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System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

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Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#381

Post by caymanjim »

jagger27 wrote: post #7

I say it every time every time one of these threads pop up and I’ll say it again here: if it’s not 16:10 or 3:2 I’m simply not interested. I buy devices like this for productivity. I don't care about black bars when watching videos because I don't watch videos on it. What I absolutely care about is the extra inch of text in my terminal or text editor. I didn't think this was a controversial opinion.

I miss 16:10 for coding use, but that ship has long since sailed. It's not like laptop manufacturers arbitrarily made the decision. TV display resolutions drive the market, display panel manufacturers target that market, and laptop manufacturers come along for the ride. There's no competitive advantage to fighting that reality. The sooner you come to terms with it the better off you'll be.

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#382

Post by veidr »

I love System76, and I use and love Pop!_OS (despite the offensive and undignified name). I tried to buy their beefy Thelios desktop with wood paneling (but they don't ship to my country). But... on what planet is a 1080p screen still OK for a mid-range or higher laptop in 2021?

For laptops, I've used Apples and Dells over the past 7 years and I don't think any of them were that low resolution.

I want to buy their shit; I even bought their insanely expensive $300 keyboard just because I think they are awesome. But I wouldn't buy a 1080p laptop in this day and age for any price.

Pop OS (as sane people call it) also happens to work fabulously on high resolution monitors! I run it on a 4-year-old 32" 8K Dell UP3218K monitor at 200% pixel doubling, and it looks fantastic — much better and way crisper text than any Mac (e.g., my work M1 Mac Mini with hyperexpensive 6K XDR Display or my 27" 5K iMac Pro).

For that Dell display, 200% is perfect, but Reddit says fractional scaling also works great on Pop OS. So it's not like they have some technical reason they need to use blurry low-res displays.

It's just kind of weird. I would absolutely buy this otherwise, but the weird retro display is a deal-breaker.

(I don't give a shit about the off-center keyboard or numpad though, so I guess we all have our own individual deal-breakers....)

As an aside: Pop OS is really awesome, though — a great distro for those of us who were always rooting for Linux, preferred open source and felt like we were the kind of person who wanted that approach to win out and would likely use Linux, but mainly ended up usually buying Macs for purposes of convenience and just getting our shit done. Pretty much works great and stays out of your way. :-D

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#383

Post by veidr »

kazinator wrote: post #44
ruined wrote: post #12

1080p screen is a no-go. come on yall, it's 2021

It's a 15" screen! For 4K to even begin to make sense, you need a 40" diagonal, and with your face about a foot away from it. (For a more detailed explanation, ask a local fifth grader.)

I think you need to try more screens. I thought the 27" 5Ks were perfect — unlike 4K 27" screens, I could no longer discern the pixels.

So why would I need higher res than that? I thought that but I was proven so wrong.

Through some weird work circumstances I got a chance to use the (ludicrously expensive) 6K 32" Apple XDR Pro Display. To my eyes, this looked exactly the same as the LG 27" 5K displays I had been using — and they do indeed have almost the same pixel density.

BUT THEN!!!!!!! I had to switch to Linux for some other work reasons, and ended up with the (old as hell) Dell UP3218K 31.5" 8K display.

For programming work, it is so much better and crisper than the LG 27" UltraFine 5K and the Apple 32" XDR Pro Display.

I cannot SEE the pixels on any of them, but the text looks DRAMATICALLY better on the 8K one. I can comfortably use smaller font sizes, and the regular same-sized text is so much crisper and more comfortable to read on the 8K.

I feel like this 8K display is one of the best computer things I ever got — it's like the display version of going from HDD to SSD — and not getting one years ago is the biggest computing mistake in my 25+ year career.

And I also say this as somebody who just this year got his first prescription for eyeglasses (my vision is deteriorating in middle age, but isn't so bad yet; I wear the glasses like half the time, and the dramatic difference with the high res screen applies with or without glasses).

NOTE: I don't notice any differences at all when viewing photos or videos — it is strictly about viewing text, for doing things like programming or reading email or web pages.

