Jouni Osmala (fname.sname.delete@this.aalto.fi) on August 14, 2019 12:09 am wrote:
>
> I think that all you have to do is ask if level1 would make same with next gen threadripper, and afterwards
> put anywhere public thank you with a link to build video, and accept the delivery.

Honestly, I just feel somewhat uncomfortable doing things like that. I'll happily argue here for what I want and use, but it still is just my personal opinion, and my opinion really shouldn't matter that much. What I do doesn't necessarily match what others do, and I am aware that I have some odd quirks that others may not have.

If you live in a city, or work in an office, just the background noise will mean that my kind of "silent machine" issues won't be an issue for you. (Of course, right now I have a neighbor who is building a second floor above his garage, so as I type this, there's a constant sound of hammers going on ;)

Don't get me wrong - I sometimes get access to hardware (including sekrit pre-release stuff - I don't do NDA's, but people know I don't leak) from companies. Although that used to be more common when I was a real developer, not just a "tech lead" or whatever you want to call me now. These days if companies ask, I tend to point them to the actual developers.

And when I do get access to hardware, I don't want to make a big deal of it.

For example, I really enjoy my laptop - I have a Dell XPS 13 - and it hits all the high notes for me (high resolution screen, light weight, feels solid). And yes, Dell made that available to me because I have connections and they have people inside Dell that actually want to make it work well with Linux.

I've been known to send them occasional bug reports about firmware issues (but probably even more importantly for them, I send Linux developers reports when their pull requests break my laptop during the merge window - so the laptop stays working).

So I've had an XPS 13 for several years now (two different generations), and I'll recommend it to people as an excellent laptop, but part of it is also that I never felt that getting access to the laptop was conditional on me talking it up. And I'm happy to mention it exactly because I've used one for years and didn't feel like I needed to make a post about it.

So I feel like now I can honestly say "it's a great laptop", without feeling like I do so because I got it through Dell because of my Linux work. Hey, I bought one of my daughters one when she went to college, because I felt it was the best one around.

Because sometimes the hardware I get isn't great, and then I'll let people know about that too. The first time I got a new dual-socket P4 devkit workstation from Intel (so this is years and years ago as you can imagine), I think I turned it on exactly once. And then I returned it to them because I don't do jet engines.

So I can afford to build my own desktop machines, and I feel more comfortable doing that.

My desktops tend to be franken-machines where I occasionally re-use some previous gen product. For a couple of generations I actually re-used a great case that was part of another Intel devkit where they had taken my silence requirements into account, and used a quality Antec case with nice sound dampening panels.

Linus