System76 support?

General
1

Hi,

I have a laptop that’s currently running Manjaro/KDE. I’m considering to shift to something more reproducible (maybe Nixos?) and I came across Aurora. That also looks quite interesting and it seems I’ll have to read some more… One thing that I wasn’t able to answer easily: how is the support for System76 laptops (specifically, Darter)?

2

We’re working on better S76 and Tuxedo support, however the work is dependant on us doing some structural changes to the akmods repo which has been taking longer than expected.

@ssweeny did the work and we’ve wanted to merge this in asap, we just need to finish it off.

3

Curious as to how an immutable distro “supports” specific vendors, especially Linux-friendly ones?

I would expect any kernel-side changes make it into the mainline kernel sources, so there should be no need for anything there?

Now, with regard to user-space applications like Tuxedo Control Centre, surely the onus is on those vendors to build flatpaks for their software?

4

Not unless the OEM sends them uopstream. Im not sure if either s76 or tuxedo have done those. Both thend to have their own modules which then would need to be created for fedora (they both are debian/ubuntu based)

5

Tuxedo tracks their upstreaming progress here: Upstreaming progress (#253) · Issues · TUXEDO Computers / Development / Packages / tuxedo-drivers · GitLab

Unfortunately it’s not a given that a “Linux laptop” works equally well with all distributions, not even years later. Things might be better with System76.

6

Yeah what we’re trying to do is enable Linux-shipping hardware vendors. Shipping an akmod for things like keyboard backlights, etc.

This is assuming that we have people willing to do the work - which we do have, Scott did S76 and there’s a group of folks enabling Tuxedo. If we can enable this and it’s decently maintained then it’s an easy win to help OEMs that support linux preinstalled. I also wanna do the logo in the top left corner of the desktop for them, etc.

Then if people like it and the numbers are right, it may encourage those manufacturers to work with those folks and then we go from there.

3 Likes
7

yeah, I should have made that more clear… say on Manjaro, there are quite a few packages that address system-level functionality. For example, keyboard backlight, fan speed, etc. here’s part of that list:

20 aur/system76-power-gui 0.1.1-1 (+0 0.00) 
    GUI application for System76 Power Management
19 aur/system76-keyboard-configurator 1.3.12-1 (+16 0.00) 
    Configures keymap and backlight of System76 keyboards.
18 aur/system76-firmware-git 1.0.69.r0.g6651187-1 (+0 0.00) 
    System76 Firmware Tool and Daemon
17 aur/system76-kbd-led-git 0.1.r14.gba5bbd7-3 (+1 0.00) 
    System76 keyboard backlight LED controller.
16 aur/system76-scheduler-git 2:2.0.0-3 (+1 0.00) 
    system76 userspace scheduler
15 aur/system76-wallpapers 18.04.2~1714172930~24.04~ff1e25c-2 (+5 0.00) 
    A collection of System76 Wallpapers
14 aur/system76-acpi-dkms 1.0.2+12+g03a5804-2 (+4 0.00) 
    This provides the system76_acpi in-tree driver for systems missing it.
13 aur/system76-driver-git 20.04.79.r0.g3e9def1-1 (+1 0.00) 
    System76 Driver for System76 computers
12 aur/system76-io-dkms 1.0.4-1 (+2 0.00) (Installed)
    DKMS module for controlling System76 Io board
11 aur/system76-dkms-git 1.0.18.r7.gcc41a32-2 (+7 0.00) 
    On newer System76 laptops, this driver controls some of the hotkeys and allows for custom fan control.
10 aur/system76-power-git 1.1.24.r14.g4ebf3fd-1 (+2 0.00) 
    System76 Power Management
9 aur/system76-oled 0.1.5-1 (+1 0.00) 
    Control brightness on System76 OLED displays
8 aur/system76-driver 24.04.5-1 (+23 0.00) (Installed: 24.04.4-1)
    Universal driver for System76 computers
7 aur/system76-power 1.2.4-1 (+12 0.00) (Installed)
    System76 Power Management
6 extra/firmware-manager 0.1.5+12+g3c542bd-1 (3.9 MiB 22.9 MiB) (Installed)
    Generic framework and GTK UI for firmware updates from system76-firmware and fwupd
5 extra/pop-sound-theme 5.5.1.r7.g25ea85d-2 (210.5 KiB 306.9 KiB) 
    System76 Pop sound theme
4 extra/pop-icon-theme 3.5.1-1 (2.3 MiB 64.5 MiB) 
    System76 Pop Icon Theme
3 extra/pop-gtk-theme 5.5.1.r7.25ea85d9-1 (551.1 KiB 3.3 MiB) 
    System76 Pop GTK+ Theme
2 extra/system76-scheduler 2.0.2-1 (1.8 MiB 6.6 MiB) (Installed)
    Auto-configure CFS and process priorities for improved desktop responsiveness
1 extra/system76-firmware 1.0.71-1 (1.4 MiB 5.5 MiB) (Installed)
    System76 Firmware Tool and Daemon
8

What does this mean in practical terms, right now? Is it possible right now to easily install all the required packages? How does one go about it? I’m a complete noob with respect to Aurora…

9

It means we’re going to do this for you so everything just works out of the box, we had to make some structural changes to the way we make this stuff in order to do that but we’re almost there.