Thought I'd share my recent experience moving from my trusty old Dell Inspiron laptop to a newly built ThinkPenguin custom Linux system. The Dell was having hardware problems, and I wanted to move to a desktop system, keeping a couple laptops for backup and travel.
ThinkPenguin offers all sorts of hardware and services, all dedicated to Linux. No worries about hardware that won't respond to Linux. They build what you want, and offer to install just about any version of Linux. I had them install Mint Cinnamon 20.3, same as my Dell. I even had them do a full disk encryption, same as on my laptops.
What I ordered and got was a 500G SSD along with a 1TB HDD. Mint was on the SSD, with Home on the HDD. It was Wifi ready with an installed wireless card. Processor is Intel 8-core i7 with 16GB memory. I added a USB CD/DVD RW. I retained my own display, printer/scanner, keyboard, mouse, speakers USB hubs, etc.
Restoring all my data, programs, settings, etc. was really easy. Before ordering, I used Aptik to back up the Dell system with Home included. I had also taken screen shots of some settings, etc. After seeing the new system running smoothly, I did a command line install of Aptik (paid version) and did a full restore. After rebooting, I was happy to see that all my settings, Home and almost all apps were restored and working. I only had to manually restore 2 missing apps. Everything is working great, and much faster due to the SSD and double memory. ThinkPenguin has been very helpful with a couple issues. For example, they clued me on how to access the EUFI boot menu, where I could tweek a couple things. ThinkPenguin isn't cheap, but offers great hardware and services, with everything ready to go with Linux. For me it was a very fair price to avoid the hassle of hardware that "sort of" works.
Just got a new Mint system
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Hank New Bee
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Just got a new Mint system
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AZgl1800
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Re: Just got a new Mint system
Aptik, is a Real Life Saver.....
I advertise it every chance I get.
I advertise it every chance I get.
Re: Just got a new Mint system
it's also great to hear, even more about an company, that does support the Linux System.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.
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Hank New Bee
- Level 2
- Posts: 86
- Joined: Thu Aug 27, 2015 5:32 pm
Re: Just got a new Mint system
I've been texting with ThinkPenguin, and got some interesting information about them. They gave me permission to share it with this Mint community. Here's the text I found interesting:
"Glad to hear you feel like you got good value for your money! We appreciate the review. I think our customers service is pretty good too. You might be interested in what we're doing behind the scenes as it's actually extremely important, but hard to communicate. I'll try and explain.
...this is a bit oversimplified... for brevity and a basic understanding ...
Dell might ship a computer that happens to work mostly with Linux. They might even sell a model that targets the Linux user base. What they don't do is spend time getting that hardware supported behind the scenes. They're just inheriting that support from upstream companies that design chipsets. We're actually doing more of the work to get hardware supported upstream. In some instances we're the only reason there exists properly supported hardware for Linux at all in certain categories.
Take the ath9k-htc package which supports various Atheros USB wifi chipsets under Linux. We worked with Atheros on getting said proper support for their chips in Linux. Any company that utilizes these chips in their product will benefit from our work. We don't benefit from their sales, but they benefit from our efforts. This is good for Linux users as a whole as random hardware will now work. This is not so good for improving support for hardware under Linux however as we end up with fewer sales of our own USB wifi adapter utilizing these same atheros chips. This limits the resources we have to work on other projects of a similar nature. So buying hardware from us basically really helps and is extremely beneficial to the Linux world as a whole.
When people buy from us we very much appreciate it."
I'm not sure how many companies are doing this sort of thing, but it sure helps Linux growth. I know before I committed my first notebook computer to Linux, I ran it for nearly a year off a USB to make sure all my hardware worked. With my new desktop system, the risk of it not working with Linux was about nil.
"Glad to hear you feel like you got good value for your money! We appreciate the review. I think our customers service is pretty good too. You might be interested in what we're doing behind the scenes as it's actually extremely important, but hard to communicate. I'll try and explain.
...this is a bit oversimplified... for brevity and a basic understanding ...
Dell might ship a computer that happens to work mostly with Linux. They might even sell a model that targets the Linux user base. What they don't do is spend time getting that hardware supported behind the scenes. They're just inheriting that support from upstream companies that design chipsets. We're actually doing more of the work to get hardware supported upstream. In some instances we're the only reason there exists properly supported hardware for Linux at all in certain categories.
Take the ath9k-htc package which supports various Atheros USB wifi chipsets under Linux. We worked with Atheros on getting said proper support for their chips in Linux. Any company that utilizes these chips in their product will benefit from our work. We don't benefit from their sales, but they benefit from our efforts. This is good for Linux users as a whole as random hardware will now work. This is not so good for improving support for hardware under Linux however as we end up with fewer sales of our own USB wifi adapter utilizing these same atheros chips. This limits the resources we have to work on other projects of a similar nature. So buying hardware from us basically really helps and is extremely beneficial to the Linux world as a whole.
When people buy from us we very much appreciate it."
I'm not sure how many companies are doing this sort of thing, but it sure helps Linux growth. I know before I committed my first notebook computer to Linux, I ran it for nearly a year off a USB to make sure all my hardware worked. With my new desktop system, the risk of it not working with Linux was about nil.
Re: Just got a new Mint system
ThinkPenguin appears to be US only. That was the message on the page when I looked at one of their products.