I traded my previous gen System76 Galago Pro after 2-3 years of being disappointed with build quality, battery life also piss poor BIOS support for a company priding themselves on supporting the hardware (i.e. UEFI had to be hacked in from the identical Clevo, next to no options, no TPM, etc). We need more competitors in this area for the Linux fanbois (admittedly myself most of the time) who try to provide solutions to Macbook "refugees".
The Dell XPS 15 / Precision 15 are amazing machines and for the first time in years I have a laptop I can recommend without reservation since the Thinkpads fall from grace (the Carbon was close but doesn't have a real processor processor last few times I checked, just the U series). I hope this new System76 Galago approaches the Dell level of quality and I welcome the competition. From what I've seen, they are aimed in the right direction.
For those interested in more details on the laptop, here's an interview with a System76 person at SCaLE 15x by the Linux Action Show discussing the new Galago and hinting at more details:
Dell has horrible support and while the product is "pretty" and feels well built - it is, IMO no better than anything else on the market today. I would NOT recommend a 5510. In fact there are many horror stories in their forums around it. Which is probably why they dropped it so fast for the 5520.
It is a great machine when it works right, but YMMV on quality.
Every time I look at a future replacement for this one I get stuck with this dilemma:
System76.com:
+ I know that the laptop I buy will work with Linux; no painstaking research needed
+ configuring the laptop the way I want it is a breeze. 32GiB RAM? No problem
- Import tariffs and shipping costs (I live in the EU)
- So-so build quality
Dell:
+ Local representation, no tariffs
+ Easier to get support here in the EU
- Minimal configurability
- Actually finding an XPS with Ubuntu in their shop
This last point seems trivial, but I just can't figure out why Dell's website is so completely unusable and stuck in the nineties! Searching for the XPS with Ubuntu gives me a list of XPS laptops that differ in subtle ways. Some I can configure bits of, some are a fixed configuration. There is no simple way to filter their offerings, and on-line I find references to XPS configurations that mysteriously aren't available in the Netherlands — what a mess.
Compare that with System76 to see the huge disparity there.
Problem is that you're looking for XPS, I think they only do XPS + Ubuntu under their Sputnik program. If you look-up the Precision line, Ubuntu 16.04 from the factory is an option with a $101.50 discount over Win10 Pro. [0]
[0] http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=xctop5...
That's really sad, because I think most of us who want to buy Linux/BSD capable laptops also want excellent build quality (and honestly don't mind paying for it).
That ethernet port they show broke after relatively light usage. I can't believe they haven't fixed that design flaw yet. I guess wired connections are rare enough maybe no one notices.
The screen rubbing on the keyboard when closed and causing bright spots was definitely the worst part for me. I don't want to have to be dainty with a laptop.
back in the days (before 2006 when I moved to apple), this was a common issue with IBM Thinkpads. Fun to see this still happening in the PC world.
Just got a Dell XPS 13 for about the same price I paid for the System 76 piece of junk. It's an amazing computer.
How's your battery life? And with what kind of usage?
At least my Precision 5520 had the option not to include the GPU, and even if you get it you can do hardware switching so battery life is unaffected essentially.
http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/productdetails/precision...
I prefer having an actual ehternet port rather than a movable part one.
The dual battery is also pretty neat, one is replaceable.
Many of my co-workers have either the Carbon or the Yoga, I've only seen one with Fedora installed but as long as Fedora works out-of-box on it then the Yoga seems to me like a great work laptop too.
I have ArchLinux and Ubuntu on both of them and they both work fine after a few HiDpi scalling tweaks on the Yoga.
*edit: I forgot to mention that the T420s has built in ethernet and a hardware switch to turn off the wifi (bios level, not physical) which are two other features I enjoy.
Initially I had wanted to support a company that sells Linux-supported devices.
My first machine - a Gazelle (laptop) - had numerous issues on arrival. It'd randomly crash. Keypresses would get stuck and repeat. It was annoying. After sending it in, I still had random issues until I installed Debian, presumably it was a kernel issue - but for it to be shipped like that..was just bizarre.
My newest machine, I purchased a Leopard (desktop). It had been a few years, and I figured perhaps they'd gotten better at things. I was wrong. They shipped this machine, knowing full well how long it takes to boot - again, due to some kind of kernel issue - it took over 2 minutes to go from cold boot -> login screen, USB devices would randomly not work, just weird stuff.. I put in a ticket, but nothing ever came of it. I didn't want to send this machine back like I had sent my laptop (TWICE), so I ended up switching OSes again, using an updated kernel, and things seem fine.
I get that they don't really have control over the kernel that comes with the OS they ship. I'm not naive. It's just a bit silly that they'd be comfortable shipping a new machine with those kinds of issues to the point where the machine is either unusable or stuff randomly stops working.
As far as the "physical quality" of the machines go, I'm still happy with both of them. They are well-put-together machines, IMO.
