Are PC Hardware Companies Slowly Driving Technology into Restricted Closed Ecosystems?

I'd make an argument for the opposite if we're talking about the general field. The major OEMs are going head first into enshittification, while other companies are building for more open ecosystems.

For anyone looking for a list of manufacturers intentionally trying to make their hardware more compatible with open ecosystems:

Framework
System76
ASRock
Minisforum
Slimbook (they make the KDE branded laptop)
MNT
GL.iNet (routers only so far)
Penguin
Supermicro
Star Labs
Pine
Clevo

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones that are deliberately building intentionally FOR mass compatibility, unlike HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS...etc.

This is not to say there aren't some models from the major manufacturer product lines that aren't widely compatible, but their main focus is not those products.

Hmmmmm, I'll go with Clevo. Because I'm from Cleveland, and it's called Clevo. It's like the PC brand that was too drunk to spell Cleveland. Which is pretty on brand for this city.
- They'll get an upvote just for that explanation 😂
  Framework is honestly the best thing on the market right now though, gotta say.
- I had a rebranded clevo back in 2009. It worked great for a few years before the dedicated gpu died. It was a sleek design (especially for the time) too.
- @LostMyMind @justanotherperson that's a clevo comment
- System76s' (at least used to) use rebranded Clevo laptops with their own flashed motherboard firmware. I've replaced parts on mine with direct Clevo spare parts.
- It’s one of those Chinese brands with nonsensical names
My read into this is that Pine is so good it's listed twice.
- Oops. Fixed.
Tuxedo Computers from Germany also make PCs specifically for Linux (you can run Windows if you really have to).
- Waiting for my InfinityFlex!
What are ASRock doing?
- ASRock servers, minipcs and mitx industrial boards are highly compatible with Linux, and it's intentional. Sometimes trailing chipset versions just to stay that way.
I can say I'll never buy another lenovo product again.
My laptop is, of course, broken at both hinges due to ridiculously thin and cheap plastic.
This is inexcusable and only exists to make a few rich people a bit richer.
- Very sad to see the downfall of a once great brand... old Lenovos will easily outlast any new Lenovo.
- Well, the rootkits were the last straw for me, a decade ago. Used to buy Lenovo religiously.
I’ll take a star labs laptop thank you
Thank you for the list. We have a tendency to criticize bad actors, but we forget that it's important to promote the ones going the right direction.
I want the pine products but every time I see the reviews it seems like they are not the greatest at the more common tasks.
At some point I want to get an MST if/when my system76 dies. But it's a easy to repair so it will probably be a while.
- If you're looking for a general purpose device, go Framework. Look at their Refurb store. Very reasonable.

Can someone tell Scott that they added the driver for his laptop on November 29th? Almost a month before he made this post.

Further, from some light reading on the subject after searching around it sounds like since most stuff is moving to NVMe drives, Intel is indeed slowly removing ACHI from newer devices, which does mean you need those IRST drivers to boot and recognize disks.

I think it's less companies trying to fuck us over and a hiccup in the slow but steady adoption and adaptation of new technologies.

EDIT:

Here's the Intel Rapid Store Technology driver for the other PC he pointed out, too. This one was added in November 2023.

This seems like it's a non-issue and maybe this guy just doesn't know what the IRST acronym stands for?

Much ado about literally nothing. This is literally based on nothing but his own speculation based on his failure to find these drivers that literally exist and are available. Honestly should be removed as misinformation since both PCs he mentioned have IRST drivers available right now.

