Figure I might as well drop a quick review after 2 years with the lemur pro 11
Pros:
* Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.
* Great compatibility for building software between my desktop and this laptop, makes my personal dev work a lot more portable.
* It's quite small and very portable.
* Nice keyboard
* Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)
Cons:
* Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost as much battery closed as it does open.
* Not great screen, terrible trackpad, and silly webcam considering the price of the laptop.
* As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.
Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a macbook after this, not being able to go a day without charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a bit anxiety inducing. Also (and this doesn't matter to a lot of people) I really value a laptop trackpad and this one is just plain bad.
> Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable.
I think any laptop sold in the last 4 or 5 years or so is plugged and charged with an usb-c cable and can be docked that way.
Agree, battery life is atrocious. I get typically get 1.5-2 hours on a charge, after 2.5 years of ownership. I always have anxiety about plugging it in. It's the biggest problem with this machine.
Other than that, I have been very happy with it. Keyboard, trackpad, screen - all adequate for me. In every way other than the battery, it pretty much gets out of the way and gets the job done.
I've had the complete opposite experience (I replaced their Pop OS with Arch Linux). With light usage I get about 10 hours, if I'm playing games or something then yeah it drops a bit but not that much. It easily lasts the duration of an intercontinental plane flight which is my primary use-case.
Maybe it's because I don't actually use it all that much, so my battery hasn't had many cycles put on it. I only use my laptop for travel, normally I have a desktop. That's why I went for a small, highly portable model.
My experience is the same. I replaced Pop with Arch running a pretty low-resource desktop setup (i3 and generally lightweight programs) and I can get roughly 10 hours with very heavy usage: Firefox with a handful of windows/dozens and dozens of tabs open, Docker, Spotify, etc.
Not terribly impressive compared to something like the newer Apple silicon MacBooks but also not terribly offensive considering I don't often work far from an available power source for super long stretches.
Wow, I'm surprised to hear this about the battery from you guys, as that appears to be one of their top selling points: "Most battery life!"
I see that the article describes it as repairable, but is it really easy to get and put in a new battery? I don't see them for sale on system76.com/components
I almost bought one of these in late 2021 when I was in the market for a new Linux machine. They were one of the few manufacturers that actually had stuff ready to ship. But I wasn't interested in PopOS and Framework seemed to be offering a slightly better deal, so I ended up waiting a month for a Framework DIY edition. I've been happy with it despite Framework not being truly Linux-first.
As far as I'm aware, every System76 laptop is a rebadged OEM laptop with an opinionated set of expansion components that they've effectively certified as functional in Pop!_OS by ensuring good driver and DWM compatibility. I think the OEM is Sager, but I'm not confident on that, or if that's uniform. Anywho, because of this, it should be reasonably possible to source replacement components upstream.
Yep, Sager/Clevo. Clevo L141AU has the same specs (2.5 lbs, 14 hours claimed battery life, 65W barrel charger, same keyboard layout, i7-1355U option). The case looks close, maybe identical, to the photos in the article. https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/clevo-l141au/
EDIT: Customized the Laptop with Linux Clevo to the same exact specs as the review unit and got a total price of $1,507, so about the same, give or take $30.
I wonder why. I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell Latitude and battery life hasn't been an issue for me. I probably don't really do power-hungry stuff but just browsing, editing code, ssh, email, etc. it's been fine.
I think this might have to do with aggressive CPU throttling and backlight brightness. I've noticed both of those play a pretty big role in the discharge duration of my Dell Latitude.
I'm planning to send it in to them this week for some repairs (USB-C port stopped working, replace the rubber feet, and replace the battery). I have to pay for the battery replacement (~$100 I think). Hopefully it improves the battery life. IIRC, I was getting 4-5 hours when I first got the machine. Never got anywhere close to 11. Maybe it's how I'm using it.