However, I know that my next machine is NOT going to be from System76. It's significantly cheaper to just get a nice Dell or something.
Previously, I had used Ubuntu on multiple laptops that did not have "hand picked" hardware. I was used to having to fix things randomly after updates and just running into hardware issues from time to time.
I assumed that the selling point of System 76 was that because they chose the hardware with Linux in mind these things wouldn't happen.
Maybe it's a QA thing but I found that I was running into just as many issues on my Sys76 machine as my old laptop. Manageable, but really puts the value prop into question. It became difficult to justify the purchase over building my own PC or buying a pre-built machine from someone else.
I just don't see why I'd pay _extra_ for something I'm going to need to reconfigure myself, anyway. Might as well buy parts or generic prebuild and throw a better distribution on it.
My suspicion is that a lot of people don't know how to configure a Linux OS for optimal laptop use. I imagine that even if one were to keep the Ubuntu installation that comes with the unit there are many further optimizations that can be performed to improve battery life.
I am trying to get some server units ordered from them for an upcoming test deployment for a new architecture we are working on and hope I can get buy in from the company to support someone other than dell or hp.
Plenty of laptops have a power button on the side now. Lenovo's Yoga series does this too.
Sure, Linux ran on it, but the keys were awful, the build was flimsy, the trackpad was atrocious, and the battery was at once underwhelming AND protrusive. Nothing to recommend them by.
Also that stick-out power button is an AWFUL idea now that someone pointed it out.
Mind you, they come with Windows pre-installed, but the Ubuntu installer will happily reformat the drive before installing itself. And they're all just generic laptop hardware (HID trackpad, Intel graphics), so I doubt that drivers are an issue.
On a ThinkPad I could, depending on the model:
- have multiple disks in my laptop
- have multiple batteries
- hostwap cdrom drives with a hard drive or a battery
- hostwap batteries
- have 4 ram sticks (W series)
- install coreboot/libreboot
- have nvidia quadro card
- have multi-core xeon processor
- have on site, next business day support (parts and labour)
- have fingerprint reader
- have hdaps
- have trackpoint+ultranav
- have on-board prng
So... What can this thing do, instead ??
Have the T450s now for 1.5 years. Very very happy with. But if there would be something Linux friendly I with a perfect Trackpoint and keyboard and the "pro" options, I would give them my money. Imitating Apple will never attract me.
This is really a matter of preference / workflow.
Dell Laptop 2011: USB shorted out, power cord was too short. Nvidia Optimius was terrible with both Linux and Windows.
Lemur 2012, box-like, RAM was expensive, but it was a work horse. Hardware keys, very small laptop to mirror an old XP laptop I loved. Kept working even after I dropped it on it's power plug. Made good use of System76's lifetime support.
Lemur 2016, smooth, thinner, no cd-rom drive, very bright LED to the right, runs much cooler. The equivalent laptops from HP and Dell are thinner, but I do not feel like risking $1.5k on a laptop that could be a dud. The plastic casing does feel cheap and a little twistable, but so did the Dell. I can not have a metal casing for my work.
I bought a less than year old Galago Pro laptop on eBay and immediately noticed it had some issues like a weird buzz and random hard drive disconnects. I contacted support and eventually RMAd it. They replaced the motherboard and it was covered by the support warranty. They never asked if I was the original owner. This was my first experience ever getting support a on a device and I can't complain. I'm using it to this day, while not a dream machine it works in Linux without tinkering and support was there when I needed it. It is definitely the best laptop I have ever owned but I have almost always had second-hand year old models. The i7 processor and haswell GPU and 16gb of memory and replaceable components, even the battery still has a few hours of life when I need it.
The HP laptop on the other hand is still being used for games by my step-son but he has a desk fan leaning on it to avoid over heating.
Otherwise it's still running (plugged in) with an older relative who uses it to check email and do other simple web tasks.
If they've gotten the build quality right this time I'll give it a shot. I'm currently using a Dell XPS 13 (2015) running Elementary OS (used to be Arch).
Hope it doesn't need fractional DPI scaling, because as far as I know there is no desktop on Linux that supports it, while Windows has supported it for years.
Source: I have a 4K display and no problems
xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto --output HDMI-1 --auto --panning 3840x2160+3840+0 --scale 2x2 --right-of eDP-1
I don't know why they don't support fractional downscaling from @2x like Apple does. I guess nobody expected 13" 1080p laptops and 27" 4K screens seem to become mainstream :(
However, while I really really want to support a company that does Linux first, I think my next machine will probably be a Dell XPS. The quality of my System76 is not top notch, feels very cheap and a little bulky.
Some Clevos are OK, but many of them have design defects and/or poor QC.
They have to do a lot better than this at this time and age...
wifi, sleep/wakeup, power management work right away
if you get 4K screen, you need to go settings and change font size from 96dpi to 208 dpi
My Macbook PRO 2012 had 16gb
