As a previous gen System 76 Galago and now a proud Dell Precision 5510 owner, I wish them luck!
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:
I will say here that the 5510 is a far cry from a perfect machine. Dell replaced mine 4 times over 6+ months where I went weeks to a month at a time with an unusable machine. First machine would shut off whenever the laptop was moved while running. They "fixed" that machine over 1 week, got it back and it did the exact same thing. First replacement machine was different specs than the unit I sent them and it also had a blemish on the display panel even though it was brand new. After arguing with Dell for over a month regarding this machine they replaced it with another that would crash randomly, but reliably over the course of the day. Machine was sent back, "fixed" and returned over multiple months 3 times. Finally replaced again after letting the machine sit and collect dust for months after buying a replacement.
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.
Four year plus owner of a Gazelle here. The only thing that is 'wrong' with it is the battery (dead). Since I use the laptop on power exclusively this doesn't bother me. I could have replaced it though. All in all it is a very powerful and very nice laptop.
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.
> - Actually finding an XPS with Ubuntu in their shop
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]
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).
Certainly. I do think that this metal-body Galago will be fairly sturdy though; System76 is simply getting better at it.
This too is part of my dilemma; I want to support a company that simply sells me a GNU/Linux laptop. There is always the alternative of spending days browsing reviews and anecdotes from people who bought some laptop with Windows on it and then installed Linux to find out if all the hardware works. It's a waste of time, and not necessary if I can buy a laptop that comes with Linux out of the box.
I had a similarly bad experience with System76 build quality. Back to Thinkpads for me.
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.
Regretful galago owner here on a permanently plugged in laptop with a broken Ethernet port and a bunch of little felt pads lining the sides of my screen to prevent rubbing. Hopefully the new ones are better.
Same situation. Had a System 76 Lemur Ultra for 3 years and hated it after 6 months. The battery had to be replaced every 10-12 months. The build quality was appalling. Everything was falling apart. The finish and keys were coming off. HDMI never worked. WIFI problems every day. It was really a piece of garbage. I'd be embarrassed to sell those.
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.
Does dell offer a quad core processor without pulling in an Nvidia GPU? That is what ticks me off about their models. Upgrading to a quad core processor also requires upgrading to the 4k screen which requires an Nvidia GPU which makes battery life abysmal. Surely there are some users out there who want fast compile times, but dont want to do any graphics and want to maximize battery life?
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.
I have no issue with Thinkpad X230 for Linux. It's thicker than an "ultrabook" but it's still my go to choice for portable laptop.
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 a Yoga 2 Pro and a T420s (when the Ts still had nice keyboards). The T420s is a much more enjoyable machine for development work. This is mostly due to the screen being matte. This reflectivity of the screen affects me much more than the resolution (1600x900 vs 3200x1800). Another important factor is the amazing original IBM keyboard with the red knob. I have to agree with grand-parent that Lenovo's quality has gone downhill in recent years.
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.
The deal-breaker on the Dell Precision 5510 for me was the keyboard layout. I work on the command line and I need the pipe key on the right side of the keyboard and directly above the shift key. I have a new Thinkpad P50 and I am happy with that.
Over the past 4 years, I've bought two System76 machines (FD: work paid for them). Each time, I maxed out what I was able to get from them.
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.
I bought a System 76 desktop a couple years ago. I had extra $$ and like you, I wanted to support a company selling Linux devices.
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.
Absolutely a QA thing. I don't see how either of the devices I purchased got a seal of approval to go out to a customer.
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.
I've considered buying a System 76 laptop for years, but it's really hard to find satisfied customers. I'd be concerned if the reviews were largely positive but included a few from people with bad experiences - I don't want to be one of the unlucky few. That's not the case at all. There's almost unanimous agreement that these are poor quality machines.
I am a satisfied customer of System76. I own a Lemur laptop which I basically maxed out. I've had it since December, and am very pleased with the build quality, the keyboard, and the battery life.
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.