Hang on, I thought this was still Clevo stuff. I bought a Clevo-ODM laptop a decade or so ago, the keyboard was atrocious in feel (no click left at all on most keys, just linearish sponginess) and activation (e.g. Space was quite difficult to activate, A would very regularly double-activate) within two years. And I know I’ve heard similar complaints regularly since then from others.
yeah - as seen from a few comments on my post, everyone has different opinions on non-objective stuff related to keyboard/trackpad. I feel like the keyboard is pretty responsive while the trackpad isn't, but the only way for you to know is to have tried it I guess.
I’m not talking about subjective things, I’m talking about keyboards objectively wearing out 3–10× as fast as any reputable brand’s. I’ve deliberately filtered for objective cases like my own, including querying specifically on the nature of what was bad in at least a couple of cases. I’m not talking about opinions, I’m talking about a keyboard becoming decidedly spongy in less than one year (compare the feel of the least- and most-frequently-used keys—on ones like ASUS and Microsoft, it’s taken much longer than that before I can readily discern any difference), and and almost uselessly bad within two years, in ways that other companies’ haven’t failed in four years (… though others haven’t been without their problems, but I’ve never had one get anywhere near as bad in general in three or four years as the Clevo one was after a little over one year).
Keyboards don't have to be non objective. I think everyone agrees that ThinkPad keyboards were great (though since the T14s gen3 they too have lost their quality)
A friend back in college absolutely hated the ThinkPad keyboards, (thought they were too deep and bouncy) and loved Macbook's butterfly keyboard when it came out, marveling at the short travel and crisp feeling of it. It's indeed quite subjective.
System76 is working with Clevo but increasingly with other vendors where they have some more input. Most new products aren't Clevo is my understanding.
Glad you are! I don't want to be overly negative. I am comparing my M2 work macbook trackpad with my 2 year old lemur pro trackpad - it's not really a fair comparison. The problem is that the pricing is similar enough where it's hard to justify the hardware downgrade.
I should also mention that my free time to work on projects has dramatically decreased in the past few years, so I am valuing the ability to seamlessly switch between my desktop and laptop on personal projects less than I used to.
> As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.
Consider the lack of GPU a blessing. You absolutely do not want a hybrid NVIDIA GPU laptop, unless you want to sit with it plugged in at a desk while the fans try and keep the GPU from melting through the case. Worse battery life. With absolutely not a single other tangible benefit.
Unless you are using the GPU for machine learning or w/e, in that case, the only utility it has.
Interesting, I've found hybrid GPU laptops to be pretty practical. I've had two over the years and on my newer one I installed PopOS, and there's a setting which puts it in hybrid mode, so by default the discrete GPU stays off, but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU.
When I'm not running a game, I get plenty of battery life out of it (4-6 hours or so?) and when I run a game I get decent performance. Exactly what I wanted. I haven't tried ML yet but I don't see why it'd be any different.
> but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU
Other than for gaming, which isn't worth it to do on a laptop anyway, I have seen no reason for this. Most discrete GPUs do a better job with drawing UI elements than a GPU anyway.
Usb-C connections being unstable in Linux is definitely still a thing. My Asus laptop (amd cpu/gpu) works about 50% of the time, and the other 50 it keeps blinking the monitor on and off.
I can fix this by plugging in hdmi first, then back to usb-c. Some sort of hardware reset gets executed that way, I suppose.
Re: Battery life, are you using stock Pop OS or did you put something else on? I have also gotten bad battery life but I'm pretty sure it is because I installed over it; the battery life claimns come as a result of power-saving features built into Pop OS.
These are product for certain type of people. I could’ve been that person maybe 10 years ago, or whenever I thought compiling Gentoo on a Pentium 4 was worth my time. But as I got busier with life, that opinion changed. To have to pay for a product that “mostly” works? (That doesn’t really once you read more details about it)
Yeah, that's probably why GP was compiling Gentoo on it ten years later: By then it had become a little too tired for Windows, but still quite viable with a crisp Linux distro on it. In case you thought you saw some discrepancy there, I think you're mistaken.
>Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.
This might be your experience with System76, but it hasn't been mine. My Adder WS had infuriating software problems.
• It would regularly hang when disconnecting from AC. The only fix I ever found was a hard-boot.
