I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable.
System76 needs to come out with something comparable to that before I can switch. The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads. The market that is still untapped is that of the Linux ultrabooks. Developers and other Linux enthusiasts basically just want a MBA/MBP that runs Linux natively. Do that, and people will flock to it.
Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era.
People who stick with Thinkpads today tend to do so because a) the enterprise support is still relatively solid, b) no real competitors for the Trackpoint, if you want one you need to get a Thinkpad, c) the keyboard, while not as high quality as it used to be, is still great relative to most of the market, d) Thinkpads are still basically reference laptops for Linux, and as a customer, it's reasonable to assume that there will be good hardware support.
If System76 wanted to go after Thinkpads, they probably could.
Edit: I just popped over to System76 to look at their laptops and I must say I really prefer the way Thinkpads look when compared with System76. I realize that this a dumb reason to choose a laptop but I have encountered no better judge of build quality than how a laptop looks. Every stupid looking laptop I've ever bought has been a disaster (parts break off, camera dies, weird crashes), whereas laptops who had a physical design which I liked (macbooks, thinkpads) have held up much better.
>the enterprise support is still relatively solid
That's not the experience I've had with my own company's support requests with Lenovo, and the lousy support relative to Dell is a prime reason why most clients I work with are dropping Lenovo for Dell.
Looked at the layout of one, and the right shift (the one I use most) is crossed with the arrow
My laptop is plugged in almost 100% of the time. If it needed to be plugged in a full 100% of the time, that would be at most an extremely minor hit to usability. I need a laptop that I can move, not a laptop that I can use while it's being moved.
I always use my laptops with a mouse plugged in, and disable the trackpad (and pointless touchscreen on my work computer) as one of the first things I do.
I would love to have a laptop with no trackpad at all (or maybe just one of those tiny nubs), leaving more space for a better keyboard.
You nailed it. I'm someone who only works in Linux but admires (and desires) the form factor of a MBA.
Then - we got on a video call. To compensate for the bezel, the webcam is on the BOTTOM of the monitor... which meant looking up his nose.
OK, you have lots and lots of pixels that are too small to see individually or in combination. Put in a cheaper screen with the same functional resolution. Lower price, same quality.
The HP Spectre (W2K28UA) I have has three type-c ports. One is USB 3.1 Gen 1, is not Thunderbolt, is power. Two are Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, no power. (No power icon anyway, I haven't tried plugging the power adapter into either of them, maybe it'd work.)
Like others have said, Lenovo's Thinkpad contract with Red Hat is tenuous at best and their quality has only been getting worse. Its not a default install, its not first class, and Lenovo is not dedicating staff to driver support in consumer products. We have the XPS developer edition program making great ultraportables for Linux. We need a business class workstation notebook in the 17" form factor with ruggedness and great features that has complete and total Linux support and inclusion out of the box.
I _love_ the bezel or lack thereof. The only weirdness is that "bottom of screen" webcam, but I barely use it.
And if you get the 9560... wow. 4K display, GTX 1050M, i7 w/ 32GB. I'm very happy.
I must say, however, I don't see that need for desktops. Custom desktops are relatively easy to build, even for customers.
A well designed linux laptop, with no driver issues, good build quality, that doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness? That's what I'm missing.
I've been custom building my desktops since the 90's and I can't remember the last time I had an issue with hardware, I think it was a Geforce MX440 so ~2003.
The driver story on desktop hardware for Linux is absolutely great (in my experience) if the hardware has been out 6mths or more or uses a core chipset/device that has.
I appreciate that hardware testing is complex and expensive, but I'd love to see an annual "high spec" and "low spec" Ubuntu reference build, with a price tag of maybe $1500 and $600 respectively, that have been tested and confirmed working with the current LTS.
That having been said, I wouldn't pay system76 a premium for it. I'd do what I've done every year so far, which is search a bit and then ultimately buy what I want and cross my fingers.
It exists, it's the Thinkpad T-series.
I don't get all this hand-wringing over the need for hypothetical great Linux machines when we have Thinkpads available right now.
Also it's not supported by the manufacturer. Thinkpads have great support from the Linux community but Lenovo doesn't officially guarantee its use (I would be happy to hear if I'm wrong on that).
There are many fine linux laptops in the desk-home type, 14"-17". The selection isn't so fine if you're looking for something that'll fit in your lap on the plane or train, and have 8G of RAM. Or at least 4.
Does Optimus work the way I'd expect it to these days?
- Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows)
- Battery life is shit (ier than on windows)
- Sleep mode has one of the following problems
* Does not properly suspend (i.e. wakes up immediately when suspending, shuts down instead of suspending)
* Does not properly resume (i.e. kernel crash on resume)
* Sometimes does not properly resume (even more annoying to debug)
* Resumes randomly, when you don't want, often turning your backpack into a forge.
- Hibernate mode doesn't work (at all, your hardware has been blacklisted).
- Plugging in an external monitor occasionally causes everything to crash (but sometimes just compiz).
These are the most annoying problems I have on my Linux laptop. Admittedly, mine is not Thinkpad, but looking at reviews on the latest Thinkpad, at least the battery life issue seems to be ever present. These are pretty much the same problems I've had for the 10 or so years I've been running Linux on laptops. I would have thought they'd been fixed by now. 10 years ago, Windows had a bunch of these problems too, so it was excusable. Now, it's just embarrassing.
I still run Linux on my laptop because I like the dev environment and tools so very very much, but I would pay serious money for hardware that was guaranteed to just work (tm) with Linux, with all of the above solved by the vendor rather than by me. I used to enjoy these little problems, but now they just annoy.
The sleep mode problems are the most annoying to me, the most elusive to solve, and the most impossible to predict from reviews :/
EVERY single thing has worked with Ubuntu (every single six months release, since 12.04 only used LTS releases) and required little to no effort.
As for a "Desktop" I haven't touched one at work since 2004. TBH I believe only gamers care. And gamers like to build/adapt their own hardware. Unless you can differentiate heavily and have something unique (something like building a RED camera or a super fast Electrical car) how is that going to fly in a marked that is in decline?
Keep yourselves to building a super high end laptop that can rival a Lenovo X series model and we will look into that.
My mum would disagree.
An ordinary desktop, perhaps, but a truly innovative product not so much. Consider something like Microsoft's Surface Studio and Surface Dial:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/accessories/surface-...
A Linux desktop with similarly novel modes of interaction would be awesome, and might be just the thing to bring the masses to Linux.
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I really want a 13 inch laptop thats thin/ultrabook format, with low specs and only a HD screen. All I do each day is use a browser and SSH into other machines, I don't need an i5/i7 processor and HiDPI display to do that.
My ideal laptop would be an XPS 13 sized laptop, with a 1080p screen, i3 processor, 8GB of RAM and as much battery life increases as possible.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
I've also install crouton for a full Ubuntu environment, which I use occasionally. But mostly I'm ssh'ing into my workstation and servers.
My only annoyance is the caps-lock key, which is now the Google search key. You can press Alt-Search for caps-lock, but it is slow and a little glitchy.
I highly recommend the recent mobile i5 processors. They are ridiculously low power and amazingly fast. I really do not want for anything.
Now you almost certainly can't buy a V63 where you live (only Japan and even then I've heard Toshiba are getting out of the business), but this is the spec I recommend. The 1080p screen is the most important thing for battery life and performance. Don't get a higher resolution screen if you want to do a full day's work away from the power mains.
I absolutely love this machine to death (and take it with me everywhere -- even to the onsen).
Frankly, having used linux on a few different laptops, i'm not really sure how someone who wants everything to always work perfectly and isn't capable of debugging kernel drivers and tossing out patches runs linux. The few times I've seen this situation, it seems people are just putting up with the broken backlight controls, standby that doesn't work, BT drivers that wont pair, etc.. All things i've had to fix on my machines. (the latest being the keyboard hotkey to enable/disable the trackpad needed "tweaking").
No hardware issues that I know of (but I had to uncomment HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf to get it to suspend, and of course XFCE doesn't know what to do with tablet mode, nor do we …). The rather big trackpad might take some getting used to though :-)
XPS 13 sizes, 8GB of RAM, 1080p screen. The lower end CPU choice for the UX330 is i5. At least older UX Zenbooks worked with Ubuntu right away with the exception of ambient light sensor.
I love my Chromebook with coreboot and archlinux, but I need a upgrade to a 1080p screen and more than 4gb of ram without having to pay $1000 for a overpriced laptop with a dual-core i7.
AFAIK this whole System 76 blew up because of the disappointment in the newest Macbook Pro. People say they'd wanted bigger battery and more connectors -- however, I'm a bit skeptical if those would be enough to choose a much heavier, uglier and bulkier model when actually buying a laptop.
The way laptops are built, I'm not sure a 10-20% increase in battery size would mean only a small change in the size of the laptop (everything fits pretty tight in there...).
At a minimum, I would expect standard USB, headphone, sd card reader, standard HDMI, mini displayport.
