Bought a meerkat mini last year - I freaking love it. System76 is amazing and I thoroughly am happy with my purchase.

Those little Meerkat's are great. I have one too as my desktop.

Bought a Meerkat in 2015 and it is still running great.

Have bought from System76 for years, got a Thelio desktop a year and a half ago that I have been happy with (I run Ubuntu, not PopOS). My Nvidia card only has 12 gigs VRAM but I have had it grinding away on Stable Diffusion, LLAMA etc.

The same. I had a great experience with them + PopOS is great.

Love the company, but I wouldn’t buy another one of their laptops.

Why?

Their laptops are unfortunately all OEM Compals. The desktops they make themselves, but the laptops aren't there yet.

So interestingly enough, the Pangolin is the first laptop model I am aware of from System76 that isn't an outright Clevo chassis (via Sager). I don't know all the facts but I did find this interesting reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/10a3lqj/comment/j...

Which suggests there are pretty major changes to how they have previously done laptops:

1) The manufacturer is Emdoor(?) instead of Clevo. (I have never personally heard of Emdoor)

2) Final assembly is done in-house @ System76 instead of via Sager. That is assembly for Pangolin is done in Denver at the same place the Theelios desktops and Launch keyboards are made.

While not necessarily all in-house yet, both of these changes are a pretty massive difference so as a former owner of several System76 laptops, I am curious how much better the Pangolin is.

Edit: So after doing some googling, it seems like Emdoor is a Chinese manufacturer out of Shenzen (https://www.emdoordigi.com/about.html?category_id=0). Personally, not sure moving from a Taiwanese manufacturer to a Chinese one is actually a good thing...but still curious none-the-less.

> Personally, not sure moving from a Taiwanese manufacturer to a Chinese one is actually a good thing...but still curious none-the-less.

As somebody working in a related space, _any_ diversification is a good thing simply because it forces System76 to redesign its processes to become less Clevo-specific.

Once you start, you're going to have a hard time to find an ODM that's willing to teach you the ropes _and_ accept that you're not a single-ODM shop _and_ deal with whatever fancies S76 brings up, so that limits options. (Any of these mean that S76 will be a high-maintenance customer for Emdoor, and these three more than compound in that way)

I can't overemphasize how big of a step this is.

It depends on how much impact they can have with the design. IF they can have more impact on the Emdoor design, its a good idea.

* * *

Their Thelio desktops are quite nice. What about the Meerkat?

Then perhaps you might be interested in Purism laptops.

s/Compal/Clevo/

I've got a Lemur Pro and wouldn't recommend it.

They rebadge (mostly) Clevo laptops, which isn't inherently a problem. The value add is supposed to be in the QA/software side of things to ensure the devices work well with Linux (so far, so good).

Well, my Lemur Pro 10 suffered from multiple different bugs in their half-baked Coreboot firmware. They ripped out the default BIOS to replace it with a more open alternative (laudable!) but the process resulted in bugs that prevented sleep and caused the UEFI boot order to be reset at various times.

They shouldn't have shipped a device with bugs like this, but I was left waiting over a year to get both fixed. On a generic box which I've supposedly paid extra for the support!

Compare this to my Dell XPS13, which shipped with Linux on it too, and never had any such issues.

I admire their objectives, but the reality of the System76 experience is severely lacking compared to the ideal.

Yes, very happy with my Thelio desktop (AMD Ryzen). Quiet, fast, just works.

How does it compare to a dell xps? I have one from two years ago, 100% compatible with Ubuntu, 0 issues, good build quality and battery life.

The Dells are far and away better machines. I have a five year old XPS13 and a year old XPS17. They are great. My only caveat is that I only buy them with Intel/AMD video cards.

The XPS13 is far from "great"; it overheats, the battery life is poor, and the speakers are straight out of the 90s. I have one and I regret buying it.

My dell xps was poorly designed and clearly the focus was on hitting spec numbers than actual usability. The touchpad stopped registering input every few seconds momentarily, enough for a lot of people not to notice. I assumed minor software or hardware fix, they sent 2 engineers to my home who proceeded to replace different parts of the laptop to no success. OS did not fix it. Apparently just poorly selected hardware from vendor at design phase. The overheating CPU was a similar story. Going for thinness over function as its easier to market how it looks.

your dell xps, afaict, has a better build than the system76's lineup. the build quality is not there yet. among other things...

How are the BIOS options on Dell XPS laptops?

Isn’t their pricing pretty unfriendly? I was looking at the Thelio, which starts at $1000 and then any upgrade costs about sticker price. (e.g. upgrading to the i5-13600K, which retails for $320, costs $315.)

It basically seemed to translate to a $1k markup for assembling the PC (and the case, I guess).

I agree, but I am also have a 'poor boy' complex...

or I am part of a different, lower tier, economic realm

Think of it as assembly, support, well documented public service manuals, the cost of the well integrated operating system, and a good warranty.

Similar to the intel macs and such.

Quality is a little shy of a premium product, but overall not a terrible deal.

Especially the “integrated operating system”. Sucks to buy a part off shelf to find out linux driver is not ready.

For the laptops you also get a level of control over the hardware not available anywhere else (except similar premium open firmware linux laptops)

We ordered four pangolins from System76 and had issues with three out of four. Two were sent back for motherboard issues (video and power) and one was sent back because a metal support bracket had come unglued and was bouncing around the inside of the laptop. To their credit they did accept our return of all four even though one of the four had not exhibited any issues. It was depressing for me because I had always thought System76 was supposed to be the best Linux machines. The higher end Dell laptops are "the new ThinkPads of yesterday" as far as Linux support and solid machines go.

Compatibility with the higher end Dells has been great for me, but the hardware has been a raging dumpster fire in my experience. Monitors randomly turning off and on after the last firmware update, battery randomly deciding it's now at 5% even though seconds ago it said 60% (even after the battery replacement), fans failing and getting super rattly, the battery draining even when plugged into their $300 USB-C/thunderbolt dock I only have because they don't allow charging at >65W with non-Dell thunderbolt docks, etc. This is a $3000 Dell laptop. I'm never, ever buying a Dell laptop or recommending them if I can avoid it. Unfortunately this is my work laptop so any replacement is going to also be a Dell product...

If it weren't for the fact that I have to run Windows-only tooling for my job, I would have requested the Mac in an instant even though I'm generally not a fan of Apple.

I've used a dell latitude 5420 and I think it's got that quality. Always works. It has a few quirks (rarely hangs on suspend or similar) but no major problems.

The 5400s and 5410s had tons of issues with power, heat, and general acpi funkiness but the 5420s and 5430s have been rock solid for my org. I really want an AMD 14" Latitude but I don't think that's happening any time soon.

I had a dell latitude 7390 at my previous job and it was awesome.

Everything worked on gnu/linux except for the fingerprint reader.

Other than that, it was a great little machine.

That is disappointing. I have a last gen Pangolin and it’s been great in the almost year I’ve been using it for work. Pretty decent build quality too.

I know mine is a Clevo made machine, and I read somewhere they’re using a new manufacturer, which I can imagine could involve some challenges.

Hope they get it sorted. These Amd based laptop have very good performance and battery life.

Dell's mailers are insane. takes months if not years to stop getting their junk mail after opting out.

Any experience with TUXEDO computers?

I had one in the past and it was fully supported and run great. They were(maybe still are) Clevo laptops. I would consider it over an XPS 15 anytime.