System76’s Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Really Nice Linux Laptop

pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 245 points – System76’s Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Really Nice Linux Laptop
wired.com

The System76 Lemur Pro is light, thin, repairable, and upgradeable. It’s the best Linux laptop we’ve tested.

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The Lemur Pro starts at $1,150 for an Intel i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM and a 256-GB SSD.

Seems a bit expensive no? About dead on with macbook air pricing

if you're strictly looking at value, it's a better value to buy a macbook air with m2 and the same stats and just install linux on it.

For the nearly $1500 spec they tested you can basically get a Framework 16, with much better upgradability and a 2560x1600 165hz vrr display.

I'm looking for a new laptop and really don't know much about hardware these days (been running my old 2015 toshiba sattellite lol, I usually just have hand-me-downs), but I'm looking at getting something that doesn't make me sacrifice my firstborn to an eldritch being to change the goddamn battery. So far I have sys76 and framework on the list, are there any other manufacturers I should also look at? And any reasons I should or should not get a laptop from any of these companies (like this one above, which is a point for framework)?

I was looking at getting a laptop from System76 but the shipping to Europe is insane. I’ve heard some good things about Tuxedo Computers. I don’t have personal experience with any of them so can’t comment on that

I was doing a similar breakdown back when I bought my System76. The difference was upgradability. If I ever thought I might need more RAM I'd have to buy that up front on the MacBook air, putting its price over 1,700 off the shelf for the max ram. System76 cost close to the base MacBook air model, but I can add RAM and upgrades at my choosing, find the best price, and install them myself when I need them. That was worth it for me.

The issue is that the M1 (M2 and M3) chips are way more efficient than X86 chips and they gets really good battery life compared to standard PC hardware. So I can hate on the software, the price, the lack of expand-ability, and so much more but I can't get that efficiency anywhere else.

System76 doesn't have some massively efficient ARM chip and system to separate them from any other windows laptop maker I just put linux on. You buy System76 because you like System76. I can live with that and I am very willing to spend more for less in places I feel matter.

It's definitely ridiculously expensive.

Install linux on the m2? Is Asahi linux good enough to daily drive already? 😮

(Also, why give Apple money?)

I just can't get over the 1080p screen. It's the one thing that's always held me back from buying a System 76.

The awful screen is one big reason I don't use my System76 laptop more often. It's the worst laptop screen I've ever seen, has terrible light bleed, and has a pink tint. And this is the warranty replacement they tried to charge me for. The first one had the same awful screen, but kept freezing on me randomly.

And the damn thing STILL has hardware features that only work on Windows 10, five years later (like multi-finger trackpad gestures). I'll take System76 seriously when they start putting good screens in their laptops and get rid of nvidia.

Really? I love the scream on my labtop. It isn't super high resolution or anything but its readable in the sun and is pretty color actuate

Multi finger trackpad gestures work fine on PopOS? I've had no issues with them on my XPS 13...

Great. I'm not using a Dell. I have a laptop from a company that supposedly supports Linux first. A company I will not be buying anything from in the future either.

Dang, looks like you got got.

I'm curious. What do you prefer, some larger res with resolution scaling? How's the scaling situation on DEs/WMs nowadays? Last I tried it, it was pretty abysmal. Admittedly it was years ago, but it used to be that mixed scaling wasn't possible, so if my laptop was higher DPI and needed scaling, I'd need to run any external monitor with display scaling as well. I've avoided high DPI/display scaling on purpose for a while at this point because of it, and tend to prioritize usable pixel real estate.

I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Dell XPS 13 9360 with a 3300x1800 13" screen and Wayland, and it works fine. There was one application (Sublime Merge) where I had to edit some scaling configuration settings, and there's one tray-based tool (Jetbrains Toolbox) that comes up tiny, but for everything else the global scaling setting in KDE has done a fine job. It also handles dual monitors with different resolutions.

I don't like 1080 screens because small text becomes unreadable more quickly on them. It's less of an issue with a small screen, but it still counts against a machine for me.

Whatever works for you haha. Admittedly, I'm the kind of guy that's running a 34" ultra wide + two 22" monitors on top, and is looking at replacing them with a single 42-43" 4k monitor right now just to have the equivalent of a bezelless 2x2 grid of 21" monitors lol. And they're all budget/business monitors. So I may not be a reference on display quality... I'm obsessed with having tons of things on screen at once. The ADHD object permanence issues ("out of sight, out of mind" is my default state) might have something to do with it...

