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.
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.
it has a 240w barrel plug and two usb-c ports. one usb-c port can be used for displayport, neither for charging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feel the trackpad and screens are totally fine. (Although low res for the 13' version).
Very happy with mine, specially how small and light it is. This is my 3rd "ultra portable", and it might be the lightest one yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find it pretty hilarious that in 2023 this can still be a selling point.
Don't get me wrong I ran arch on a thinkpad for a long time so I can appreciate the statement, but now I just use a macbook and get my work done
My 6 year old oryx pro gets about 2 hours (on nvidia). It can game though… (steam is kinda amazing)
I really like matt screens which all these laptops have.
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.
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.
Also, battery life is great. I don't need to do any xrandr/crazy ENV configs for high DPI guis/etc.
I spent $150 on my last 1080 14", and the panel is phenomenal.
I have 4k for my desktop but that's a 27" monitor.
Wouldn't pushing 4k on a laptop reduce the battery life even more?
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.
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.
https://partofthething.com/thoughts/replacing-the-keyboard-o...
I agree though that getting the parts for the repairs can be a hassle.
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.
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).
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.
> The Lemur Pro *starts at $1,150 for an Intel i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM* and a 256-GB SSD.
For $179[1], you can upgrade it to 40GB of RAM for a total of $1,329.
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.
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.
Stil own an aging Asus 1215B, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My X1 Carbons (2nd gen) 1440p is the bare minimum for me and thats almost 10yrs old!
> Display 14.1″ 1920×1080 FHD, Matte Finish
I'll pass. It has a 16:9 display.
Similar to op, I won't buy a 16:9 laptop anymore. It can be 1920x1200, though, that's still sufficient for smaller laptops.
Anybody know what's going on there? Why not drop the barrel and put something else there (like another USB)? Seems bizarre.
If you forget your barrel jack connector you can borrow a USB charger and it'll work!
Win-win!
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.
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'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
Seems like every other laptop vendor has a proprietary super-special just-for-me connector, that ends up being the same voltage
(not that USB-C isn't open)
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.
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.
Does System76 ship laptops with an ISO keyboard layout? I don't see this as a configuration option.
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.
https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/meer7/repairs.html#rep...
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:
The laptop is pretty good though.
_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
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.
ThinkPads were an early favorite of Linux.
Brands like System76, Purism, and Framework are appealing today.
But we require our TrackPoints.
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.
For context though, every Dell and HP laptops and desktops I've had the past 12 years has been really great with Linux.
The several Lenovo laptops I've had the past 12 years have been great with Linux.
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.
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.
But there are no home/end/pgup/pgdn keys, but couple of them cramped with cursor keys (I assume home/end and pgup/dn must be pressed with Fn).
* 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 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!
My attempt at Linux at a Chromebook was ruined because of a terrible trackpad.