You're going to have a hard time convincing me that an HDMI connector adds more than a few grams of weight. Thickness, maybe. But even then.
VGA and ethernet could be nice too, but wouldn't see much use in my case.
The battery could be removable (i.e. half internal half external, like the thinkpads).
Optical drive is obviously not much use in a laptop anymore and should be external. (this one actually adds weight and not just thickness)
- No headphone cable, I have bluetooth headphones - No ethernet, I have wireless - No hdmi/displayport, I have chromecast/miracast
In general, I don't want to connect all that much to my laptop. And for the things I want to I'd prefer a universal connector such as usb-c. Make a docking station that works over usb-c where I can connect whatever is on my work desk such that I only have to plug in a single cable and everything is good for me.
I have a pre-touchbar model and it's more than thin enough. It can be done. To my mind, the question is can a company that doesn't have Apple's resources manufacture on the same level as Apple? I'm not sure.
From a personal/consumer standpoint, all I want to see anymore is a competitor to the Macbook Pro, with a comparable track pad, display, keyboard, battery life and form factor. I'd love to move away from my MBP, but the closest competitor I've found is the XPS 13 and, while it's a great laptop, just doesn't hold a candle to the MBP in a few of those areas. I wish System76 luck and would love to see them prove me wrong. This press release, so early in the process, just seems like a lot of pressure for the company to live up to, especially based off of their past offerings.
I agree with you on wanting decent ultrabooks. I have had too much trouble with Dell to risk more of my money on another.
...
> Phase three moves product design and manufacturing in house. We’re about to build the Model S of computers. Something so brilliant and beautiful that reviewers will have to add an 11 to their scores. Being that we’re System76 and we do things the System76 way, our design principles are polar opposite of the rest of the industry.
Is this serious? The Tesla Model S was a serious gamechangers for the viability of electric cars. Dell and Lenovo have made "OEM computers with Linux support" a solved problem space. These guys think they're going to leap from selling rebadged Taiwanese MacBook clones to coming up with original PC designs so great that they beat what Apple and its mountains of cash can put out? Are they serious?
I think it's entirely possible that a similar situation can happen in the PC space, and System76 believe they're positioned to do it.
Disclaimer, I do happen to be a web developer at System76. But the argument stands; you can disagree that System76 has the ability to execute on this vision, but after building a very successful business around Linux computers for 11 years, I happen to believe it's going to happen.
There are many configurations and many redundant options, and silly coupons that work on some models and not others. The buying options are entirely unclear, I think intentionally so. Just like HP and some of the other major OEMs. Please don't read this wrong, I love options, but I dislike foolish inconsistency. When I build a desktop I can choose any CPU, any GPU, any Mobo... When I look at the 4 models (lines, tiers, whatever) of the XPS 13 they have redundant options, 4 different ways to get to the same configuration with no reason I can see for a $200 difference in price. When I spend my money I want to know what I am buying.
Beyond the normal BS is that part of buying System76 is not giving money to microsoft. I think microsoft is evil, not an exaggeration, legitimately evil. Not giving them money is a huge selling point for me. I think this is a discussion for another thread and will not defend this here and now, Just take that I (and at least a few others) won't willingly give money to microsoft. So where is the option for an XPS with Linux, any flavor (or even Freedos or no OS) pre-installed?
Because none of the XPS 13 systems say they support what I choose for my OS, what is my recourse if I do blow away the pre-installed OS and something doesn't work? They are free to change the hardware when they please and I have ordered two dells with identical model numbers and gotten 2 different things (even in their business class of machines). They are making it clear that I am not their intended customer and mine is not their intended use case.
The XPS 13 is available as a developer edition with Ubuntu instead of Windows preinstalled: http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/productdetails/xps-13-93...
I am quite happy with my 2016 MBP, by no means perfect, but my overall Mac experience did not change that much.
I have personally learned so much from that experience that it is very difficult to overlook when thinking of brand hacks.
I don't see myself moving to System 76 unless they bring out an exceptional product. For instance, if they did a desktop that contained two motherboards, one for a 'server' and one for a 'client', then that would really help build web apps where you don't want your 'server' to be slowed down by your IDE, browser tabs and everything else 'client'. Such a system would have to have a SGI style unified file system that was quick from either client or server side, i.e. no NFS mounts.
Given that no such PC has ever existed(!) I don't see System 76 coming up with something crazy niche that 'every developer must have'.
They're going to build better computers in a few years, is the message I got from it. Are they showing/announcing anything today?
Side note: is the Bonobo really rocking dual GTX 1080's? Like the full-size desktop 1080's?
