System76 brings Ubuntu to $699 laptop with Kaby Lake chips | Hacker News Reader

System76 brings Ubuntu to $699 laptop with Kaby Lake chips

cio.com

31 pointseth0up11 comments

Really regret having bought a System76. I hardly moved it off my desk but it was completely broken after 2 years of use. Rj45 port broke (everyone at work had the same problem), battery life was poor and stopped charging altogether after a year, keyboard needed to be replaced, screen weren't blurry on the one side. These are very cheaply made laptops from Clevo. If you need a cheap laptop, then you're probably better off buying it directly from them. But way better just to avoid altogether.

A bunch of guys at work bought them and I don't think any of us would again.

I must agree with you. I bought from this company a while back and during this time their site said free shipping but deep within FAQ it said they don't include duty taxes.

So, when it crossed the border into Canada the laptop went up another $150. They weren't helpful at all and eventually I told them I was going to refuse the shipment.

They told me I was going to incur a 20% restocking fee, even if it was never received.

Looking back I shouldn't have said anything to them, allowed the shipment to go back and simply did a chargeback on failure of receiving the good.

System76, I wanted to like them! Then I bought one of their systems and discovered their dead pixel policy, firsthand!

Never wasting my money ever again on that garbage.

I bought a Lemur in July, but returned it within 30 days. The battery did not last (not any CPU intensive tasks)

Battery in stand by mode (lid closed) would drain within 7-8 hours

In addition the quality felt cheap - screen, touch pad

This gets rather pricey fast, but I just cannot get over how cheap and ugly it looks.

Recently decided to work on Linux environment instead of OSX and looking for new alternative to Apple. But is there really anything worth looking at? That has decent screen, SSD, 8Gb RAM, good enough touchpad and really works with Linux?

I bought the Lenovo Ideapad 700 a little over a month ago, and Linux has been running beautifully on it. I needed was to add a couple of kernel parameters to be able to adjust the backlight, but I had to use similar parameters for my last laptop, so it wasn't a surprise to me. It came with a 128 GB NVMe SSD as well as a 1 TB HDD (which I switched out for a spare SSD I had), 16 GB of RAM, and a 6th-gen i7 quad-core processor. The graphics card it came was with an Optimus setup (i.e. using the discrete Nvidia card for acceleration only and the integrated Intel graphics for everything else), but given that I don't do anything GPU-intensive and I didn't feel like doing an advanced setup like PRIME, I just disabled the discrete GPU in the bios settings. I find the touchpad to be very good quality, and it works beautifully with the defaults provided by the synaptics driver (I tried to use the newer libinput driver, but I couldn't find a way to turn off middle-click paste, so I switched back to synaptics). The screen is only 1080p, so it might seem a little low-res if you're used to Retina displays, although I honestly don't care enough to find it very noticeable. The only complain I have is that the computer beeps kind of loudly when you press the function shortcut to open the boot menu (e.g. in order to boot from USB), but given how infrequently I need to do that, it's not a huge deal to me.

If you're interested, I got it through the link below for a pretty good price (the 'emailprice' querystring parameter seems to reduce the price by about $250, which is nice).

http://www.adorama.com/le80ru00fsus.html?emailprice=t

EDIT: If you have any specific questions about the laptop, I'd be happy to answer them! I'm extremely happy with it

I'd second the Ideapad. Not sure about recent versions, but I've had the Z510 for >2 years and it is great. I took out the CD drive and have an SSD + 1TB HD and it runs fedora with almost no issues (wifi drivers on some kernel upgrades). Only downside is the battery which was never great and after 2 years is down to about an hour.

Cost me about $700 2 years ago and other than the battery is perfect.

You're right, I completely forgot to mention the battery life! Mine is around 2-3 hours currently, and it will probably go down as it gets older. My last laptop had similar specs and similar battery life, so my current thinking is that most high-spec 15" laptops just have crappy battery life (although I've never owned a 15" Macbook, so if they have similar battery life to the 13" ones, they wouldn't fit this hypothesis). Of course, I have extremely few points of data for this, so if someone has had a different experience with a similar laptop, I'd love to hear about it!

I got the Dell XPS 13 in 2013 and I was pretty satisfied. Great screen, speedy disk etc. In ubuntu 16.04 the touchpad works great, and I think the latest XPS models have larger and better touchpads.

Linus also ended up buying an XPS 13 recently :)

https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/VZj8vxXdtfe

We buy everyone Alienware 13" from Dell. They Ubuntu 16.04 out of the box (and Mint latest). The screen is 1330x768 or something insane, which doesn't have a lot of love, but everyone plugs in external monitors. They're awesome.

Also, as a save a bunch of coin trip - buy all add-ons from your local store/amazon. We save ~300 per laptop compared to adding to Dell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com