If you're lucky enough to live in an area that still has small computer shops you can also get made to order if you aren't up to making one yourself.

In Silicon Valley you can go to Central Computer, though they aren't a tiny neighborhood shop by any means.

For laptops you might buy a Linux laptop.

When you say “made to order” - you’re talking about desktops, ya? Not laptops? If there are made to order laptops, I need to see that.

I’m planning on using Central for a PC build in a month or so - definitely going to try to stretch my dollars.

This used to be a thing- I remember my father excitedly configuring a made-to-order laptop from ZipZoomFly[0] back in the day. I think that the market wasn’t kind to them though, the ecosystem about replaceable laptop parts never matured to the point where it was competitive with the proprietary designs, and standards constantly changed because of the form factor’ constraints, so the dream of just replacing a single part never materialized.

Closest thing to that dream now is the framework laptop, which does have replaceable parts.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipZoomfly]

Resellers of Clevo barebones offer a fair bit of flexibility to spec the system to order. It's not full freedom to mix and match, but still quite flexible. The price is that it is far less sleek, bulkier and heavier than most other laptops.

Yes, desktops.

From other comments you can still sort of configure your own laptop.

What I was referring to was laptops already configured with Linux. So all the drivers are working, for example.

> And back when PCs were far more open, good old IDE was always an option too.

IDE is extremely slow, the connectors occupy a lot of precious space, and it hasn’t been used for modern drives for a very, very long time.

If anyone really needs IDE then they should get a USB IDE adapter for their use case.

Faulting motherboard manufacturers for removing ancient connectors is just grasping at straws.

What the parent poster was talking about was not the old hardware IDE interface, but the emulation of the IDE interface within the SATA controller, which exists for compatibility with very old operating systems which understand the old IDE interface but not the newer SATA interface. Since nearly all modern operating systems understand the SATA interface (AHCI) natively (that is, without having to install any extra drivers), that compatibility mode is not very relevant anymore.

I'm referring to the software interface.

CompactFlash cards are still running as IDE drives.

I still hope to some day see Postgres ported to run directly on a RAID controller. EBPF already exists running on NICs but we need more things of that sort. I suppose Synology has a bit of an analog of this in that their NASes can run docker images on their end which makes better use of their gigabit ethernet connection. But that’s basically a whole second computer.

I really really want to want Framework 16 for example.

But 2,5 kg versus 1,8 kg for a Lenovo with way better specs (I'm a traveller, weight is everything)... tough...

Framework Laptop 16 without a dGPU is 2.1kg.

Well yea, a pre-built with no regards for repairability will always end up more tighly packed than something that needs to fit in a standardized battery, etc. And in Framework's case, an entire GPU.

That's pretty much why phones never had a chance for this idea until very recently (and AFAIK, those recent examples are still not commercially available).

> I'm a traveller, weight is everything

LG Gram laptop series. My LG Gram is the best laptop I ever had. It's lighter than Mac laptops.

Microcenter's pre built PowerSpec PCs are great. They are all basically OTS components so easy to upgrade, yet get pre built convenience.

The next thing or what has even gone on with Apple Silicon is going to be attempting to outperform SoCs and if you can't then you get pushed on having to make SoCs on chips. I think there will still be Raspberry Pi or other vendors that will have open SoCs and even Risc-V boards being integrated with Framework laptops but as time goes on we are still going to most likely going to be stuck with SoCs on devices because the memory or any other device is just closer to the rest of the Silicon.

RaspberryPi's SOC famously boots from it's GPU first, then it's CPU. The GPU is a binary blob (not open source) thanks to Broadcom...

Broadcom... that same hardware mfgr that makes your Debian install so much extra fun... (well, if you care about networking and integrated controllers...)