Pros:

* Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.

* Great compatibility for building software between my desktop and this laptop, makes my personal dev work a lot more portable.

* It's quite small and very portable.

* Nice keyboard

* Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)

Cons:

* Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost as much battery closed as it does open.

* Not great screen, terrible trackpad, and silly webcam considering the price of the laptop.

* As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.

Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a macbook after this, not being able to go a day without charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a bit anxiety inducing. Also (and this doesn't matter to a lot of people) I really value a laptop trackpad and this one is just plain bad.

I have one of these and spilled a drink on my keyboard, getting it replaced was $300 of parts and labor, but the worst thing was it took almost 2 months pressuring their support reps to actually complete the process and they would frequently just not respond to messages, or ignore information I provided or clarified.

Pop_OS! is really nice to be fair. I’ve also had issues with build quality. My Gazelle’s screen stopped working when the computer ran out of power and had a bent wire when I opened it up. Again they wanted hundreds of dollars to fix it, even though it was clearly a manufacturing defect. When they sent the computer back the chassis was cracked.

I use the Lemur Pro with a USBC dock, two external monitors, a keyboard and a mouse when at my desk. I did a few manual upgrades. I added 32GB of RAM (maxed at 40GB). I also added a second NVMe I purchased (4TB).

So far it's my favorite laptop. Here's some pros and cons:

Pros:

- Screen is nice and clear with great color. For a non-Apple screen it's great.

- Battery life has been great. I get about 11-13 hours of coding (Firefox, Terminal w/tmux+vim @ quarter screen brightness). I have used it on full airplane rides, etc. Awesome battery life, especially for Linux.

- Video playback is good, even w/1440p@60fps (hardware acceleration in Firefox, no frame loss). However, it does get the fan blowing.

- Suspend/wake works and detects the dock and connects everything perfectly again (mouse, keyboard, monitors, etc).

- Disk speed is amazing. I feel like my old Macbook used to chug on disk reads/writes. However, this machine/nvme is blazingly fast.

- Pop_OS has been nice. I have no complaints. I used to use a bare bones Debian netinstall with a custom DWM setup, but I decided to give Pop a try for a year and I have stuck with it. It's stable and everything just works.

Cons:

- Fan can be annoying when playing videos or scrolling quickly on Youtube.

- When doing a reboot while attached to the USBC dock, it doesn't appear to re-connect to the dock post-reboot. I have to turn the dock off and back on (or unplug the USBC/re-plug it).

- Webcam is meh-- but I don't use it anyway.

I don't see myself going back to a Macbook. If anything, I may take the plunge back into my old custom Debian+DWM setup, but I am happy with everything as it is.

This is the most intriguing part to me. I've been mulling a Framework for a while but what's held be back so far is that the battery life is 9-10 hours after tuning, and I'd love it to be longer. 11 hours of continuous video on this laptop is pretty impressive for a Linux laptop I think. My Dell XPS 13 feels like it needs to go onto the charger every 4 hours so this would be a huge improvement.

_Pros_ * The battery life is incredible, that's the one thing they totally nailed. For Linux especially that's huge, and is in my opinion the absolute selling point of the device. With that said, after about 2 years I did notice a steep drop-off in performance, going down to like 4-6 hours in the span of a few weeks. Replaced the battery and the performance is again A+

* Hardware support is fire, I hop distros a lot and have never once had any issues with getting firmware for anything. IIRC there was one firmware setting I needed to flip before Arch would run properly, but customer support actually talked me through it over email which was cool.

* A pretty nice selection of ports (they have port-heavier alternatives if that's your thing). The lemp9 just came with standard USB-C, which was kind of a hassle for finding a compatible docking station, but I believe lemp10+ upgraded to thunderboltt.

* Chassis feels pretty premium, comparable to what I was using before. No deck flex, hinges are smooth, moderately slow to accumulate fingerprints.

_Cons_

Go to /r/system76 and you'll get a lot. Top culprits I've seen and experienced are:

* Speakers are very, very bad.

