System76 Launches Ryzen-Powered Laptop

System76 is never one to rest on their reputation or become complacent in an incredibly competitive field. This has never been more apparent than with their constant push to bring more and more powerful systems to consumers. Case in point, the new Serval WS laptop (https://system76.com/laptops/serval). This Linux workhorse includes a powerful AMD Ryzen CPU, along with all the other bells and whistles you'd expect in a flagship laptop.

But the highlight of the Serval WS has to be the processor. System76 offers three different configurations for this laptop: Ryzen 3600; Ryzen 3700; and Ryzen 3900.

Of those three options, it will be the Ryzen 3900 that will garner the most attention, as it's a CPU that includes 12 cores and 24 threads.

Consumers can also choose between a GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2070 GPU, for graphics intensive workloads. Other features of the Serval WS include an RGB keyboard, 1080p webcam, and plenty of ports for connectivity. The laptop can be purchased with either a 15" 1080p or 17" 4K display. The Serval WS supports up to 4TB of NVMe SSD storage and up to 64GB of memory.

The base model starts at $1,299 and can be configured to a whopping $5,000. Like all System76 machines, the Serval WS comes preloaded with their in-house Linux distribution, Pop!_OS (https://system76.com/pop).

Fedora 33 Desktop Defaults to Btrfs

Although the release of Fedora 33 is a few months away, there has one been one announcement that has turned a few heads. Said announcement is the shift to the btrfs file system as the default for the desktop. All desktop editions of Fedora 33, including spins and labs will be included in this change.

But why have the Fedora developers opted to make this change? The developers see btrfs solving a number of problems, such as users running out of free space, preventing data corruption caused by flaky storage devices, poor responsiveness when under pressure, file system resizing, and complex storage setups.

Btrfs on Fedora 33 will include all of the default features found in the stable version of the file system. And with btrfs having been well tested for over 7 years, the developers are confident this change will go smoothly. To this point, the Fedora developers have said:

"For laptop and workstation installs of Fedora, we want to provide file system features to users in a transparent fashion. We want to add new features, while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space. Btrfs is well adapted to this role by design philosophy, let's make it the default."

This change will not have any impact on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Original source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault

SUSE Acquires Rancher Labs

Rancher Labs is a privately held company that provides a Kubernetes management platform. SUSE is one of the largest independent open source companies. Put these two together and you have the makings for an incredible moment in IT history.

Melissa Di Donato, SUSE CEO said of this definitive agreement. "Only the combination of SUSE and Rancher will have the depth of a globally supported and 100% true open source portfolio, including cloud native technologies, to help our customers seamlessly innovate across their business from the edge to the core to the cloud."

Unlike other solutions, the SUSE/Rancher Labs combination will remain fully open source. And with cloud-native application adoption continuing to grow exponentially, this coming together of a powerhouse and an up-and-coming star should be a game-changer. With SUSE being a global leader in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing, and AI, and Rancher already being established as a leader in Kubernetes container management, this acquisition will deliver "computing everywhere" with the latest AI and containerized workloads.

Of this combination, Sheng Liang, Rancher CEO, says "Our leading Kubernetes platform with SUSE's broad open source software solutions creates a powerful combination, enabling IT and Operations leaders worldwide to best meet the needs of their customers wherever they are on their digital transformation journey from the data center to cloud to edge."

The acquisition of Rancher is the first step in SUSE's planned expansion strategy since becoming a fully independent software company in March 2019.

It is rumored that SUSE is paying at least $600 million to acquire Rancher labs. The deal should close around October 2020.

Source: https://rancher.com/blog/2020/suse-to-acquire-rancher/