>If you could get a couple of distro owners such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, Arch, etc. to agree upon such a device

I think I would rather (it'd be easier) to wrangle cats.

yeah. RedHat (owned by IBM) will surely step up to the plate here. . .

I feel like there's a punchline coming, then realized that was the joke

Red Hat would never participate. Their current (and for like the last decade or more) strategy seems to be to run toward various goals in convoluted and incompatible ways such that they're always "ahead" of everyone else, using their weight and the combined power of several projects they head to force the rest to burn resources playing catch-up with their meandering path to sub-optimal-but-sufficient solutions.

Never heard that

Do you have any source? (Even if those are opinion based)

Gnome, systemd and its increasingly-tight integration with same, plus its eating everything in sight, wayland conveniently leaving everything up to the DE/WM (but gnome works, so why don’t you just use gnome?).

Ubuntu also tried to do a bunch of their own stuff, but not very well and without this apparent overall strategy that Red Hat has. They seemed to just be trying to differentiate themselves, not to also drive everyone else nuts as they’re forced to try to keep up.

Is Gnome driven by Red Hat? According to the project site the board and the advisory boards are not controlled by Red Hat employees, the Gnome foundation president isn't from Red Hat either, and the project is a GNU project.

Same question regarding to Wayland, from a shorter check I see that it is developed by the freedesktop.org which was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat 21 years ago but it is seems that it isn't really under Red Hat control nowadays.

It's hard to escape being de facto controlled by the entity that's providing the overwhelming majority of your development resources. The board doesn't have the time or expertise to take a position on deep technical questions, and the main contributors are Red Hat employees with a Red Hat worldview.

Red Hat is also the main contributor to the linux kernel, almost every year. Red Hat is probably the company with the largest contribution to the open source world at large, and it's been that way before most of the other big players of today were born.

You're bringing logic into this, please stop. The propaganda narrative is to just bash Red Hat for any work done. Of course the company that employs many opensource people across the world is going to have some effect on the ecosystem.

The really funny part is that people think there is some metaphorical gun to developers heads to use this technology. There is a choice, there always has been.

> The really funny part is that people think there is some metaphorical gun to developers heads to use this technology. There is a choice, there always has been.

Of course, but when the choices are "support A and B for C" or "support A and B for C but now it'll be a ton of extra work to package and maintain because C deliberately cut out A (and every other alternative that's not B)... or drop A and only support B for C, which is becoming popular fast anyway because it has lots of money behind it" then those two sets of choices aren't exactly the same.

"There's a choice" doesn't mean the choices & options aren't being nudged pretty hard.

> You're bringing logic into this, please stop. The propaganda narrative is to just bash Red Hat for any work done. Of course the company that employs many opensource people across the world is going to have some effect on the ecosystem.

I used to like them a lot, but at some point noticed I dislike an awful lot of the ways they influence the Linux desktop, and the tech they push, often by intertwining the projects they have influence over and driving them in ways that practically exclude and marginalize alternatives. If they changed I'd change my opinion. But yeah, I'm probably just some sort of simpleton.

These kind of comments are really baffling to me. If they have no interest or investment whatsoever in A, then what are they supposed to do? Can you blame any distribution for not wanting to put in all that extra work to package and maintain it themselves, for every single other piece of open source out there that someone might have a passing interest in? It's a business, they don't have infinite money to spend towards everyone's side project on Github. I wish they did but sadly, they don't.

I get that you feel excluded and marginalized but those may be misplaced emotions, if you were never a paying customer or a developer then you were probably never part of the club. It's just some company posting free stuff online, and you're welcome to take it or leave it.

> These kind of comments are really baffling to me. If they have no interest or investment whatsoever in A, then what are they supposed to do? Can you blame any distribution for not wanting to put in all that extra work to package and maintain it themselves, for every single other piece of open source out there that someone might have a passing interest in? It's a business, they don't have infinite money to spend towards everyone's side project on Github. I wish they did but sadly, they don't.

Were my terms too abstract? Systemd is written such that it's a pain in the ass to keep the multiple options for the several systems it replaces around, if a piece of software that's very important decides to go all-in on Systemd. Gnome did exactly this. Before that happened this problem did not exist. Systemd + Gnome created the problem, for any distros that wants to package them, forcing them to choose between a bunch of extra work or marginalizing anything that's not systemd. I'm not talking about "side projects on GH" but the ability to, practically, not theoretically, replace important parts a Linux system at all, or to write a new implementation that does things usefully-different from existing options because the spec is reasonably broad and the system loosely-coupled. Those are on their way out, and that's on purpose. Side projects on GH indeed. Haha. I think I see where the disconnect is, yeah. Maybe we're talking about totally different things?