• When disconnecting from AC, the CPU would sometimes get stuck at 800 MHz. The only procedure I found to reliably fix this was to reconnect to power, wait a few seconds, disconnect, wait a few seconds, and then reconnect.
• It would regularly fail to wake from sleep.
• The screen randomly flashed bright white when suspended, so I had to get in the habit of shutting the lid at night to keep it from waking me up.
• The fan would get stuck at 100% even when the temperatures were at 30°. Fixing this required sleeping and waking the machine.
Maybe some of the problems were caused by Nvidia, but I don't much care. The fact remains that I've been using Linux laptops since I was in high school and I've never had problems like these. Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora all worked well on Dell, Framework, IBM, and Lenovo hardware (Yoga, not Thinkpad), as well as on my home-built desktops with Nvidia GPUs.
Also some hardware problems:
• The barrel connector was cheap and the power cable would regularly fall out. This exacerbated the software problems. The machine would get stuck at 800 MHz at least once a day and hang every few days.
• The machine was generally cheaply-built. The rubber feet fell off, the case creaked and flexed, several keys cracked, small plastic bits broke off, etc.
Credit where it is due, System76 support was responsive and replaced the mainboard promptly and free of charge. But that didn't fix the problems, so not all that much credit is due.
I wound up installing Windows on my System76 and giving it to my cousin as a gaming machine. I owned it less than two years.
>Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)
System76 rebadges Clevo machines and isn't very forthright about it. I find that questionable enough to outweigh my preference for small businesses.
Want to also add that unless you want to stick with Pop OS!, custom firmware will need to be installed, that custom firmware conflicts with packages from many distros. Without that custom firmware, your fans won't scale properly and you will struggle with hardware sleep, battery life, performance in general, etc.
Ironic that distro hopping on a linux-first laptop becomes difficult. But, priorities, I guess.
Maybe being stuck on Pop isn't an issue for some, but for those of us who don't like a UI locked in brown and teal that isn't being updated because they are writing their own entire (also ugly) DE, it is a problem.
It’s a nice computer but calling it “repairable” is a farce, and System76’s customer support is unfortunately woefully inadequate.
I have one of these and spilled a drink on my keyboard, getting it replaced was $300 of parts and labor, but the worst thing was it took almost 2 months pressuring their support reps to actually complete the process and they would frequently just not respond to messages, or ignore information I provided or clarified.
Pop_OS! is really nice to be fair. I’ve also had issues with build quality. My Gazelle’s screen stopped working when the computer ran out of power and had a bent wire when I opened it up. Again they wanted hundreds of dollars to fix it, even though it was clearly a manufacturing defect. When they sent the computer back the chassis was cracked.
I've replaced the battery once and the wifi card twice, the second time in SFO at a cafe table with some random screwdriver I stole from the office. The internal layout is SO easy to open up and put back together, and all the parts and instructions for repair are posted on their website (and are super easy to navigate!). Idk why you would say "farce" but that seems extremely strong. I guess it's kind of inconvenient that they didn't fix the laptop you broke in a timespan you liked, but that's got nothing to do with the thing's "repairability".
Chiming in with my customer support experience: My battery started to inflate after a bit over a year. I did some research and knew their warranty didn't cover this, but I contacted support anyway for help with finding a replacement.
They weren't able to ship me a replacement battery due to international shipping restrictions but were very helpful by giving me the part number to look for and linking to their very good docs on how to do a battery replacement yourself.
In the end I was able to have them ship a replacement battery to a friend with a US address, and doing the actual replacement was very easy.
I had a good experience with System76 customer Support. I contacted them on Wednesday July 13th and they responded that Monday July 18th. They sent me a label immediately, I shipped it to them and with shipping time both ways I got my laptop back on the following Friday, July 29th.
That's unfortunate. I got a Lemu4 (Lemur Ultra) back in 2012 and one of the biggest reasons I went with them as opposed to a Dell or another laptop considered to run Linux well was because their support staff were well-trained and quick to respond (usually replied to my support messages same-day and their phone support consistently had <5 minute hold times).
