Hot on the heels of its unexpected (but ultimately fantastic) collaboration with computer giant HP, System76 is back with another big announcement: bringing its products to Europe.
You don’t need to dive deep into any conversation concerning the company to come across someone wistfully wishing that the Denver, US-based outfit would ships its wares outside of the United States.
As the biggest independent Linux laptop seller —citation needed? I don’t think so— expanding its reach beyonds its home borders is something of an inevitable yet interesting next step.
And now it’s happening!
System76 European Distro Hub
In an interview with Dutch tech site Tweakers System76 says it plans to open a distribution center somewhere Europe ‘in the coming months’. From this location it “hopes” to stock its bespoke Launch mechanical keyboard, including a ‘Launch Lite’ edition with smaller key sizes and no fn row.
“Laptops and desktops have a lot of restrictions and the costs are higher, so we will start with our Launch keyboard and sell it from a European distribution center, so that the shipping costs and taxes for that market are lower,” Tweakers (via netherlands.posten.com) quotes System76 engineer Jeremy Soller as saying.
Here in Europe (you did notice the .co.uk didn’t you?) most laptop and desktop keyboards have a different layout to standardised International and/or US keyboards. Language variants aside, European keyboards tend to have a larger enter key, a smaller left-side shift key, an alt gr, and so on.
So when might we get our hands — quite literally in this case — on the System76 Launch and Launch Lite keyboards? Soller says the new hub will be set-up “in the coming months” and name-checks the Netherlands as a possible location.
Beyond keyboards, System76 makes clear its ambition to makes its Linux-powered laptops and desktop PCs available in and localised for European customers, though concedes that the process involved with doing so is a touch more complex than with keyboards, hence them choosing to launch with the Launch.
Any European readers excited by this news? Let me and everyone else know down in the comments.
Thanks H. Stoffels