I really wish system76 would start giving options for 4k displays. I have a FHD display from them, only a few months old, and it's noticeably worse than my old macbook pro display.
Display Managers: When Linux boots in a 4k screen, the GRUB menu is impossible to read, so I have it memorized. I have tried many Display Managers, some recognize 4k and adapt with no issue, many do not. GDM and SDDM work well, XDM not so much, fonts are all over the place.
X11 (it has an NVIDIA card) There are some apps which refuse to adapt to 4k if you are running GNOME (and yes I use the QT_SCALE_FACTOR). Then there are apps written in WXWIDGETS. Steam menus and items are unreadable to me. Some Window Managers barely support HiDPI displays (XFCE I am looking at you). It goes on and on, by the end of the day its a very frustrating experience. GNOME (and it's derivatives) do it the best so far, KDE has issues with icon sizes and the panel. XFCE has multiple issues, so much that I gave up on it quickly and can't remember them all (and it looked awful). i3 was a little tricky at first but it can be configured to work well, but you need to adapt all the apps and bars too.
Other OSes: Even MS Windows has frequent problems with the screen magnification. macOS just gets it right, and I never had ANY of these issues, except small fonts in the firmware screen.
For my next laptop I will go back to 1920x1080 and avoid all these problems and start using AMD GPU's so I dont have to turn off secure boot and stop using X11.
Add these lines to /etc/default/grub: GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32 GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
And then run: sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
(see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Se...)
weird, I have a 4k screen but the bios, grub, etc are just scaled across the screen. A bit blurry of course but definitely readable.
The only problem that I have left is with Google Chrome & Vinagre: whenever I move the cursor inside their windows it stops being scaled up (therefore it becomes tiny). Used to work fine, changed during some recent update :(
Xft.dpi: 125I exchanged the Galago for a 14" Darter, and 1920x1280 is just right.
The Pangolin looks pretty nice to me.
Also, KDE is better in all regards. Ditch gnome.
I mean, that OS experience, man. It's like people are living in an abusive relationship that hasn't improved since 1998.
You've never used a laptop with a decent touchpad? Or one without a loud fan? Or one with a good battery capacity?
The displays are not the only lackluster thing about System76 hardware.
But given that Linux still doesn't have perfect support for display scaling (compared to macOS, for example) and the fact that it's a 15" screen, I would still probably opt for the 1080p if given the option.
I spend all day with Firefox, terminals, and emacs in XMonad and they all scale perfectly with no raster UI elements. (XMonad's pixel boarder I didn't bother to scale.)
On Windows and MacOS last I checked, there was a lot more resized raster bullshit.
Also a lot of the big linux distro's now have support for this. I know Manjaro and Ubuntu can do it with minimal effort.
And for the niche case where you have a big disparity in DPIs of multiple displays + apps that can't adapt to DPI on the fly, scaling up is surely the wrong solution, you should be scaling down no the smaller screen.
macOS only allowed me to run my 3440x1440 display at lower resolutions, but no _actual_ scaling support. The font is around 3mm tall.
Meanwhile, wayland scaling work wonders. The big issue being that xorg-only apps are blurry (it’s recently been fixed in master though).
System76, for me, seems to have a balance between coreboot and as much free software as possible. But also the addition of a proprietary blob full gpu.
Also the system76 cpu specs are slightly higher.
Actually, the lack of sharpness makes it even harder to read.
AMD integrated graphics needs a bit of explaining to me is this the performance monster variety or Intel graphics is actually faster type of deal. How many external screens can I drive with this setup? My main use case for this would be using Darktable. For the same reason I want a good HDPI screen. Otherwise, this would be a development machine (docker, misc jetbrains stuff, homebrew, some data engineering, and all the usual stuff). So looking for ram and CPU that is faster than what I have today (2018 15" MBP).
My mac book pro is literally falling apart (keyboard) at this point and I'm not eager to jump on the ARM bandwagon yet as it will mess up my tool workflow short term (Java, docker, intellij, homebrew) and cause me compatibility headaches I just don't need in my life right now. I am liking the performance though. All the software that I use runs fine on Linux. So, not a hypothetical option for me. I'd be up and running in a few hours with little to no loss of functionality.
