I guess we all know it from "balena Etcher"; is it actually a "company to trust"?
balenaHub makes life easier for everyone working with IoT,
edge and physical computing. If you’re a hardware manufacturer,
a software engineer, an entrepreneur with a new business idea,
a fleet owner that already manages devices, or simply the owner
of a Raspberry Pi looking for some apps to try, we’re working
to help reduce friction in edge development and hardware.
There are many ways to evaluate if a company is trust worthy, that's up to you to judge, but ill provide some background info.
balena is a venture backed company, the team is about 100 people and we have some notable investors and advisors see https://www.balena.io/team
balena's revenue generating product is balenaCloud, which is a sass cloud offering for companies to manage their IoT devices. https://www.balena.io/cloud
If you don't want to use the sass offering we also have an open core version openBalena, anything you can run on balenaCloud you can run on your own machines using openBalena, but you will not have features like the dashboard or VPN. https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena
WAT? Is it April 1st? I hope this is a joke, but I'm not sure, since I'm Austrian, and, well... I have some experience what our governments are up to...
UPDATE: Sorry, phew:
<This article was posted using the glory of
the Austrian crown, JavaScript. (To hide this
message, pay royalties to the Austrian government)>
Fuchsia will run on a surprisingly large number of x64 machines but because it's not tested on a wide array of hardware, it's hard to recommend you try it outside of the narrower set of hardware where it is tested.
At first this comment made me angry (it's Linux, the whole point is user choice, what would be the benefit in preinstalling!) - but I suppose System76 have really showed how much better things can be with Pop!_OS.
I would expect the vast majority of users will be using Linux though, so calling it Windows only seems a little misleading. There is an option to get no OS and avoid the Windows tax.
I have an XPS 13 (forget the model number but I think it had an 8th-generation Intel CPU) that came with Linux and it definitely wasn't "just works" when I bought it (sleep/wake was kind-of broken and such) but a month or so later, it did magically start working (and nothing else was really broken).
The 9310 is an 11th generation Intel CPU, that I've had for over a year now. While it certainly was even more broken when I first got it, after the first quarter improvements seem to have stopped happening. Things like WiFi, Bluetooth, sleep, power management, and video output are still fairly flaky.
People elsewhere in this thread complain about the battery in sleep for the Framework, and I confirm the same with mine, but losing a few percent a night is nothing compare to the Dell, which goes from 100 to 0 overnight.
People have been waiting for a Linux that "just works" for decades. And they'll probably still be waiting for the next 20 years. But that's not really the point of using Linux.
That philosophy is probably part of the reason, why linux on the desktop stays in its small niche inside tech circles.
Most people, myself included, indeed want a system that "just works" - to get the actual work done. And then if the basics work, I can enjoy the full freedom to tweak it to my needs in infinity.
But only very few people enjoy "freedom to tinker", when it means "mandatory tinkering" to get basic functionality.
My best linux times were indeed, when stuff just worked. I was really surprised the first time I used a live Linux cd and everything "just worked". No manual driver installing, like I had known from windows. It booted up and everything was just there.
It was different, but it worked. And then I discovered the endless possibilities and freedom to change ANYTHING.
But fast forward to today: my quite modern laptop still has standby/resume issues on linux, making it hard to enjoy it at times. And I don't feel like compiling the kernel myself to maybe see a slight improvement.
I'm pretty competent/qualified to tinker with my Linux, but I still much prefer a "just works" approach too. I think most in the community do. I don't want a "Just works because everything is hyper-locked down" but that's a much different thing IMHO.
Fortunately most distros have gotten to where we are. Fedora works amazingly well OOTB on so much hardware, and I've heard great things about Pop and other popular distros.
I have DIY Framework that came without an operating system. Installed Pop_OS on it from a flash drive and in 10 minutes all the necessary tweaks were made.
So if 10 minutes of installing an OS and tweaking a few settings stops someone from spending years with a computer, I'm a bit confused by their attitude.