I don't game as much as I once did so I'm behind the times on mobility graphics (I understand they've come a long way), but that really impresses me.
I would buy none of these two btw, unless they tell me that they didn't rip off little children in some remote place... In that case I'd even pay lil bit extra.
Edit: When customizing the machine I can see that it has m.2 and 2.5" sata. The wifi is 802.11ac 2x2 or 3x3.
Currently, size wise, it's only the 2016 Macbook that has made an impression on my eye - and I am not really happy with putting so much money on the table for a sub-par performance notebook.
I like the hardware specs of the Galago Pro. Unfortunately, I can't say that for the design. So much wasted real estate (e.g. screen).
So I'm not sure there is quite enough incentive for me to pay the extra $500.
If I lose a couple of days to having to figure stuff out with a faulty machine, as opposed to solving the immediate issue of having a box that works right now, I will have lost significantly more than $500.
This is why I buy Apple hardware with Apple Care, by the way. Whenever I've run into an issue I walk into an Apple Store or call customer service and have the issue resolved right away. Sure the up front cost is higher, but the time and money saved on not having to care is priceless.
It has to be said though, that the hardware is only half the story. I also make heavy use of spideroak and iCloud for backup of pretty much everything, as well as init scripts to get a brand new machine configured in less than an hour.
If these guys can provide the same solid hardware + support + cloud story (by themselves or through partners) then I'd say the price tag is competitive.
> Laptops are more complex and will follow much later.
Oh... I guess not.
Custom desktops aren't all that interesting. Especially not with the KickStarter / other funding platform culture that caught on with the custom desktop case community. I really don't see System76 being able to outdo enthusiast communities in terms of what people want (SFF, quietness, form factor, etc.). Their best bet is to work with enthusiast communities, take the cases people are supporting/testing, and create verified + supported Linux configs for those systems. I think they'll have far more success in creating truly unique and useful systems going that route.
It is a little odd that they are starting by re-designing their desktops: their desktops actually work well.
I guess that's why they're starting on desktops. You can limit custom fabrication to the cases and then it's just part-picking. There's also good margin on peripherals.
But ultimately where this is going to make or break them is on laptops. The problem there is it's powers more expensive. Mainboard design, screens, batteries and a much lower uptake of high-margin peripherals.
That said, many, many developers are happy to drop a few thousand on a good portable because it's a business expense they can easily justify. There's money to be had if they get it right. In that vein, they need to get away from their current image of rebadging generic hardware. Ergonomics are important.
System76 is not known to do they things they say in the article, though, like building laptops that work perfectly on Ubuntu and will work with future generations.
Hopefully their design will improve, too.
I bought an ultralight Acer of so-so quality and the thing runs Xubuntu, i3 almost flawlessly out of the box. I'm not going to pretend it's a Macbook Air or XPS but it matches them in function for a lot less money.
And for the laptops: with the rate of tech innovation I am afraid that when they release a laptop it will be one or two generations of CPU behind... and I also doubt they'll be able to produce something that comes into range with the 2015 MBP (not the awful Late 2016 model). Key points are fan loudness (I have yet to see a powerful AND silent x86 laptop other than the MBP), the trackpad (again, Apple wins with size and functionality by far) and the battery life - I can get 4-6h of Netflix on a single charge, hard to beat this given that Apple has literally billions of cash available to tweak OS X to their hardware for maximum power efficiency.
Do the extra money go to a better construction quality and material? Right now i'm using an asus and i'm a little depressed about the general durability. The one i was using before break after no more than 3.5 year, but i started having problem during the first year of use. I think i need something a little more "rugged".
My usual price tag is 500€, but i will pay more for a more robust laptop.
This is mainly in response to that Reddit thread from many years ago which basically spread the neg against System76. I was cautious due to being biased from the negative reviews of the past, but would consider my experience evidence that its at least not that way now :).
Really hope this works out - not only do I love seeing Linux plays, quirky plays, contrarian plays, and quirky, contrarian Linux plays, but also, we need more alternatives to Dell/Lenovo.
Also also, they seem like great people.
I ended up buying a XPS 15" in lieu of not buying a MBP.
in germany you can buy a 13,3" FHD laptop with up to 32GiB ram and preinstalled ubuntuflavors starting at 1099€ here:
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Noteboo...
keyboardlayouts for a lot of countries and plenty of other customization options available. Batterylife is claimed to be 12 hours. Weight is 1,3kg.
edit: added weight, starting price
If there is one certainty in this world, it's the apt comparison of System76 to Tesla.
I know Intel claims otherwise, but an always running background OS feels like a back door to me.