That said, I never had to send my laptop off to them, as they were more than happy to send replacement parts to me when the fan bearings failed. They even sent me an optical drive caddy for free well after I had purchased the device (there was no hardware fault, I just wanted to install another drive and they didn't sell the caddy as a standalone part).
I have been using a Lemur Pro (lemp11) for ~14 months as my daily driver (coming from a Macbook Pro). It's my main machine and has been running constantly the entire time (auto suspends at night). I have powered it off a few times since purchasing it.
I use the Lemur Pro with a USBC dock, two external monitors, a keyboard and a mouse when at my desk. I did a few manual upgrades. I added 32GB of RAM (maxed at 40GB). I also added a second NVMe I purchased (4TB).
So far it's my favorite laptop. Here's some pros and cons:
Pros:
- Screen is nice and clear with great color. For a non-Apple screen it's great.
- Battery life has been great. I get about 11-13 hours of coding (Firefox, Terminal w/tmux+vim @ quarter screen brightness). I have used it on full airplane rides, etc. Awesome battery life, especially for Linux.
- Video playback is good, even w/1440p@60fps (hardware acceleration in Firefox, no frame loss). However, it does get the fan blowing.
- Suspend/wake works and detects the dock and connects everything perfectly again (mouse, keyboard, monitors, etc).
- Disk speed is amazing. I feel like my old Macbook used to chug on disk reads/writes. However, this machine/nvme is blazingly fast.
- Pop_OS has been nice. I have no complaints. I used to use a bare bones Debian netinstall with a custom DWM setup, but I decided to give Pop a try for a year and I have stuck with it. It's stable and everything just works.
Cons:
- Fan can be annoying when playing videos or scrolling quickly on Youtube.
- When doing a reboot while attached to the USBC dock, it doesn't appear to re-connect to the dock post-reboot. I have to turn the dock off and back on (or unplug the USBC/re-plug it).
- Webcam is meh-- but I don't use it anyway.
I don't see myself going back to a Macbook. If anything, I may take the plunge back into my old custom Debian+DWM setup, but I am happy with everything as it is.
I wonder how much screen brightness plays on to people’s varying battery life results.
You’re the first person I’ve seen say they use a laptop at quarter brightness. I keep my screens either at full brightness or close to it. Never below 75%. Prior to your comment if id seen a laptop maker advertise a certain battery life and then have “at quarter brightness” in the fine print id consider them deceptive but apparently there’s at least one of you that it’s accurate for.
> System76 claims 14 hours, and I managed 11 hours in our battery drain test (looping a 1080p video). In real-world use, I frequently eked out over 13 hours. That’s off the charts better than any other Linux laptop I’ve tested recently.
This is the most intriguing part to me. I've been mulling a Framework for a while but what's held be back so far is that the battery life is 9-10 hours after tuning, and I'd love it to be longer. 11 hours of continuous video on this laptop is pretty impressive for a Linux laptop I think. My Dell XPS 13 feels like it needs to go onto the charger every 4 hours so this would be a huge improvement.
If battery life is a focal point, one model that may be worth considering is the HP Dragonfly G4, which from the reviews I’ve seen gets 13-20 hours depending on the test. That’s under Windows though, not sure how it’d fare with Linux.
I’ve been underwhelmed with my ThinkPad’s performance in this aspect and have been considering trading it in for a G4 for this reason.
I'll say the same thing I always say when System76 hardware is posted here. A 1080p screen should be a non-starter in 2023. How they are still selling these with low DPI screens doesn't make sense to me.
I love 1080p panel on 13-14" laptop and plan to choose do so if given choice. Until 2160p panel become common at least, so I don't have to rely on non-integer scaling.
I'm at a point where the screen and battery are essentially the only parts of the laptop that matter. Everyone offers a selection of ram, storages, CPU, etc. But a good screen and battery are hard to find without going to the bigger brands.
does the window manager support a high dpi screen? I don't mind spending money on a high dpi screen; but each time I've been disappointed by the poor scaling support. Not sure what the point it.