I personally do. A "just works" configuration will be ideal for me. Anytime I install linux on a new computer, I find myself spending too much time tinkering with configuration settings to make basic things like adjusting keyboard brightness and volume control work with the respective keys.
You don't have to do any of that with a Framework and Ubunut/Pop. The only real thing to adjust was getting the fingerprint sensor working, which really was copy/pasting a script. Everything else worked perfectly out of the box.
You can fix the battery drain issue by changing one line in a config file. The issue is from how Intel chips handle hibernation w/ Linux, so not a Framework specific issue though.
I don't, and I suspect that people who would want Linux preinstalled don't have much experience in it, and being lost would hate it, badmouth it, and badmouth the company for making it an option. Installing Linux is quick and of trivial difficulty, and if you're afraid to do it you should probably work on that fear at a different time than when you're also breaking in a new computer.
I would say that installing Linux is like being able to tune your guitar or a chef being able to sharpen their knives, but it's an order of magnitude easier than either of those things.
Agree with sibling that maintaining preinstalled Linux is a good sign that all the guts and peripherals are compatible, although that might be a perverse incentive to use a bleeding edge kernel/distro to accommodate flashy hardware. If anything, they should install a boring LTS/Debian Stable, completely stock other than a custom wallpaper.
I want to know that the hardware will work with linux, and will continue to work with linux.
A pre-install option is just one way to advertise and convince the user that you've tested the hardware to work on linux
Yes. The linux market is extremely diverse. The sheer amount of distros and DEs is pretty good evidence of this. It doesn't even have to be different people.
For personal laptops/desktop I don't care if it's preinstalled for me or not since the very first boot is going straight into my usb installer since it's extremely unlikely that they checked all the boxes I will check (especially getting my LUKS passphrase correct!!). But for my wife or parent's laptop that's exactly what I want. If dad runs linux I can help him out a ton more, even SSHing into his machine to set things up or install updates, etc, but I'd prefer he be able to turn the thing on and connect it to his wifi and start using it without me having to be there.
OK, but devil’s advocate, if they explicitly mention Linux, that means they have to explicitly support Linux for newcomers and experts alike, which for a small company, is probably not an insignificant lift, from a customer service perspective alone. They are really clear about how things are in the DIY and Linux sections of their forum and on Reddit/Discord, there are tons of people helping out (including employees), but that’s a little different than being a mainstream laptop company (and not niche like System 76 or Tuxedo or whatever) that is also prepared, within 6 months of shipping their first product, to offer robust Linux support.
I think this is doubly true when you consider the elevated support task they have by the nature of how upgradable/repairable the laptop is. The number of issues I’ve seen from people (and I’m just an owner who lurks a bit in some of the communities) who didn’t know how to properly insert RAM or have had other more basic problems (which is separate from the more widespread issue of installing the wifi cards, where the antenna cables were legit the most difficult I’ve ever dealt with and I have years of experience — Framework sent me a replacement cable and card and that was great), makes me sympathetic to them trying to grow their support teams at an even pace and not inviting a bunch of support queries that can tie-up even the more established Linux hardware vendors.
So yes, I agree, better Linux support would be great. The good news is that it’s already becoming an enthusiast computer so Linux support, especially on newer kernels, is already better than on many other enthusiast laptops (the suspend issues and some recent kernel regressions for wifi are obviously issues but they aren’t isolated to just the Framework), so hopefully that will help. But a hardware startup can only focus on so many things and if being explicitly Linux-first isn’t one of those things (and due to market size, I think that probably makes sense when you have mainstream aspirations), it probably isn’t a good idea to over-promise in that respect — especially when the DIY options and unofficial support is really strong/encouraged.
It takes 10 minutes to install Linux from a boot drive and have everything setup as you need. Bizarre to me that those 10 minutes would determine whether or not you spend the next x years with a computer.
I’m with you in the “Intel Only” but not the “Windows only”. Windows is the only one you have to pay for, so it’s the only one with an option. If you don’t want Windows, then choose the “bring your own” option and download your Linux distribution.