> I get that you feel excluded and marginalized but those may be misplaced emotions, if you were never a paying customer or a developer then you were probably never part of the club.

Rad, I'll stop having an opinion or even noticing things that are happening because I'm not part of... what club is this? HN posters couching insults in armchair psychology to try to evade downvotes? Is that the club?

I completely disagree with your comment and I'm not talking about different things. There are a lot of side projects on Github to replace various parts of a Linux system, and various parts of systemd. They exist. What else were you talking about? When you want to replace something then you have to re-implement all its functionality. Systemd isn't any harder to replace than anything else, and it certainly didn't create the problem that someone has to actually put in the work to write the replacement. If it feels like too much extra work, then maybe ask yourself if it's really worth it to replace it to begin with? What are you really getting out of it?

The "club" is people who were invested in that particular project. If you're just a free user and you didn't have an active investment in pushing the project forward, then you're not in that club. Sorry, I don't mean to be blunt and I'm not trying to insult you, but the honest truth is that your opinion doesn't really matter unless you have the resources or the clout to push it forward. And if you did, then you'd be the one running the company, and then people would be complaining about how you're marginalizing them. Again I don't meant to be rude here or shut down your opinions or anything but let's just be real. Someone's got to foot the bill eventually, and when you're that person you get to be the one who says no, and then everyone else gets to be mad at you.

> I'm not talking about different things. There are a lot of side projects on Github to replace various parts of a Linux system, and various parts of systemd. They exist. What else were you talking about?

So, we are talking about different things? Because most of the things I'm talking about pre-date Github.

> The "club" is people who were invested in that particular project. If you're just a free user and you didn't have an active investment in pushing the project forward, then you're not in that club. Sorry, I don't mean to be blunt and I'm not trying to insult you, but the honest truth is that your opinion doesn't really matter unless you have the resources or the clout to push it forward. And if you did, then you'd be the one running the company, and then people would be complaining about how you're marginalizing them. Again I don't meant to be rude here or shut down your opinions or anything but let's just be real. Someone's got to foot the bill eventually, and when you're that person you get to be the one who says no, and then everyone else gets to be mad at you.

Sweet, so I'm the everyone else who gets to be mad. Glad we agree I get to. For fuck's sake, I'm just pointing out a pattern of behavior a corporation is engaging in, which may be used to predict other things they may do. This is bizarre.

Systemd is winning because it’s clearly a lot better than the alternatives.

Red Hat didn’t force it on any other distro. A majority of major distro makers chose it because it works really well for their purposes.

I assumed the majority of distro makers chose it because of red hat and canonical choosing it, making it a defacto standard.

Kinda like gnome, even though kde is more customizable and has more features.

This seems like it could just be a case of Hanlon's razor. Software projects are quite capable of being convoluted and incompatible without any agenda having caused it.

Yes, but there would be a sufficiently-well-resourced agenda to mostly avoid convolution....except the incentive is misaligned.

With the death of CentOS, is Red Hat really relevant anymore in the consumer space anyway? My gut instinct would be no but happy to be corrected if this is false.

CentOS isn't dead.

So CentOS is actually getting better with a more open development model. Awesome.

Fedora?

Maybe not a single reference device, but there are fairly standard devices that are advertised, ship with, and offer support for Linux. The HP Z8 claims "Ubuntu. Certified and pre-installed." I've always run RHEL or CentOS on them and the company I worked for paid Red Hat for kernel customizations...so I figured there was comparable support. Yes, these are workstations, but HP says the same thing about their zbook. I've just never used those.

System76 manufactures computers exclusively for Linux. Dell XPS laptops are also pretty popular with Linux users. Thinkpads were historically, as well.

I would think you could get financial support for a few base models and enough widespread support for at least half a dozen hardware configurations.

https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/z8.html

>I think the non server Linux community needs a reference device.

Currently, as it stands, you'd need 10,000+ 'reference' devices to match what's in use and to wait several years for them to fall out of use if you want that to be a lower number.

Even Chromebooks, which are largely based on specific boards for several models, have a few hundred reference boards that would need to be specifically supported.

> and it's upto hardware manufacturers to try and match the reference device to make their laptops/desktops compatible.

