Anybody have experience with System76? I’ve been on the lookout for a replacement for my ancient thinkpad and they came up as a contender along with eluks. Looking for something with no OS or Linux since I’ll immediately wipe and install my own
I’ll never game on it (just now realizing this is a gaming community :) so GPU doesn’t matter a ton. More interested in CPU/RAM/storage and cost. Even battery life doesn’t matter a lot since I’m rarely mobile, but nice to have.
I have used their Lemur Pro for a few years now. I haven’t had any hardware issues with it at all. Just a solid, basic laptop.
That said, the 16:9 screen was kinda annoying to me when doing software development work. I’ve recently switched to a Framework laptop but the Lemur still chugs along.
If you’re cool with their laptop design, System 76 is perfectly fine imo.
I got a Darter Pro on a lark a couple years ago. It’s my “travel laptop” and is fine for most things, basic sysadmin work, word docs, shitposting, etc. Feels pretty snappy, which I assume is some better hardware / OS integration since they put some effort into libreboot or coreboot or whatever, plus PopOS.
PopOS is fine, basically just a flavor of Buntu like Mint. I prefer Fedora / RHEL, but didn’t feel compelled to change it.
Until recently they were rebranded Clevo laptops, so you could cut out the middleman and buy those. That said I’ve heard they’ve been shifting to custom hardware, so take a look. I’d consider them for another basic laptop in the future, but anything for work or heavy lifting would probably be a Dell or Thinkpad, or desktop from scratch.
We got a bunch of their desktop boxes at work a few years ago. They’ve been mostly all right, but we’ve had a couple big headaches with them, mainly with Pop!OS.
For one, they were out of stock of the GTX 1050s that we ordered them with, so instead we agreed to take them with GT 710s they had lying around and I think they gave us a discount for it. No biggie, we really just needed them as graphics adapters because we were buying them with Ryzens.
Except, in PopOS they ingeniously decided to alias all the Nvidia driver packages to the latest one, I guess so they would automatically be kept up to date. That’d probably be fine if we had the 1050s the boxes were supposed to come with, but since we had 710s instead, after an update one day, all our desktops booted in VGA mode because the drivers failed to load as they had dropped support for the 710. So from there on out, we had to manually install drivers instead, and manually reinstall them with every kernel update. One of my coworkers opted to just wipe his computer and switch to Ubuntu to not have to deal with it.
Later, I ended up wiping one and installing Windows 11 Pro on it because I needed Windows for some work stuff. It worked fine, but one day I decided I wanted to run Folding@Home to generate some extra heat because our shared office building has garbage insulation and weak-ass HVAC. It didn’t take long for my computer to overheat and shut down. The same thing also kept happening on a spare box that still had PopOS on it.
As it turns out, the CPU and case fans in these computers don’t plug into the motherboard, but into a proprietary daughterboard that also has SATA ports on it for some reason. And for the fans to work properly and not be stuck at one speed the whole time, you need to install their driver for it which is
system76-power(which, by the way, they were working on a Windows port for, but have apparently abandoned it).Except that doesn’t really fix the overheating issue because surprise! The fan curves are fucking hardcoded! And they’re tuned to keep the computer as quiet as possible for as long as possible, so they absolutely fail to respond to a sudden sustained load. I couldn’t really think of any way around that besides editing the source and compiling it myself, so I gave up. You can’t even run the computer with the case open as the power button is part of the outer shroud and only connects to a socket inside the case when the shroud is fully seated.
On top of that, the aforementioned coworker had the SSD in his machine crash recently and he lost a whole day’s work. Almost certainly just a random failure but it was worth mentioning.
Overall, the machines have worked out all right, but if you’re trying to do anything with them that isn’t what System76 intended you to do, they kind of end up fighting you.
I have a laptop from 2010 that is still working, though I’ve long since stopped using it regularly. When I had to deal with them, they were great. It’s a small company, and their hardware won’t hold any surprises. They’re just selecting hardware that will run on Linux with no issues. They’re not making anything custom aside from their branding on the case. For laptops anyway. I think their desktops are a bit more original.