* Keycaps have a coating that erodes over time, which is ugly. Can't replace individual keycaps

* Intel options only

* You're using Linux, so be ready for compatibility stuff. PopOS is well managed, but at the end of the day you still have to contend with ex. the linux audio stack

A better option would be a low-end Dell that works just as well with Linux and costs perhaps half as much. I am yet to see a low-end Dell that doesn’t excel with Linux.

Webcam is potato, speakers are webcam sized and only one usb c port right next to the dc charge jack.

Ditch the barrel jack, give me a thunderbolt port on both sides and increase the trackpad size and I’ll overlook the webcam speakers and cramped display.

That sounds very promising. That has always been a major annoyance to me. I don't think i have every owned a laptop with linux where I actually trusted that it would still have battery the day after if I just closed the lid.

Does System76 ship laptops with an ISO keyboard layout? I don't see this as a configuration option.

Anybody know what's going on there? Why not drop the barrel and put something else there (like another USB)? Seems bizarre.

ThinkPads were an early favorite of Linux.

Brands like System76, Purism, and Framework are appealing today.

But we require our TrackPoints.

But when I had to unplug it in the office to go to a meeting it was just terrible... support for plugging/unplugging external monitors/docks was atrocious, I had wifi issues, and doing something like a Zoom meeting (Webex at the time) would reduce it's battery life to 1 hour or less. Stuff just got messed up using it as a laptop that was getting used at the desk and then not at the desk.

That was quite some time ago, I hope the software has gotten better. I stopped using it cause I was messing with linux too much instead of doing my work. That was depressing, cause it was kind of the same story as every time I've tried to use linux on the desktop back to the 90s.

For context though, every Dell and HP laptops and desktops I've had the past 12 years has been really great with Linux.

The several Lenovo laptops I've had the past 12 years have been great with Linux.

> Display 14.1″ 1920×1080 FHD, Matte Finish

I'll pass. It has a 16:9 display.

Performance-wise? It makes the M1 look like a complete joke. Our MITM proxy (ZScaler, a truly terrible product) is CPU-bound, and the M1 would stutter during large container image pulls. I don't notice pulls on the Pangolin - I just keep working while they happen in the background. Builds are on the order of 30% faster. It also handles two external monitors.

Something is strange with secure boot and the System76 kernel; I just couldn't get it working.

Monitor is average, definitely less usable in sunlight (by virtue of being actually unusable) than Apple's offerings. Keyboard and touchpad are great. I did have some issues with the touchpad, and support told me to (gasp!) open the laptop and make sure the ribbon cable was seated properly - 10/10 repairability.

Can't get any sense of whether the memory is baked in at build time, or if I can swap out later. The 'tall' option seems to imply there's more room, and that's what I'd need to get to manage my own memory, but ... I can't tell. There's no FAQ page, and... I was going to send in a question today, but since there's a system 76 topic here, thought I'd ask here and see if anyone else can shed their experience with the meerkat and after-market upgrades.

Secondary issues are bad multi-display support. It kind-of works, but often at least one screen glitches out if there's not at least one window maximized on it.

And all the USB ports, C included all run into the same host controller, so you've just got the one bus-worth's of bandwidth which is a bit rough if you're docking into multiple screens, a good camera, audio, network, etc.

But there are no home/end/pgup/pgdn keys, but couple of them cramped with cursor keys (I assume home/end and pgup/dn must be pressed with Fn).

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/replacing-the-keyboard-o...

I agree though that getting the parts for the repairs can be a hassle.

[1] https://support.system76.com/articles/guides/

They weren't able to ship me a replacement battery due to international shipping restrictions but were very helpful by giving me the part number to look for and linking to their very good docs on how to do a battery replacement yourself. In the end I was able to have them ship a replacement battery to a friend with a US address, and doing the actual replacement was very easy.

That said, I never had to send my laptop off to them, as they were more than happy to send replacement parts to me when the fan bearings failed. They even sent me an optical drive caddy for free well after I had purchased the device (there was no hardware fault, I just wanted to install another drive and they didn't sell the caddy as a standalone part).