Good luck with that.

On most hardware I buy, I can read "compatible with Mac and Windows" on the package, but nobody seems to bother if it's compatible with Linux or not ...

Maybe because "being compatible with Linux" doesn't mean anything specific. There's no spec so nobody can follow it... which is what GP is saying I suppose: Define a bar so people can try to aim for it.

Wouldn't "Compatible with Kernel 5.11" be a pretty good/accurate bar? That is if they upstream their drivers or develop their closed sourced ones against certain kernel?

Except that when you get the device in your hands, the kernel version advertised is in the very best case one year old. So irrelevant.

ARM9 SystemReady is designed to offer manufacturers of devices a way to target a "reference platform", where all compliant devices can be booted from a single kernel/os image. I detailed this out in a comment earlier this week, with PDF links, if you'd like to read more. I think they're specifically thinking of mobile phones and servers (and the Server spec is its own standalone thing, which is smart). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26694321

Any hardware manufacturer deciding hibernation for Linux was worth doing would have done it already.

Back in the day, this was basically how Thinkpads were, right?

My recent-ish Thinkpad (T470) didn't give me much, if any trouble with hibernation on Linux. I can reliably use it to switch operating systems (dual-boot with Windows 10) without losing the state of either OS. I've had rare occasions where the presence of certain USB devices caused it to resume unexpectedly, but that's the only issue.

I'd suggest today, raspberry is filling that role.

Sort of, but that's not a laptop.

Sounds like a great idea. I suggest that as a reference device we use this device sold by my company. :)

Honestly if your company made a firm commitment to publishing the necessary specs, fixing reported bugs, and maintaining that stance going forward, then that would probably be a deal many open-source people would take.

That's a good idea! What do you think would convince hardware vendors to match a reference device?

A large number of sales of said device. That's pretty much what drives any manufacturer.

In consumer space it’s probably 1 sale for every 100 Windows. If you’re constrained on engineering resources guess which one you won’t care about ?

1 to 100 in the consumer space seems to me extremely optimistic, not sure if I'm betting that it's a 2 or 3 orders of magnitude miss.

I know it's not representative of the consumer space as a whole, but Linux users apparently make up about 1% of the Steam userbase fwiw https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Li...

Yeah, but that 1% can choose either the Linux reference hardware or keep buying some other random laptop and throwing Linux on it.

So, the market is really rather less than that 1%...

Well, since Steam is the only gaming platform available on Linux, and since Steam is sold as a system based on linux with its own Linux distribution, SteamOS, and since Steam have its own version of Wine that magically runs Windows games on Linux, I would say that this statistic says nothing at all.

It would be difficult to get the mainstream vendors to match this initially, but I suspect the Linux focused vendors like Pine and System76 would do so fairly rapidly.

The way to convince the mainstream vendors would be what's attracting them to release Linux support right now. The popularity of Linux devices for people who want to work on the same machines they run their servers on.

Like I said though, I'm not sure whether this idea is workable or even makes sense.

I mean, Pine's and System76's laptops don't even use the same CPU architecture as each other currently...

Some certification of genericity required for all future device purchases by publicly funded institutions, for example.

That's what Microsoft did. Initially there were a lot of issues and also things like hibernation didn't always work right.

Linux needs to have similar certification. The rest would be to have customers look for it and prefer hardware that's certified.

You mean something like this:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/make/Lenovo

Or this:

https://support.lenovo.com/il/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-fo...

It's all really very nice, but even on certified machines, some hardware parts are not working on Linux (X1 fingerprint reader, for example).

> It's all really very nice, but even on certified machines, some hardware parts are not working on Linux (X1 fingerprint reader, for example).

But then I guess they aren't really doing their job when certifying things that don't work.

HW vendors that want to race to the bottom, sure.

But if I want to differentiate, commanding a higher price, then I'll probably be different.

> I think the non server Linux community needs a reference device.

The question is, who is going to make this reference device? Intel? AMD? ARM?

imo they already have them--they're all the unsupported macbooks

Apple computers might actually be a good device for that role. Enough variability to cover most pricepoints, high quality build, consistent components.

Good luck trying to get specs out of Apple.

Apple computers are some of the worst documented computers out there. Also, niche components, one-off chips, secret registers and unidentifiable chips on the logic board, the T2 chip alone is a nightmare for linux (and the T2 is on every Apple laptop since 2018). The M1 isn't even minimally documented yet, and reverse engineering it will probably take a decade.