Hacker News Reader

Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

My next laptop is going to be from them, no doubt. I'm hoping someday they offer Arm offerings too!

I have one of their cheapest compact models, the Lemur, and I love it. I don't use it much lately, but everything "just works" for the basic cases, and I only have to sometimes deal with poor Linux support for non-System76 peripherals which would be an issue on any Linux notebook.

I plan to buy a desktop from them soon because I'm not into having a laptop now that I work from home permanently and I also want to run some games on it that you absolutely cannot run without a graphics card.

At this point, my white whale for a Linux laptop is functioning sleep. Any problems/higher than expected power consumption?

Is it? My ThinkPad running Linux goes to sleep and wakes up just fine.

Mine does too, but the battery still dies after a while, unlike my MacBook which seems to have nearly unlimited sleep capability.

There are a number of factors. In my case it's the driver of the graphic card.

I never had problems with sleep on any of my Linux laptops. The problem is with shutdown. Shutdown is shutdown when I'm using the Noveau driver for my NVidia card but it's reboot when I'm using the NVidia driver. Unfortunately Noveau doesn't get sync right for my card with both Wayland and X11 so I have to use NVidia with X11. The few times per year that I have to poweroff I press the power button right before the BIOS screen appears.

At least version 470 of the driver fixed the brightness control keys. The didn't work for years and I remapped them as hotkeys to run xbacklight.

The power usage isn't great, but it's as good as any non-Apple compact laptop I've ever owned. It sleeps fine, but not in the "hibernate" type of sleep.

NFTs exist, but fully, and more-or-less reliably, functioning sleep states are still something Apple can use as a differentiator in 2023.

Markets are weird.

In all fairness, windows laptops don’t have functioning sleep either. Only apple nailed it.

Edit: This is what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

> Only apple nailed it.

it used to be true, but sleep sucks now in the M1 line. When I leave my 14 inch mbp on sleep with 20% battery before bed I wake up to a dead battery.

May be some app you use is preventing sleep from functioning correctly? Is this something that happens to many users?

I have two M1 macbooks, one that I use almost daily and another that I only use a couple times a week. None of them have had any problem with sleep or battery life, I'm actually extremely happy with them in this regard.

Sleep on the M1’s is as good, if not better, as it ever was. You might have a power hungry application throwing things off.

M1 user here who's never experienced what you're saying. Sounds like a configuration issue.

Yeah, the classic let's copy Apple (power nap), but only half-ass it. Bonus points for completely throwing out S3 sleep (though I hear some laptops still support that).

Speaking of Linux, on my particular HP laptops (Elitebook 840 (intel 11th gen) and 845 (zen 3)) it wipes the floor with Windows. Even though "HP Recommends Windows 11".

Main reason being that it actually stays asleep. Windows, half the time, will wake back up moments in. When it stays asleep, there's a high probability that it will somehow crash and reboot [0] or just randomly wake up while being closed in a bag.

There's no power management while the actual OS hasn't started booting [1], so you get the screen going at full blast, etc. Good times, especially in a bag or at night [2]. It also sometimes starts spinning the fan while pretending to sleep. It does indeed get rather warm, so I'm not really sure what it does.

What Windows sometimes does and Linux never does: wake from sleep to a black screen, wake from sleep to a garbled screen, sometimes with the fan blowing like a jet engine.

---

[0] No, it doesn't reboot for updates. The event log talks about unexpected shutdown. It also doesn't run out of battery, since it also happens while being plugged in.

[1] I use bitlocker with TPM + PIN, so it doesn't boot on its own

[2] I don't usually close it because the screen touches the keyboard, so it gets dirty.

> Only apple nailed it.

On my old Intel Mac the so-called "smart sleep" would leave my laptop hot to the touch after carrying it in my backpack. Utterly useless. Even at its best it would still result in a 20% reduction in usable charge. Just give me a hibernate option, FFS.

> Only apple nailed it.

Meanwhile, my wife's Apple laptop fails to go to sleep if it's plugged into a Dell monitor via USB-C, instead it wakes up and dings every time it's about to go to sleep.

As always in Apple world, how well something "was nailed" depends on your exact circumstances, and when something doesn't work, you have no hope of ever getting it to work.

I was in the same boat, but in my case I finally figured out that it wasn't that the hardware that couldn't do it, I realized the configuration wasn't optimized.

So I'll share my number one optimization trick. Install powertop and get familiar with all the tabs it provides.

Use: sudo powertop --auto-tune

it can make a HUGE difference.

After a while all the tricks started to snowball and I was able to set up my laptop so I could swap between nvidia discrete graphics (2-3 hours off a full battery) and the integrated Intel Xe graphics (13.5 hours off a full battery). Power consumption on suspend under intel graphics is negligible. Wake is flawless. Now I find myself wishing I knew windows better so I could get the same graphics-swap-trick working under windows too (dual booted system).

Personally I prefer TLP to powertop, they even have a FAQ page on the differences. https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/powertop.html

Thanks! I’m not familiar with TLP, but I’ll check it out.

I love my system76 laptop. Shit just works. No messing with drivers, setting, etc.

Dumb question: when considering a company that sells branded generic laptops, why not buy from the generic laptop vendor directly (Clevo in the case [0])?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039414

(Yes there's a response in that link from S76 folks but I'm still curious on the buyer side your reasoning.)

I bought my S76 laptop via my work's "choose your own workstation" program. It's a great way to support continued development of the software I use PLUS when you buy via S76 you get lifetime support for the device. The support is not something I've made use of often, but it certainly paid off the one time I needed it. Basically, it depends on your idea of "value" - do you value money (buy cheaper hardware) or time (buy S76 with support)?

Yea, I had to pay for the battery, but when my battery died they shipped one out immediately with free shipping for the cost of the battery (no markup from the "aliexpress special" I found later; and I bet theirs is more reliable than that one). Also, when I had password issues with FDE due to my own failure, after the warranty ran out, they emailed back and forth for days until we fixed the issue.

I bought a NUC from them years ago that was always a bit wonky, but not unusable. Until one day I couldn't stand it any more and sent it back for repair. At that point I'd had it for well over a year, maybe more than two. It came back with a fixed controller and has worked flawlessly ever since. So, you pay for support. And the price difference is peanuts compared to all of our hourly rates.

Edited to add: the repair was free of charge.

Same reasons other have stated really:

It supports a company selling linux laptops, and they make sure everything works out of the box, and provide support. Pretty much the same reason to use their OS, which is basically just Ubuntu + drivers. It should all "just work" which is exactly what a lot of people expect from a laptop.

If you have a desktop system that's giving you problems in linux because of incomparable hardware or crappy drivers it's a pretty easy to find what component is working well for other people and swap some parts, but laptops are such a pain I don't even want to open one up if I can help it. It sounds like System 76 works with Clevo to put together certain builds they might not offer normally. Why risk getting a similarly spec'd Clevo only to find out it's got a different wireless chipset or GPU variant and now you're stuck with a bunch of of problems to try to work around.

> when considering a company that sells branded generic laptops

What company does that?

The company this thread is about: System76. They dont build their own laptops (which, is understandable for a small company).

No, they co-design the laptops and ship them with completely different firmware. That's very different from what you're saying is happening. You even linked to a thread where an employee discussed how it works.

It'd be nice if they made the laptops themselves, but not even Apple does that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com