Not only that, but I couldn't even find that info either in the article or the order page it linked to. I agree completely that 1080p is just not good even for a laptop-size screen anymore.
Been using a lemp9 since 2020 and I will say that it's good but not great. Came to it from an X1 Carbon and it's felt like a lateral move, but if you're trying to replace an MBP or something I don't think you'll be satisfied.
_Pros_
* The battery life is incredible, that's the one thing they totally nailed. For Linux especially that's huge, and is in my opinion the absolute selling point of the device. With that said, after about 2 years I did notice a steep drop-off in performance, going down to like 4-6 hours in the span of a few weeks. Replaced the battery and the performance is again A+
* Hardware support is fire, I hop distros a lot and have never once had any issues with getting firmware for anything. IIRC there was one firmware setting I needed to flip before Arch would run properly, but customer support actually talked me through it over email which was cool.
* A pretty nice selection of ports (they have port-heavier alternatives if that's your thing). The lemp9 just came with standard USB-C, which was kind of a hassle for finding a compatible docking station, but I believe lemp10+ upgraded to thunderboltt.
* Chassis feels pretty premium, comparable to what I was using before. No deck flex, hinges are smooth, moderately slow to accumulate fingerprints.
_Cons_
Go to /r/system76 and you'll get a lot. Top culprits I've seen and experienced are:
* Speakers are very, very bad.
* Keycaps have a coating that erodes over time, which is ugly. Can't replace individual keycaps
* Intel options only
* You're using Linux, so be ready for compatibility stuff. PopOS is well managed, but at the end of the day you still have to contend with ex. the linux audio stack
$1150 for an 8GB PC laptop is very high. It’s the price of a 13” MacBook Air with twice the storage.
A better option would be a low-end Dell that works just as well with Linux and costs perhaps half as much. I am yet to see a low-end Dell that doesn’t excel with Linux.
This is my guess too. It's a very weird design decision, especially for a developer targeted laptop. I would probably be less unhappy with a 16 GB RAM chip soldered, but than an 8 GB one.
i get that for achieving higher memory speeds, you need to often solder instead of making it available as a slot.
but most people would like to upgrade, and if it is going to most likely work on the slower speed of the second stick, it defeats the performance point altogether.
My wording is confusing, by "not taking a performance hit" I mean that the performance of the 32GB stick is not limited to the lesser 8GB stick, like it would have been with dual channel.
Of course, dual channel is always better than single channel, and it gives you a performance boost if you have 2 of the same stick.
I paid 700 euros for a Samsung Ibook two years ago. i5, 16GB, 256GB SSD, intel iris xe graphics. Not a performance monster, obviously and I use a mac book for work. But I can run Manjaro on it and I can even do some lightweight gaming on it via steam. All the important stuff works. And it even manages to not look cheap (even though it is). Nice aluminium, quiet and effective cooling, etc.
So, this thing seems a bit expensive for what is effectively yet another generic laptop with the usual underwhelming meh screen, crappy trackpad, etc. Exactly the weak points of my setup as well. But a lot more reasonably priced.
Upgrading beyond the base spec is a very different game between the two: a base 13" MBA with maxed memory and disk (24GB/2TB) is $2300, whereas machine with the same upgrades is $1470.
Even the XPS 13 developers edition does have issues.
After the way netbooks went down, I have either used OS X, or Windows with VMWare/Virtual Box when needed.
Now with WSL there is one thing less to install, although with managed languages I hardly care as they abstract the underlying OS for the most part, or I just connect to a cloud instance.
Given my experience with System76 laptops, I know they can make a good impression at first, but after seeing how flimsy they are in long-term use, I can't justify the markup. You can get a better sturdier laptop with good Linux compatibility cheaper elsewhere.
I have one running almost all the time. Bought it three years ago and it just works.
When I bought it, there was the option to not include a separate Graphics card. Onboard is just fine for me. And that brought down the price considerably.