I don't care about legacy ports; USB-C dongles are cheap and effective and I have a few in my bag. Likewise with hdmi to usb-c. What I do care about is being able to connect my Thunderbolt USB-C phone, fuji camera, hard drives, external screen, etc. I'm thinking of adding a headphone to that mix. 2 USB-3.2 ports seems like it's limited.
It has 2 legacy USB-A ports, MicroSD, HDMI and a USB-C-3.2 which I've used to run a 4K screen at 60Hz.
Price was very reasonable. I'm happy, this has stepped up my laptop CPU performance by a factor of 4, the GPU can now do all the stuff I want from a laptop, and it's compact and has good standby life.
I just looked and they don’t seem to offer the higher resolution right now on that model.
Anyway, it is a fine laptop.
Not even a 4:3 display! 1080 vertical is almost useless for coding. Seems much of their target market of Linux enthusiasts would have a lot of coders wanting better than that.
I don't think a majority of linux enthusiasts codes mainly in vim or emacs anymore.
It's 2021 ffs...
Can we get a high res display 9 years after apple's first retina macbook?
All of those additional pixels require additional battery and CPU power to drive. By contrast, black-levels, backlight-uniformity, color accuracy, and pixel fill can be improved without trade-offs. Most laptops have a lot of room for improvement in these areas, and IMO they lead to a better picture overall versus increasing the resolution. As a bonus, you also get to side-step a ton of unfortunate software weirdness.
And while adding HDR and increasing the refresh rate does come with battery/CPU/software trade-offs, I still think they're more worthwhile upgrades than merely jacking up the resolution on a small screen.
I have no idea whether the Pangolin screens are terrible on these metrics too, I'd just like to see a lot less focus on resolution. It's actually really hard (impossible?) to find an HDR panel that isn't 4K, and IMO that's a shame. We live in a world where Samsung phones run below their native screen resolution by default in order to conserve battery[1], which makes no sense whatsoever. If the native resolution of the screen was lower to begin with, battery life would be even better, and visuals would be improved overall due to lack of scaling!
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-lowers-default-scree...
200dpi DPI is fantastic for working with text. The clarity you get is more relevant for text than HDR, wide gamut, or even wide viewing angles. I would heartily recommend it even if you only stare at a terminal all day.
I work with text, and the difference is night and day.
I'm sure there are a lot of economic issues that I don't understand but here is my request:
. all the ram possible . pretty good CPU w/ lots of cores . a good keyboard (no numpad) . a good 4k-ish screen . a big battery (if you make this laptop, ppl will optimize the software to make it last) . decent speakers . is it too much to ask for a decent GPU?
Overall: please just make a premium laptop and charge a lot. There are more ppl on the Internet like me than you realize.
Things no one cares about:
. thin
Things no one cares about:
. thin
They were best buy for the buck. Although, appl beat them out on chassis - alum frame is BEST - but the guts of S76 is top notch.
The only thing I am pissed at S76 is, is that they changed their vid interface for screens on the same laptop - so I couldnt replace a dead machine with a good machine based on their screen redesign
and they wanted $90 for a fn power receptacle....
Else, I support them they are like 60% apple evil
System 76 is more of a "lifestyle" brand that targets Linux users. They're one of many resellers that just rebadge Clevo laptops and market to different segments.
Nothing against Clevo, mind you, but there's no reason you should limit your shopping to them versus the more established brands if they don't meet your requirements.
Just seems like they're doing more than slapping a distro on a third-party machine and profiting from the brand, especially considering issues most people seem to have with Linux computers in a practical sense.
I do admit that in today's world a laptop is almost useless (I have nowhere to go!), and I plan to transition to a real desktop sometime soon, since it's just so much more powerful and useful overall.
Most of the display manufacturers are building 4K for marketing reasons (few people outside of gamers really know about WQHD) but those displays consume too much power to replace FHD across the board. An intermediate resolution between FHD and 4K might be more expensive at this point.
LG, which makes their own laptops and displays, did it right with their 2560 x 1600 laptop panels.
Also note the Apple Retina screens were great due to more features apart from just resolution.
