Holy moly, $100k a year each. I hope this more than covers LVFS’ costs and give them enough headroom to keep improving it.
For these companies it must be pocket change, but that can be a lot of money if the LVFS is efficient enough.
Dell and Lenovo both sell Chromebooks, which technically run a variant of Linux. Those laptops are especially popular in schools.
It’s smart investment on their part and broadens their options longer term.
All in all a net positive on all fronts.
So why this company and not coreboot?
NovaCustom uses Dasharo, developed by 3mdeb. Isn’t that better?
This is talking about fwupdt firmware and patches, not uefi/bios replacement.
Isn’t uefi bios firmware? What’s the difference?
Those are considered firmware, yes. And these can vary in their installation as being updated via the firmware interface itself or some other update mechanism.
Some firmwares like on certain IBM thinkpads, my surface pro 6 and others can be updated directly via a Linux command called fwupd, but the firmwares must live in specifics public repositories.
This news means we’ll all have a much better time using fwupd to update these on dell and lenovo machines, but the firmwares themselves will remain proprietary blobs.
Coreboot replaces the bios/firmware altogether, and it’s not an easy task to get new ones, unfortunately.
This is a good very good thing! Let’s hope that Dell & Lenovo will also cover their more Consumer oriented devices (Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo Ideapad or Dell Non-Pro or XPS models) instead of just their Business oriented Models (like Dell Latitudes and Thinkpads/Thinkstation)
Let’s push for it to happen!! Collectively we make it happen! Also, for more companies to jump on board. Imagine Samsung jumping on board to make a Linux phone!
Yes! Yes!! No!
Lenovo and Dell laptops are the best for Linux for some time already. Thinkpads get the spotlight but the Latitudes are no hassle too.
I even have a Latitude running with the Linux-libre kernel 👍
Does everything work correctly?
Everything that I’ve tested. The wireless card is physically broken, so I haven’t been able to test that, but I had it running with FOSS drivers on Debian so I think it should be fine. From memory it was and Atheros chip from Aliexpress.
Lenovo and Dell laptops are the best for Linux for some time already. Thinkpads get the spotlight but the Latitudes are no hassle too.
A costco HP I grabbed in a pinch has been rocking linux without any issues from day one.
I have an HP Envy from several years ago and the BIOS is super locked down so I can’t enable secure boot on it. With my previous HP laptop, I had a ton of trouble getting the WiFi to work
That’s really odd. I have a pavilion of similar age and I enabled secureboot without issue. Old HP and wifi is pain and suffering.
Maybe there’s a way, but I looked all over the settings and internet and even had an AI agent do a search for how to enroll my keys and couldn’t figure it out
Also how old is this envy? Exact guide I followed. I built mine from source as I run Debian on that laptop.
I have an HP pavilion x360 from 2017. https://youtube.com/watch?v=FhJYj57qQCI
HP Envy X360 15-ds1010wm, I think it was from around 2019. My BIOS menu looks like this:
Platform Key and Pending Action are not selectable BTW
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