Why on Earth would you want to buy a laptop from a specialty Linux laptop vendor (at more expense for the same specs than a standard Windows OEM laptop) if you just need to optimize the installed Linux to get good battery life? Isn't that supposed to be the value-add of buying from a vendor that specializes in Linux laptops?
I'm a satisfied Meerkat owner. I've had it for almost two years now, and not a single hitch. Only minor complaint I have, is that I wish the price were lower. That would've enabled me to buy a more powerful machine. Now, I'm hurting for an upgrade and the only real economical way to get the specs that I need with hardware that's Linux-supported is building my own rig.
I used a System76 Gazelle for work and getting a master's degree in CS. Wonderful machine for those purposes. Ubuntu on a laptop, with actual supported drivers, made working in python, java, and scala quick and easy (apt is still better than brew) and it was portable. I've been tempted to buy another since Apple seems stuck at 16GB. However, the webcam did stop working after 1 year.
I've got a 5 year old Leopard and a 1.5 year old Wild Dog that are perfectly satisfactory. I have a month old Oryx, and my sentiment follows the general comments - I'd probably spend just a little more to go Dell/Lenovo for the next laptop. The rebranded Clevo machines just aren't the same build quality and on a laptop (for many users) that's a meaningful issue.
I bought a Gazelle 3 years ago and also have a 2015 MBP that my work got for me. I'll admit that the MBP is built very well and the retina screen is fantastic, but I prefer using the Gazelle. I like the keyboard better and Ubuntu (in my opinion, of course) is superior to Mac OS in every way. Also, I haven't had any problems like others have reported.
I can say from my experience dealing with system76, they are hands down one of my favorite machine producers, for both laptops and desktops.
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.
They're a great group of people, I agree. Unfortunately the machines are not great, at least from my perspective as a Gazelle owner, and from what I have read from others who have purchased laptops from them. I've never used one of their server products so I can't comment on them. I want System76 to thrive but they need to build a better hardware product at the price point.
Other than that power button on the side, that laptop looks pretty interesting as a Macbook air replacement. Here's hoping maybe it's not a power button, that it's a hard power shutoff for camera/mic peripherals.
Yes, very silly place for a power button if you ask me. It will get pressed accidentally by virtually everyone who picks it up and moves it, or uses it, or bumps it into the side of something.
You can configure the power button to do whatever you want it to do of course. I think the default behaviour in Ubuntu's Unity is to show the shutdown menu (shutdown, reboot, suspend, or hibernate), not simply suspend the laptop right there and then.
Plenty of laptops have a power button on the side now. Lenovo's Yoga series does this too.
There's basically no detail to the video, so I'll just join the chorus of disappointed former customers here. I had a System76 netbook ~6 years ago, and it is truly one of the worst pieces of hardware I ever encountered (and I had a PowerBook 5300c).
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.
You mean the ethernet port that will break off and the power button that is not recessed so it does not power on in your bag. Great. Who puts a power button on the side of a laptop?
My previous one (Samsung NXPsomething) needed a dongle but it came in the box. My current one (Microsoft Surface Book) doesn't have one on the device itself but there's one on the official dock which is the best place for it anyway.
Worth mentioning though it's simply a port adapter. Not a USB device or whatever. So it works for things like PXE boot, etc., and has performance identical to regular onboard Ethernet.
I've never been bothered by the adapter. It just sits there attached to the (thin) cable I always carry in my bag anyway.
Am I missing something with these machines? I just priced generic Acer and Asus laptops with the same specs to the Lemur, and they both came out $200 cheaper.
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.
I ordered a System76 laptop about 4 years ago for work as my day to day machine. Almost immediately the HDMI port broke and I was pretty bummed out. I emailed their support hoping to get it repaired but they never actually fixed it. Since then I have never gone back to them. I want them to be great so badly but that just hasn’t been my experience.
Fully agree. I am looking now for more than ten years for an alternative to ThinkPads because of the Trackpoint. Tried many many options, always send them back (including the TinkPad x40 series, which removed the physical trackpoint buttons) - but so far I did not find and forced to pay premium money to ThinkPad.