Battery life is slightly worse but it’s not linear: the GPU has more pixels to push but usually that’s in a highly optimized rendering path so things like text don’t take 4x as long to render - and on macOS the extra resolution meant it could drop the extra work of subpixel rendering entirely. In the decade since this became common, GPUs and CPUs have become more than enough faster to cancel out the difference.
16 hours on the new m1 macbook.
- named "pangolin" and illustrated with a bull - the bull is disturbingly ugly - the introduction makes no sense to me? Is team red the Democrat party?
It's a little like if you're shopping for a video game console or a phone and can't get a straight answer on anything due to children arguing over which brand's product they like better all over the internet.
I get that it's just terminology but it's always struck me as odd that buyers would affiliate themselves so strongly with a brand in an open, competitive marketplace.
At least between (for example) Android and iPhones there are objective differences that might matter to you in picking one or the other, but for internal components that fundamentally don't impact how the device works it seems odd to have such strong feelings about it.
Surely all I care about as the consumer is if this laptop is objectively better for my use case than my other options in its price range?
IIRC the Pangolin is already on their laptop lineup since a couple of years.
Interestingly, this is surprisingly recent. In 20th century Democrats were usually (though not always) red, and Republicans blue, which would approximate UK usage (red for Labour, blue for Tories). Some TV network switched in the 90s, and it just caught on. Apparently 2000 was the first time it was done consistently.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=seeing%20red
So Team Red -> Seeing Red -> Bull?
It unintentionally may attract various political party fans, as well as other fans of the color red.
Coincidentally, China is associated with the color red, and AMD was forced out of China in 2019 for having a relationship that was too close: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD–Chinese_joint_venture
But, team green and team blue have China links as well. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/technology/china-intel-nv... And also possibly relevant (x86): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin
As for the bull- bulls are associated with red for multiple reasons ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muleta in bullfighting, Red Bull caffeinated drink, color of Bulls NBA team jerseys). System76 marketing: “No bull. ...Is it charging? It's charging. Must be all the AMD red. Time to run. No, bull!”
Red has also been used for "workers" parties and organizations, like the UK Labour party and various socialist and communist parties.
I'm pretty sure that the choice of red by System76 has nothing to do with politics.
red - amd green - nvidia blue - intel
I agree though that the marketing is indeed weird.
Nothing saying you can't switch them around..
> sporting components from team red. AMD Ryzen CPUs team up with AMD Radeon integrated graphics
Also, I’d associate the bull with anger and power on the bull’s part, because of the breeding and/or natural selection to favor it. The bull is also angry at being penned and possibly maltreated, before being killed.
It's mystifying that there's pretty much no availability of competitive spec'd machines for such a great performing processor / GPU on the market. This Pangolin is slightly amazing for allowing up to 64GB of RAM -- all other options using AMD Ryzen 4XXX I've seen are limited to 8GB of soldered RAM, 1080p display, and 720p webcam. I was somehow lucky and got a 16GB version of the Flex 5 in July. Now it's completely disappeared from the market.
It just feels like dark market forces are preventing good options that people really want to buy.
"alternate mode" support and "display port" support are the keywords I know to look for. Or alternatively, beware of ones that say "Data and Power Distribution (PD) only"
Seeing it not mentioned in the Pangolin specs doesn't give me hope for this unit -- no mention in the expansion ports section AND no mention in the video ports section. Red flags for me and my desired way of computing.
They're called different names, but same concept. HP has "PointStick", Dell has "TrackStick", etc.
Non-Apple manufactures need to really catch up and implement trackpads that are on-par with Apple
The only times I’ve used laptop speakers the last many years were by accident and unintentional. They’re something that I’ve never for several laptops I’ve owned, and just add space, cost and IMHO, bloat.
I’m sure many people who use laptops mostly for work will agree here. Especially if you only use it around other people.
Just like I've never had a need, on laptops, for optical drives, card readers, and lots of other features.
Sure, there's an audience, but adding bulk+cost+complexity to ALL laptops shouldn't be necessary.
You can have specialised laptops with ethernet+card readers+speakers for people who need extra hardware capabilities, without including this on mainstream general purpose laptops.