However, they currently don't have that many AMD options for Laptops, so my next one probably won't be System76.
PopOS never did it for me. Not once did it survive a system upgrade. So I just switched back to Debian.
After almost 10 years of wanting a computer from System76, I was finally able to afford one and bought a Galago Pro 5 (galp5) in 2022. Since then I've come to deeply regret that decision.
I've replaced the keyboard within the first month because it shipped warped. It recently started to "ignore" key presses and needs to be replaced again (according to support without any diagnostics). $90 for the part that saw minimal use? No thanks.
The machine doesn't handle undocking well so it stays plugged all the time. Image burn even with power saving enabled? You betcha!
I hate to gripe. I really want them to succeed but it's just been one disappointment after another. Before buying I had read the posts referencing build quality and should have taken heed.
I bought a Galago Pro 5 in spring of 2022. I use it regularly, though not for my day job, and my keyboard has been fine. I haven't had any issues using a Thunderbolt 3 dock with a 4k monitor.
My only complaint is sleep mode on Manjaro is not low level enough. The battery drains enough that I can't leave it sleeping for more than a couple days unplugged.
My anecdata is that I used a galp6 since 2013 as a daily driver for years. It stayed in service in one way or another for ten years. The battery became useless but everything else was rock solid.
Webcam is potato, speakers are webcam sized and only one usb c port right next to the dc charge jack.
Ditch the barrel jack, give me a thunderbolt port on both sides and increase the trackpad size and I’ll overlook the webcam speakers and cramped display.
I've used System76's products for a decade now, and always been happy. Recently, my (non-techie) wife and teenage daughter started using them as well, and they're happy as well.
> Among other things, this means that modern forms of suspend work out of the box
That sounds very promising. That has always been a major annoyance to me. I don't think i have every owned a laptop with linux where I actually trusted that it would still have battery the day after if I just closed the lid.
I may have misunderstood, but I did not read this as saying "S3 suspend works". I read it as "'Modern suspend' works, so I don't have to keep trying to get S3 suspend working".
That is basically the opposite of what you want. 'Modern suspend' is why you burn battery with the lid closed, overheat your laptop when it's closed in a backpack, etc. It sucks. It's not sleeping in any real sense and can power up to full power if a fly farts too close to the microphone.
For better or worse (worse IMO), I think that what we knew as "suspend to RAM" or S3 is gone forever. It was apparently just too hard to get working reliably with all the peripheral hardware and they gave up.
Everything I have read says that for any recent laptop, if you want reliable suspending that won't burn battery you have to always "hibernate" or "suspend to disk". It takes longer to start back up but initializes all the peripherals from "off" so it can be more reliable.
I'm still working with my older HP laptop that has legit S3 and am dreading an upgrade to a "modern" one.
I have the same experience with various Lenovo laptops running Windows. However, whatever Apple does on MacBooks works. I can close the lid, slide it into my backpack on Friday and open it on Monday with virtually the same battery level.
It's a tough spot since you need S0ix (modern suspend) for Windows 11 to work but you need S3 for Intel ME to be turned off so you would have to pick one or the other.
"Modern suspend" is a specific technical term for the suspend system from Intel and MS that's supposed to supersede S3 suspend. It's supposed to let the OS do stuff like poll emails and download software updates while in the suspend state. Modern suspend typically has the problem you describe with both Windows and Linux since its teething problems have continued for a long time.
Please someone show this to the Tuxedo guys, as their supplier is the same (Clevo), but apparently it IS possible to get the Lenovo-style 6-button cursor arrangement in this form factor, and as a bonus, with separate Home/End/Ins/Del! I will never buy a laptop without this.
Does System76 ship laptops with an ISO keyboard layout? I don't see this as a configuration option.
Why on earth have they shipped with a USB-C that you can charge from _and_ a barrel charging connector? Article says exactly the same power delivery on both.
Anybody know what's going on there? Why not drop the barrel and put something else there (like another USB)? Seems bizarre.