I'll have to check it out again then, if display scaling got better since.

Also a great way to get more performance and increase battery life. On a laptop, most folks would be hard pressed to see the difference between 1080p and a higher resolution.

That's the odd part. I run Pop!_OS on a ThinkPad with a 4K touch screen at 175% scaling and it looks beautiful. The scaling on the DE is superb. I don't understand why they don't offer a HiDPI option on their laptops.

And it works fine with multiple monitors at different scaling ratios, or does it scale them all the same? That's the actual part that didn't work correctly for me, back then.

No problem. I have three screens, the built-in at 175%, the attached 1440p at 100% and the 1080p also at 100%.

My bet is that it’s to preserve battery life. Driving hi-res screens takes power.

My 2018er Thinkpad x1 carbon has 1920x1080 and runs over 10 hours. And has better hw suppport than this "Linux Laptop".

Is it possible to buy a display off some marketplace with the same connector, and hopefully, the display controller plays nice with the motherboard?

I guess, but at that point you might as well get a different laptop rather than void the warranty if the System 76.

Upgrading/tinkering doesn't void your warranty. Explicitly.

And their customer service is top notch. I thought I bricked my gazelle when I upgraded the memory, but their customer service walked me through how to fix it - didn't even bat an eye.

Upgrading/tinkering doesn't void your warranty. Explicitly.

This is generally true with everything in the USA (covered by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act) even though companies are sketchy about it and try to convince people that it'll void their warranty. The manufacturer has to prove that your upgraded part was the direct cause of the issue you're trying to claim under warranty.

I did not know that - my point is that system76 is not at all sketchy about it. They actively encourage tinkering, make it clear that you won't void your warranty, and have extensive technical documentation to explain how to do upgrades etc

I love companies like that. The world needs more of them.

Modern standby really took things backward for x86 laptops

What's modern standby?

IIRC it’s something about not actually going to S3 sleep to keep stuff like networking alive

Your CPU never actually sleeps, it stays in S0 (on). The CPU is still active and doing things, but it's in a "low power state".

In quotes because it's not low power at all. On one of my laptops S0 standby gets worse battery life than just actually being on.

Speak for your own cpu. Mine definitely takes naps every time I try open Firefox

Yeah I mean I get C-states for things that idle a lot, like homeservers, but i still don’t see the reasoning for outright replacing traditional suspend on computers. Now you have to worry if some random pcie device is going to up your consumption by 5 watts during suspension. Well, at least that’s only a big issue on laptops.

Sorry for rambling

1920×1080 FH

Not 2k. Not 16:9. Probably doesn’t even cover DCI-P3 or decent color accuracy. Folks are gonna keep thinking Linux is a geeks-only thing if you have terrible panel that’s bad for content creation.

1920×1080 FH

Not 2k. Not 16:9.

How isn't that 19:9?

And QHD isn't really necessary on a laptop imo.

I still won't buy it though.

I have had 1080, 4k, & 2k laptops in my life. 1080 text is blurry. 4k is obviously overkill wasting battery on pixels you can’t see. 2k has crisp text without so much wasted density & you have to get unreasonably close to the panel to tell the difference.

1080p is 2k. From Wikipedia: "2K resolution is a generic term for display devices or content having a horizontal resolution of approximately 2,000 pixels.[1] In the movie projection industry, Digital Cinema Initiatives is the dominant standard for 2K output and defines a 2K format with a resolution of 2048 × 1080.[2][3] For television and consumer media, 1920 × 1080 is the most common 2K resolution, but this is normally referred to as 1080p." (emphasis mine)

You are correct.

I meant “2.8K (2880 × 1800)” or thereabouts but misremembered the naming.

Goddammit, I didn’t need a reason to upgrade my laptop (I have a carbon X1 running Fedora and the failure to suspend drives me bonkers).

Sounds like a great laptop to run Windows on /s

Edit: quite surprising how many people don't understand the /s.

I like how not even the "/s" saved you from the brainless.

I guess, they, for some reason, do want people to run Windows on that machine^^

Or they are triggered so hard, that they couldn't even understand the /s anymore when they got to that point of the sentence.

It's just a bad joke.

You can. There's nothing stopping you

I thought the /s should have been enough to tell everyone that this was a joke, but apparently not.

I think the precursor to a joke is that it has to be at least somewhat funny. Your joke is just a statement