FURTHER NOTE: Although I strongly disagree with your comment here, I upvoted it anyway because I think it is a commonly-held opinion which I myself believed a variant of until my recent lived experience with the weird Dell proof-of-concept monitor, and I don't think it deserved the light-gray dimming. And also because I remember you recommending the metal band Annihilator several years ago on this website, the discography of which I then obtained and enjoyed. :)

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#384

Post by sampling »

indolering wrote: post #357
fsflover wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they actually made the effort to design a laptop that went beyond its foundation, I'd be more interested. Have a look at https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 then.

Mine fell apart and the company is shady.

Which component of your laptop broke and which Librem model did you order?

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#385

Post by schaefer »

Thoreandan wrote: post #85

Unfortunately, it looks like https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/pang10/README.html > the Pangolin line has several non-open blobs in the firmware, so it's unclear if you can disable the AMD Platform Security Processor. The only available tech specs seem to be for pang10 not pang11 hardware, maybe this will change.

The pang11 specs are here:

https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/pang11/README.html

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#386

Post by slantyyz »

ayushnix wrote: post #257
slantyyz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling That depends on the OS though, right? I don't know about Linux or Mac, but I'm pretty sure that if you scale on Windows, you're still running at the native resolution, but the UI elements get scaled. Nothing should look weird. At least that has been my experience on Windows... outside of apps that don't follow Microsoft's scaling…

Yes, that might be the case, but I don't want to be dependent on the implementation differences of different operating systems. I like Apple's approach in this case. Enforce the usage of HiDPI displays by default with at least ~200 PPI which needs integer scaling. Instead of trying to work around the issue, they simply bypass it, which is what I'll do in the future.

Fair enough. I prefer the flexibility that Windows' Hidpi implementation offers over being constrained to Apple's method, but different strokes for different folks.

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#387

Post by zozbot234 »

sodality2 wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with that for a lightweight Linux dev/browsing machine. More than that just goes unused.

As someone with a laptop like this, dev work in certain situations (compiling heavy code, like systems languages) is essentially unworkable. The ram is actually 3.33 GB (memory is shared with GPU) and the CPU's are often dual-core. Visual studio code escapes alright (somehow), so maybe for light web dev work. But when my rust code takes 8 minutes to compile and 20 seconds on a PC, it almost makes it easier to compile…

8 minutes for a first compile on a non-trivial code base (ripgrep) is not that bad. Sure, you might call it a "low end system" but these performance choices can also save on battery use, which helps when coding on the go.

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#388

Post by kcb »

fnord77 wrote: post #265
kcb wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that only really apply while doing intensive memory accessing. Something that you would probably only be doing a very small percentage of time.

no - simply refreshing memory state costs power. The DRAM memory refresh cycle happens about every 60ms. In the background, memory cells are constantly read and rewritten. Power consumption adds up pretty quickly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_refresh

Sure but that is not peak power consumption. The charts I'm seeing for DRAM power consumption are based on the gbps.

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#389

Post by jcelerier »

zozbot234 wrote: post #387
sodality2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a laptop like this, dev work in certain situations (compiling heavy code, like systems languages) is essentially unworkable. The ram is actually 3.33 GB (memory is shared with GPU) and the CPU's are often dual-core. Visual studio code escapes alright (somehow), so maybe for light web dev work. But when my rust code takes 8 minutes to compile and 20 seconds on a PC, it almost makes it easier to compile…

8 minutes for a first compile on a non-trivial code base (ripgrep) is not that bad. Sure, you might call it a "low end system" but these performance choices can also save on battery use, which helps when coding on the go.

From what I could find, ripgrep is 40kloc... That means roughly 83 lines of code compiled per second. I'm sure there are languages on the PDP-11 (a 1.25 mhz machine) that compiled faster than that.

Re: System76 Pangolin Linux-first laptop with AMD internals now in stock

#390

Post by ncmncm »

folli wrote: post #158
johnzim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea who thought this was a good idea. The trackpad is even off to the left to accommodate it. I'm not a fan of symmetry for symmetry's sake, but I do think some affordances for the human body might be a good idea. How do southpaws enjoy this keyboard setup? The ergonomics of laptops are bad enough without stuff like this.

TIL that left-handers are also called southpaws.

It comes from baseball. Southpaw pitchers have an advantage
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