I'm sure you could, but another USB-C port is certainly more expensive than a barrel plug. How significantly this affects the BOM I can't say, but due to the complexity of USB-C I assume it's not totally negligible.
If you want the port to handle PD, various (display) alt modes, high speed data transfer, maybe even TB, you may need a few additional controllers. OTOH having multiple USB-C ports with varying capabilities can be quite confusing.
Don't know their reasons but seems wise to me: USB-C tends to get clogged with lint easily. Also charging port breakage due to handling accidents is pretty common eg by accidentally pulling/twisting the connector sideways, good to have redundancy there.
Last time I tried a System 76 laptop it was great when I was plugged in at my desk doing dev work. Better than a Macbook Pro.
But when I had to unplug it in the office to go to a meeting it was just terrible... support for plugging/unplugging external monitors/docks was atrocious, I had wifi issues, and doing something like a Zoom meeting (Webex at the time) would reduce it's battery life to 1 hour or less. Stuff just got messed up using it as a laptop that was getting used at the desk and then not at the desk.
That was quite some time ago, I hope the software has gotten better. I stopped using it cause I was messing with linux too much instead of doing my work. That was depressing, cause it was kind of the same story as every time I've tried to use linux on the desktop back to the 90s.
I'm still using 1080p monitors in 2023, with the exception of my Surface Book 2 which I don't use nearly as much (I prioritize my personal desktop way more). I game on 1080p I just don't have desk space for 32" 4k monitors, and I dont see any value in having 4k under a 14" monitor.
Interesting, I have been stuck in 1080p land so I have not tried 1200, maybe if I get the chance I'll check that resolution out. I am debating making a small jump to "2k" since its between 4K and 1080p, but I get the feeling those monitors are not quite as common as the other two resolutions, and I'm not sure if it'll be truly worth it. This is in terms of a desktop, not a laptop, but I could see the argument for 1920x1200 for a laptop, seems more reasonable to me.
As a AMD fanboy, I have been using the Pangolin for a few months now. I can't currently use PopOS (Intune only works on LTE Ubuntu), so I'm not getting the full benefits of the laptop - notably the battery life. I get about 5hr with a pretty big stack of containers running, as well as working in Rider. This is strictly less than the M1 that I was using prior to this laptop. A flight-safe Anker battery pack bumps it up to the 10hr I was hoping for.
Performance-wise? It makes the M1 look like a complete joke. Our MITM proxy (ZScaler, a truly terrible product) is CPU-bound, and the M1 would stutter during large container image pulls. I don't notice pulls on the Pangolin - I just keep working while they happen in the background. Builds are on the order of 30% faster. It also handles two external monitors.
Something is strange with secure boot and the System76 kernel; I just couldn't get it working.
Monitor is average, definitely less usable in sunlight (by virtue of being actually unusable) than Apple's offerings. Keyboard and touchpad are great. I did have some issues with the touchpad, and support told me to (gasp!) open the laptop and make sure the ribbon cable was seated properly - 10/10 repairability.
In my opinion, if you have the money, a Razer or Asus laptop is the highest quality machine that you can get to run Linux. Of course there is also Framework, but those are not as well built in my opinion.
Personally, I have the new Blade 14 and it is great. Large trackpad, 16:10, 6 hours of battery life (pretty good for linux) and an RTX 4070. That said, it is absurdly expensive.
In my experience both ASUS and Razer are terrible brands. Poor support. Poor build qualities. Getting drivers for Razer is like pulling teeth, especially for previous gen hardware. Keyboard lighting controls for Razer requiring cloud connected software. Hard pass on both for me.
I think you are correct about the history of Razer products, but this latest line up has been very solid. I had issues with the first laptop I got. It turned out to be a software issue and I got support within a day and they patched the problem within a week. I should also add that they have battery limiting features now and a two year battery warranty. Those two improvements protect you from 90% of the bad experiences people report with these laptops.
Asus I have had consistently bad experiences with and that is why I tried Razer. Of course this is all just my personal experience and I doubt either is perfect.
