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Comment by bugfix-66 | Hacker News Reader

I've owned three System76 desktops.

Highly recommended if you want a Linux desktop computer.

I had one of their systems, a gazelle professional 4 if I recall right, it must've been around, oh say, 2013?

And it was quite a nice machine, great linux compat, the 4-core i7 in it performed quite well and it let me load it up with RAM. It wasn't too heavy or anything and I liked the display.

But the battery life. Good lord. 45 minutes, 55 if I messed and fussed with power settings and such. Basically gaming-laptop-tier "more like a UPS than a battery" battery performance.

My next laptop was a thinkpad T440s and it had similarly good linux compat and it performed much better for battery life - I got an i5 in that one and saw 8ish hours of battery life, and it had a hot-swap feature where I could swap in a big-ass battery once I depleted the slim one and get an additional 20(!!) something hours of battery life on a single boot. Great for car trips and heavy all-day use like at conferences.

But then superfish and I swore Lenovo had lost me for-ever.

So my current laptop is an XPS13 and I get 8-10ish hours off one charge with it, and it is super thin and the only Linux issue I've had is needing a very new kernel when I bought it new a year and a half or so ago, new enough that Linux Mint didn't ship it OOTB and the live ISO couldn't get WiFi, so I installed Arch instead, where their latest install image did indeed have a sufficiently new kernel.

So I'm a happy XPS user right now and I've found I like the 13" form factor. Would I be disappointed on battery performance if I went with a system76 machine for my next laptop?

I am on a Lemur Pro from them, and it gets 14 hours of battery life.

That's amazing. Are you for real?

Yeah, I find it's totally as advertised. Charged it up for a flight last week. Worked the whole time. Turned it on in the hotel afterwards and it had 70% left.

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

How’s the rest of it? The trackpad, the sound, microphones, webcam, etc? If I had one of these would I need a bunch of external stuff to make it decent?

Depends on your tastes I guess, but for me none of them have been a problem.

I do usually have an external mouse on my desk when I'm using it at home, but the trackpad has been fine on the go. I've never noticed a problem with it.

Speakers are fine or hearing things in videos, etc., but I generally put on bluetooth headphones and/or a stereo system to listen to music. Bluetooth connects within 2 seconds of me turning on my Bose headphones. I think a lot of people don't like the speakers on this thing, and they're admittedly not as good as my VCR-sized Dell 2011 XPS with built-in minisubwoofer.

Webcam works great, but won't win any awards.

Screen brightness is good. Look and feel is good. Weight is excellent. Keyboard backlight is great. USB-C charging is great. Endurance seems good (I've had mine daily driving since 2020).

The only issue I've had was early one when I typed one key sequence too fast, sometimes there would be an extra letter thrown in there, but they fixed it in firmware.

The only issue I’ve had is randomly the trackpad will stop working, then I reboot. I think I also made a few tweaks a while ago to some config for them. Otherwise, top notch machine.

That’s good to hear. In the past their laptops have been rebadged affairs and not great while their desktops were very solid.

They haven't released their first in-house laptop yet. Some of their new laptops are reportedly quite good, but they're still rebadged Clevos with custom UEFIs and other firmware mods.

Well the quality seems to have ramped up considerably.

I can believe that! But I am still excited about the eventual release of a Linux-first laptop equal in quality to their desktops. :D

On the note of high-quality hardware produced by other manufacturers, the HP Dev One which ships with Pop!_OS might be attractive to people who are looking for a supported system with very nice hardware: https://www.wired.com/review/hp-dev-one-linux-laptop/

So many things are just less than ideal: screen resolution for one and battery life is “ok”

Sub-par Linux laptops got me to switch back to a Mac full time a year ago. Battery life is insanely good and the screen resolution is much better (I need lots of pixels for the larger fonts I increasingly need)

> the screen resolution is much better (I need lots of pixels for the larger fonts I increasingly need)

Xorg supports some scaling methods that macOS doesn't, which meansv you can scale fonts arbitrarily without a HiDPI screen. As someone with severe (but so far mostly correctable) vision problems (high myopia, mild astigmatism, small cataracts, some photophobia, moderate colorblindness) who has used recent MBPs, 1080p is still fine for me on Linux laptops. I don't find that vthe fancy Mac screens really add much in terms of readability, as nice as they are.

Each of their lines are geared towards a specific market. The Lemur is the "portable" model, where weight and battery life are the top priority. They do also emphasize that it is a capable device in its own right, but it has a slightly smaller screen and lower max specs than the more powerful lines (14", up to 40gb ram vs 64 for others).

I wouldn't doubt that the claims are real; I can easily go a whole day of programming without needing a recharge on my lg gram, which was likewise advertised as having oodles of hours. If I'm careful with my usage, I could easily push 16. As it is, I've got two instances of chrome (different profiles), three instances of VS code, a server running, docker and postgres in the background, sitting at around 48% battery remaining and I haven't plugged in to charge in about 8 hours or so.

I have a XPS 13 and I had arch on it but it would drain power while sleeping. The laptop would be dead overnight. Tried a lot of things but couldn't fix it. Had to go back to Windows.

XPS 13 w/ Kubuntu and I don't have this issue.

I don't have it either, but I have heard of it. It's something to do with the kernel not being set to allow the s2idle power level. I don't know what triggers it, but setting some kernel flag forces it to show that sleep level which will then be used for sleeping.

A such-afflicted laptop will be missing the s2idle that you see querying /sys here: https://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/sleep-modes.html

I've had two system 76 laptops and I've been happy with them. The company seems to do a decent amount of work on upstreaming fixes they make to software and they generally seem to be good members of the open source community. I'm looking to buy my first new desktop in a long time as soon as the 4090's are available, and was originally planning to go with System76, but I've heard some people say the cooling in the desktop systems is really bad, to the point that it causes stability or thermal throttling issues.

Since I've only seen a couple of data points, I'm curious if you have anything to add about the thermals and whether it's something worth considering as I'm looking around for a new desktop.

I would have bought one long ago if they hadn't included binding arbitration in their terms of sale. It looks like they still do.

https://system76.com/terms

(In that spirit, I need to look into moving off Ubuntu in response to self-promotion being added to system commands.)

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