System76 Virgo Aims to Be the Quietest yet Most Performant Linux Laptop
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Which means: great display, battery life, keyboard, light and thin (for couch use), and then to be available to try before I buy in some form. Eg, visiting a store to try the display/keyboard. Or else, free returns.
(nice trackpads are traps: MacOS makes you rely on their great trackpad, but it makes you more prone to RSI in the long run to use a trackpad all the time. Better to use gnome with its great keyboard shortcuts)
I wish system76 would put better displays in their machines. I hope virgo goes with 1440p or higher. This whole in-house laptop project is very encouraging, I cna't wait to see what they're building in 10 years
My favourite desktop environment is gnome, because I almost never need to touch a mouse with it, and it’s nice and minimal (although you need to add a few extensions)
While macOS feels dated, has absolute garbage support for anything Linux releated and awful keyboard layout(just use Ctrl already).
It's eternally 70% complete. The lack of polish drives me nuts.
Okay so I can key shortcuts to move between virtual desktops, but how do I then move a window to a different desktop?
I have to install 3rd party tools, such as Amethyst. The papercuts with the Mac workflow are atrocious.
7 hours? 10,14?
I mean it all sounds cool, but rough edges are everywhere. There is no such thing as "polished graphical experience on Linux".
What sort of resolution is the external display, and do you have (just one would be fine) example of an app that messes up?
It's going to be the only way to fix this.
Someone will outcool you & you will lose, baring some breakthrough in cooling technology. (Solid state cooling could do it but AFAIK hasn't scaled up yet & already takes significant size. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/05/23/zotac-pi430aj-pico-m...)
speaking of "driver", some hardware drivers aren't there yet, notably audio, display brightness (either off or on), and i think sleep states aren't quite right.
I read somewhere that the camera also doesn't work, meaning that video calls are out of the question and that's something I use for my personal and professional life.
So, not a daily driver from me just yet.
Thanks for the info.
"Most performant" is a tall order. The traditional benefit of Arm has been efficiency, not compute power, but Apple has shown what's possible with their M1/M2 designs.
That ship has sailed, though. The licensing of ARM puts them in an unfavorable position, which only incentivizes Nvidia to focus on GPU sales and RISC-V skunkworks. They've still got their Grace ARM system coming "soon", but I'd be surprised if they bothered to update their current Orin systems. It feels like no one besides Apple and maybe Qualcomm have an incentive to deliver consumer ARM hardware right now. To compete with Apple you need a custom core, and building a custom core takes time and money. The few stakeholders who can deliver a quality ARM experience are probably scheming to cut ARM out of the picture entirely.
You'd basically be giving up on running really serious stuff on the laptop itself. If you have good wifi/5G, a home server or an AWS rental might do the heavy lifting.
It's a mixed bag, because the whole purpose is for traveling, and that's often when your connectivity is iffy. So, not sure. Battery life would be nice though.
Check for "fanless laptops" and for CPUs with low TDP as a lead;
consider if your routine involves a car/t the purchase of an adequate "powerbank", probably a "power station" made of a battery and a good inverter (e.g. Jackery).
Laptop manufacturers have a tendency to lean into the performance aspect at the steep cost of the other three aspects because it's easy to dump more power into the CPU and push the fans harder to make up the difference. Achieving balance takes engineering chops that many of these manufacturers lack or don't care to procure.
They're junk by every metric I know of. Expensive, too. They have nothing going for them.
Their build quality feels poor. Sometimes it's hard to tell when an issue is just a vicissitude of using Linux or their fault, but I would overall not recommend.
I would be willing to give them a shot one again one day (there are so few purveyors of pre-installed Linux computers), though not for the ~$1k Thelio costs.
Right now, WSL is working great for me, but Windows seems to be getting increasingly aggressive with wanting one to use their search, etc.
If it feels the same, that’s a very good thing.
They have even better open source thinking than Lenovo (which inherited some good thinking from IBM), and the US provenance is significant to some companies.
(Though I'd probably standardize on Debian Stable rather than PopOS.)