Of course that doesn't address the space issue.
"Expansion 1× USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1 × USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 2× USB 2.0 Type-A, MicroSD Card Reader"
which contains a mention of a single USC type C port.
Watt-Hours are unambiguous units of energy, Amp hours are ambiguous without knowing the voltage.
since you said mAh (milliamp-hours), I'm thinking you are talking about phone batteries which are typically in the 3.3-3.6V range depending on the chemistry, then 1000mAh would be 3.3-3.6Wh.
As a comparison the Dell XPS 13 has a 52Wh battery, so it's not a very big battery. 49Wh is what the new MacBook Air has, but the Air has a much lower power CPU.
For reference the LG Gram 15 has a 72Whr battery at 1.1kg. The current champ in 'battery size to weight ratio'. Most ultraportables have a 50-60Whr battery at around 1.3kg.
I think 3.64 lbs (1.65kg) is perfectly acceptable for a 15" laptop, not the lightest but also not the heaviest.
However 49Wh is on the low end for this size laptop imho. Granted it isn't having to put a HiDPI screen and hopefully the Ryzen is more energy efficient than Intel but I doubt it is going to be a show stopper in the battery life department.
Not huge; same as a MacBook Air (a much lighter laptop). For something this size you'd generally expect more.
FWIW though, I do recommend trying out US English International. For programming it’s lovely (once you adapt, which is surprisingly fast), and you can also type German, Spanish and others on a single layout.
It’s also the easiest to find from most manufacturers.
But laptop manufacturers have seriously started putting physical ANSI layouts and putting QWERTZ (the German layout) on it. There were three machines I would have bought if it hadn't been for the keyboard.
a) While touch typing is indeed a useful skill to have, suggesting that people shouldn't care about a certain feature because you can, in a sense, work around it, is missing the point.
b) Keyboards aren't just different in how they are labeled. I know of the ANSI layout, which is present on this laptop, and the ISO layout, which is used in much of Europe, has a differently shaped Enter key and other differences. There might be other physical layouts I'm not aware of. I can touch type on an ISO keyboard, I can't on an ANSI keyboard. And frankly I'm not willing to adjust to a different layout just for my laptop.
Also, I can touch type already (after far too many years of learning), but that obviates the necessity for allowing others the possibility to use my machine.
Brave, I know...
16:9 is optimized for watching video and not much else. Give me back my pixels. Luckily some vendors have finally begun to see the light on this issue (Dell XPS, Huawei Mate, LG Gram - Microsoft even goes 3:2).
Going to 3:2 or 4:3 would simply mean a narrower screen, if you want to keep the same backpack-ability.
In my case: I've done i3 setups before and then haven't main'd Linux in a bit, then when back on it tried to see how well I could fare with minimum system setup, and Regolith gave me a good-ish i3 config out of the box (along with dark matching GTK3 theme and terminal themes etc.). I did end up tweaking the files though to change up some keybinds and indicate fan speed + thermals in the bar. So it ended up being mostly 1) just a config starter (incl. most bar widgets you'd want) that I can also maybe rebase on if they update upstream in a way that matters 2) a way to get very consistent system theming across i3 setup and GTK.
Advantage of using it is you get a set of sensible defaults rather than having to put together your own.
It's arguably worse, since we have some known ways to reduce the scope of the Intel ME backdoor [3].
But realistically, if you care about security and privacy, both Intel and AMD chips are unusable.
1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-process...
It's rare nowadays to have end to end ownership. Very sad.
https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/Think...
I've been eyeing an upgrade to a Dell XPS because it ticks pretty much all the boxes for me, but it's Intel. I'd much rather go AMD, but thunderbolt support is a huuuge plus for me because I have a Dell monitor with USB-C that acts like a KVM. Button on the monitor to switch from my windows desktop to my linux laptop, swaps over all my USB devices at the same time, charges the laptop through the monitor; only one cable to do it all! It's AMAZING.
So I'm wondering what kind of support for Displayport over USB-C this System76 laptop will have. I realize I won't be able to do the whole "one cable to do everything" approach here (omg can we please standardize on USB 4 already so everything can do this? gah!) but if I went in this direction, how much would I need to do to plug in everything?