most stuff is moving to NVMe drives,
NO!!! GOD DAMMIT, NO!!! 2.5" SSD's JUST NOW GOT CHEAP ENOUGH TO BUY!!! NO!!!! FUCK ALL THIS PLANNED OBSOLETE CRAP!!! I'm going to keep buying SSD's, and I have a whole little system. It's like NES cartridges.
I buy the big ones as the slave drives, and the little ones as the OS drives. And when I want to swap out, I just turn off my PC, swap out one hard drive for another, and pristo bingo blammo I'm on a tottally different OS.
- Okay that's totally fine, SATA ports aren't going anywhere for a while. And you can always add more via PCIe cards. Just buy regular size boards and you'll be fine.
- It's the same with NVMe, what do you mean.
  Have you ever opened a 2.5" sata ssd? half of the box is empty, it's just there so you can screw it to the case on the other side. I hope that form factor will die soon. We need nvme in m.2 format for everything small, and 3.5" for servers. 2.5" should disappear.
- Wait, you're swapping hardware to switch to a different OS? Why? Just make a dual boot system
- It’s like NES cartridges.
  In the sense that the card edge connector plugs directly into a slot on the motherboard instead of being connected via a cable, M.2 drives are more like NES cartridges than 2.5" drives are.
Excuse me, Scoot Blickerdon, that would require people suffering technology struggles actually research their issues and do the legwork to fix them themselves.
- Kinda ironic to hear it from you, all things considered.
  (It's still up, by the way, because Nate Silver might be stupid but having worked for a large media organization he understands how copyright law works.)
I'm hoping your right. It's probably more nuance than a simplistic article. But it did seem like it was true at the time the article was written.
It might be me but I'm finding the big companies like Dell are doubling down a bit on their property drivers and at the same time, other companies that are simply open souring everything, if just for the "free" bug/features the community is willing to add to their platforms. It's a strange duality to live through.
- I understand that but this article is literally nothing but his own speculation because he tried and failed twice to find drivers, one of which has been available a month before he posted this, and the other available over a year before he posted this. It's not malicious, but its misinformation based on fear-driven speculation about bad corporations. I fucking hate corpos too but this is dumb. We don't need to make shit up out of fear of bad behavior.
  This is literally already turning into an anti-corporate circlejerk because of a misunderstanding. It's kind of like when Bernie Sanders supporters at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 were completely convinced the Cisco WiFi routers around the arena were noise generators to drown out their cheers for Sanders. It's dumb and unhelpful and makes us look stupid.

I thought he was talking about locked-down bootloaders or something. Because that's a real concern to me.

Slowly? No.

No, not slowly. They've been accelerating toward this.

That's why I think computers should be like in year 2000. Not because I'm some luddite, but because you can't increase complexity indefinitely without laws of the market changing. Today's general-purpose computer systems are so complex that they encourage behavior that wouldn't be competitive then, because then there were more choice and the industry was much easier to get into.

There are things one can live without.

Especially funny, because new cultural phenomena involving computing are as applicable today as they were in year 2000. What was added since then seems to be about, well, that amount of gaslighting, propaganda and primate instinct abuse made real by centralized social media, and about everyone carrying surveillance devices.

Not everything is progress, some things are just experience. I think wisdom may be in losing that.

This also won't be unprecedented, supersonic passenger airliners are not operated today, and creation of an actual space colony seems much further than it was even 20 years ago, and unification of the Earth into one huge federated state has not happened after Cold War ending, and we don't carry around devices with nuclear batteries.

Such airliners were in operation. Such a colony was being seriously devised. Such a political project ... I guess, was more of a propaganda device both on the Western and on the Soviet sides, but many things done and attempted hint that it wasn't all dreams. Nuclear batteries exist.

So. Computers produced in a few enormous God level foundries, with technology far harder to achieve than nuclear shield, centralized to a few companies, with processes approaching theoretical physical limitations, being the necessary element of our daily lives. I don't think that's a good idea by any measure, if you forget what you know about our world and just read this sentence and imagine some alternative one.

Oh man he's going to be so pissed when he finds out what Intel have been doing for 50 years

Dell blocking the BIOS is a bit slim to claim "PC hardware companies", but they definitely are. HP's crap too in this regard.

Cramming more and more stuff into a SOC leads to this for sure but it's hardly the only factor. Built-in obsolescence also plays a heavy role.

Yes, Yes, Yes & Yes

Why is this entire Lemmy community just weird leading-title BS articles about nothing?

Because you're not contributing to the betterment of it.

This is why I just bought two framework laptops. They're doing the exact opposite.

I think this is pretty much a non-issue. If the Windows installer is broken, that's not necessarily Dell's fault. And you could just install a different OS with NVMe support.. I've stopped switching everything to "legacy" and AHCI a long time ago...