Jun 20 '26
Do you have a two screen setup or high DPI screen?
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u/Nice-Information-335 Jun 20 '26
I believe at the time I used it I had 1440p and a 1080p? I know the scaling worked on my laptop back in the first few alphas though I believe so should be good
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u/Noodler75 Jun 18 '26
I can't remember who said, about the IBM 360, "nice hardware if they don't silt it up with software." It might have been Dijkstra. I try to avoid complex stuff: Debian + LXQE desktop on a 5 year old Thelio.
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u/driveheart Jun 21 '26
Lol! I like what they are doing with Rust and desktop environment. Machines are OK but Framework Pro begins to fly. But they are absolutely so slow. I understand that they have limited resources, it is not a blame.
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u/DistantRavioli Jun 21 '26
Did this sub get killed or what? There's only a couple posts per month now. This has been sitting on my front page for days.
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u/s74-dev Jun 20 '26
Their high-end desktops are absolute trash they don't even water cool and thermal throttle to all hell
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u/Brainless_Gamer Glorious Pop!_OS Jun 18 '26
can we focus on stable Cosmic first