You can find European Clevo assemblers such as LDLC in France or Multicom in Norway.
https://www.entroware.com/store/
I've never had to contact them for support. It's been flawless from the get-go.
The thing that puts me off buying them is that they get quite expensive when you start speccing them up but the quality does not match the $1500+ price tag. On the plus side you can save money doing some after purchase upgrades but that doesn't address the overall build quality issues.
The phrase "seeing red" is a fairly common idiom in my experience in American English. This refers to the matador's traditionally red sash used in bull fighting. Red is believed to draw inordinate amounts of bull attention and make them angry.
The use of "seeing red" is a bit strange, as the idiom is typically associated with anger and a pending bull charge, potentially metaphorical.
Thus, AMD -> Team Red -> seeing red -> bulls.
My XPS 15 lets you choose tap-click or physical click-down of the pad, but to push the touchpad requires so much force that it's painful. So I have to use tap-click and it is a daily frustration. My MBP's touchpad is not so bad until I need to drag something, I've noticed I avoid interactions such as resizing that I do all the time with a mouse or a touchpad that has dedicated buttons.
I know I'm in the minority but I don't even understand why we moved away from separated buttons, because I find them a joy to use.
Did you know that you could use a macbook touchpad like it has buttons? I've noticed it with my mother and my girlfriend (separate entities for the record) when I got them a macbook when their windows-based laptops almost died: they couldn't get used to clicking and pointing with the same finger, and fell back to their old habits of having a finger on the bottom left of the pad, and clicking that finger if they wanted to click/drag something.
So it kind-of knows what to ignore and what not to ignore / recognise intent of the user trying to do this.
When you combine this with "bottom right click = right mouse button" you basically have what you want!
What makes me hesitant is the build quality. I've seen enough comments online (and in this thread) with complaints about parts needing to be replaced.
That being said, I want to note that System76 has great documentation on repairing their laptops. For example, here are the docs for the Oryx Pro 6: https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/oryp6/repairs.html.
It's pretty straightforward to upgrade the internals, replace parts, re-paste the CPU, etc. Repairability is an important factor for me, especially considering the next laptop I buy I'm going to use it for a while (I'm currently using a 2013 T530).
Still, the complaints about needing to replace things makes me hesitate.
It's nice for a machine to be easily repairable and upgradeable, but I don't want to invest so much money in a machine where I'll need to replace parts right away. Also, I imagine most people looking for a new laptop don't own the tools needed to repair nor are they comfortable with opening up a very expensive machine. Heck, I'm only comfortable with fiddling with my T530 because it's so cheap.
I started with a Galago, that had a slight screen defect, (slightly yellow on one side). And I didn't like the 4k resolution. They offered me a choice: repair the screen (they pay shipping) or return for a refund so that I could buy the Darter (I pay shipping). I chose the latter, and I've been very happy. So while there is the occasional lemon, they stand behind their machines.
And software support has been great, supporting me across obscure Linux problems, not-quite-baked OS upgrades, and pilot error.
I’ve been happy with it. It updates the os frequently (I’m using their popOS) with no issues.
you no longer see such low resolution screens on phones/tablets
Huawei Mate 40, iPhone 11 and Xiaomi A3 to name a few.
I have a 2013 Pangolin. Not a bad machine - it's still going after several Ubuntu updates, and currently powers the kid's screen time. There were some annoyances that kept it from being my main coding machine - it was bulky, battery life is nowhere near as good as a MBP, the keyboard felt like it was off-center (probably because it, unlike many other laptops, has a numpad), and the trackpad gives next to no feedback. But it's a well-made machine that's kept going.
It disappeared from System76's lineup for several years. I wonder how the new ones compare with the old.
They really need to ship a 16:10 or a 3:2 screen. Those are for doing work, 16:9 is for watching movies and is way too short.
I suppose I must not have been the only one asking whether they had such an offering, and perhaps there are other use cases where such a config would be nice.
System76 really seems like a good idea, but one bad experience is enough for me to spend my 1000$ on another brand. Thinkpad has been a much better experience so far
Seriously are webcams going to ever improve on laptops?