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.
To be fair, a track point has to go right in the middle of the keyboard to be of any value. A USB serial is functional as a dongle for the subset of people that need that. Same for floppy and scsi for that matter.
Given that almost everyone has gone to chiclet keys with space between keycaps, I'm almost surprised that no one has tried to market a glue-on bluetooth track point for those who demand them.
Has System76 improved their product quality? I understand their reputation has never been any good. If they're able to pull it together I might consider one, but coming from mac land, its going to be a tough sell, and I'm pretty sure I would just get a lenovo if I wanted to move away from macbook pros.
HP Laptop 2010: AMD built-in graphics card overheated and AMD cut support for it while still selling it.
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 had a similar problem with a HP laptop that was a nightmare to run under Linux and almost as bad with Windows. It had a AMD chipset though and Linux wouldn't run it without blasting the CPU/GPU fan full blast. After countless hours trying to get a working machine when it came time to get a new laptop I thought I'd try System76.
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.
Had a Lemur 14" about 5 years ago. Out of the box - Ubuntu support was very good but the battery life was poor (sort of expected at the time), build quality okay but not comparable to the 2012 Macbook Pro's, and the speakers were notably quiet.
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.
System76 employee (and HiDPI... enthusiast?) here! It does not need non-integer scaling. It's 3200x1800, which is like 1600x900 pixel-doubled. A great resolution for that physical size. This is also why you don't hear us talking about "4K" on that display, because that'd actually be too many pixels and require non-integer scaling for a usable UI.
Glad you guys have thought this through. I bought a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition in 2015 that was marketed as a perfect Linux laptop and came with Ubuntu preinstalled. It had a 13.3" screen with a resolution of 1080p, so the text and UI was almost unusable. Two years later, there's still no fix.
"Fractional scaling" (I assume you mean e.g. 160 DPI instead of 200 DPI) is no problem even with the older KDE version from F23, just a bit finicky to get started up - but when it runs, it works. Gtk on the other hand seems (seemed? - I don't bother to check regularly) to be stuck at 100 %, 200 %, 300 %, ...
That doesn't scale the UI. And it doesn't even scale the text for many third party apps like Sublime Text, Firefox, and IntelliJ. Windows handles this perfectly.
You can achieve fractional scaling by first setting Gnome hidpi to an integer value and then adjusting the screen with xrandr [0]. It's not great, but it works.
Yes I'm aware of that, it's a poor "solution" that's more like a hack. It renders everything at twice the resolution you need and then scales it down, which is awful for battery life on laptops. And it's difficult to do, barely anyone understands what a command like this does:
No, Gnome only supports integer scaling for UI (@1x, @2x, @3x).
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 :(
I bought a Lemur 4 or 5 years ago and it served me very well. It still works and is somewhere in a drawer in case I need a Linux. The only thing I did on it was replace the battery after 3 years.
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.
Better get ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen5 (latest generation, recently released). Carbon has 14" screen with a similar or even smaller size (frameless design) than that bulky 13" System76. It also has 2 Thunderbolt3 ports, I doubt System76 will have added at least one. Carbon also has a best keyboard on the market.
Is this something new or is it another rebranded Clevo? The Galago Ultrapro they released a couple of years ago had amazing specs, but the keyboard had a design flaw they refused to fix properly.
Some Clevos are OK, but many of them have design defects and/or poor QC.
If we are talking about the same machine, where the keyboard would just not register key presses about 5% of the time, they did eventually ship out free replacement keyboards to all owners.
Which was surprising, since their support line tried their damnedest to convince me that I just didn't know how to type. I never took them seriously after that.
Yeah they tried to do the same to me (gaslighting, basically), and I already had a return shipping label in hand, but (un?)luckily they announced the replacements right around that same time.
When I was looking into them they were shipping out identical keyboards with a metal bar attached to it to make if feel less "cheap", but it supposedly didn't actually fix the problem. Did they actually end up redesigning the keyboard after that?
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMbQoNz2GP8&t=21m18s