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.
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.