As far as needing cloud connected software to configure Razer hardware: that is simply false. The laptop is configured via an embedded usb interface that you can send reports to in Linux. There are open source projects that make this particularly easy to do.
I should have clarified, the cloud integration requirement for adjusting the keuboard's RGB settings is under Windows. It's software Razer developed themselves and require for basic functionality on their shipped product. It left a terrible impression with me.
ASUS used to be my goto for quality on some items long time ago, but it has changed drastically in recent years. Sadly, it is just a reminder that one should not rely on brand recognition. Things change. Do research. Talk to people.
Can't get any sense of whether the memory is baked in at build time, or if I can swap out later. The 'tall' option seems to imply there's more room, and that's what I'd need to get to manage my own memory, but ... I can't tell. There's no FAQ page, and... I was going to send in a question today, but since there's a system 76 topic here, thought I'd ask here and see if anyone else can shed their experience with the meerkat and after-market upgrades.
I've been strongly eyeing this model as well, but in the end I decided to trade money for risk and acquire a used Dell OptiPlex micro from eBay. :crossed_fingers:
My biggest beef with it is the arrow keys are nestled among the page up/page down keys. I'm constantly miss-striking PgUp when I'm just trying to arrow around.
Secondary issues are bad multi-display support. It kind-of works, but often at least one screen glitches out if there's not at least one window maximized on it.
And all the USB ports, C included all run into the same host controller, so you've just got the one bus-worth's of bandwidth which is a bit rough if you're docking into multiple screens, a good camera, audio, network, etc.
I have a System 76 laptop that I bought it 4 years ago. It has reliable. Although PopOS has not been reliable. Their support and customer service is great. Drivers work and I'm happy with it.
I stuck with PopOS for a bit after getting my Lemur Pro, but in the end switched back to debian. IMO PopOS just isn't a serious OS focused on stability.
System76 is doing us all a favor by showing what a Macbook could be if it were actually "Pro". Do a spec for price comparison and System76 is blowing them out of the water.
* More cores on wider supported chips
* Nvidia Graphics cards that are far better supported for machine learning than the M1, M2, M3 series (as i understand, it's not my specialty)
* Discrete memory instead of unified
* Market similar prices to storage upgrades (eg $200 for .5 -> 2TB instead of $600
Ok a couple cons -- $190 for an extra charger is a bit much, but likely due to 330w vs 140w. Also pointing out power draw is much higher.
I'm team usb-c after having broken many barrel connector ports. That's a plus not a minus.
I'm also team usb-c because it is extremely nice having one charger that can charge any of my devices instead of needing a charger for my laptop, a charger for my phone, a charger for my tablet, on and on
Very happy user of a System76 Lemur Pro laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) for the past year, FWIW. I'm running stock Debian on it, not System76's Pop!_OS.
I get the kind of battery life the review mentions if I put the laptop into "Power Saver" mode. In "Balanced" or especially in "Performance" mode the battery doesn't last as long, of course. So when I can't be plugged in, I put it into Power Saver mode (this is super easy via the Gnome upper-right settings popup panel; I assume it would be just as easy in other window managers).
I got great customer service from System76 when I ran into a hitch at the start of my Debian installation process (TL;DR: see Debian bugs #1024346 and #1024720 -- the file ".disk/info" existed on the pre-installed Pop!_OS partition; getting rid of that enabled the installation to continue). System76 support went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking this down and solving it, considering that I was installing an OS that wasn't even officially supported by them.
Happy customer; would buy again; I get no commission for any of this -- I just want to see the company flourish so they're still there when it's time for me to upgrade my laptop!
Pros:
* Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.
* Great compatibility for building software between my desktop and this laptop, makes my personal dev work a lot more portable.
* It's quite small and very portable.
* Nice keyboard
* Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)
Cons:
* Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost as much battery closed as it does open.
* Not great screen, terrible trackpad, and silly webcam considering the price of the laptop.
* As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.
Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a macbook after this, not being able to go a day without charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a bit anxiety inducing. Also (and this doesn't matter to a lot of people) I really value a laptop trackpad and this one is just plain bad.