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System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

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Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#121

Post by acomjean »

ekimekim wrote: post #99
camjohnson26 wrote: post #9

It’s a nice computer but calling it “repairable” is a farce, and System76’s customer support is unfortunately woefully inadequate. 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 informa…

Chiming in with my customer support experience: My battery started to inflate after a bit over a year. I did some research and knew their warranty didn't cover this, but I contacted support anyway for help with finding a replacement. 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 goo…

I had similar. Contacted them, they didn’t have the part but had the Clevo part # for the fan which was easy to buy and replace.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#123

Post by jklinger410 »

ipdashc wrote: post #119
jklinger410 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop. Consider the lack of GPU a blessing. You absolutely do not want a hybrid NVIDIA GPU laptop, unless you want to sit with it plugged in at a desk while the fans try and keep the GPU from melting through the case. Worse battery life. With absolutely not a single other tangible benefit. Unless you are using the GPU for machine learning or w/e, in that c…

Interesting, I've found hybrid GPU laptops to be pretty practical. I've had two over the years and on my newer one I installed PopOS, and there's a setting which puts it in hybrid mode, so by default the discrete GPU stays off, but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU. When I'm not running a game, I get plenty of battery life out of it (4-6 hours or so?) and when I run a…

> but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU

Other than for gaming, which isn't worth it to do on a laptop anyway, I have seen no reason for this. Most discrete GPUs do a better job with drawing UI elements than a GPU anyway.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#124

Post by ilikepi »

mgkimsal wrote: post #57

Slightly OT, but was looking at system76 mini recently: https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat 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…

The hardware docs list the memory as DDR4 SODIMMS...

https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/meer7/repairs.html#rep...

I've been strongly eyeing this model as well, but in the end I decided to trade money for risk and acquire a used Dell OptiPlex micro from eBay. :crossed_fingers:

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#125

Post by belthesar »

warner25 wrote: post #109
jbeard4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, battery life is atrocious. I get typically get 1.5-2 hours on a charge, after 2.5 years of ownership. I always have anxiety about plugging it in. It's the biggest problem with this machine. Other than that, I have been very happy with it. Keyboard, trackpad, screen - all adequate for me. In every way other than the battery, it pretty much gets out of the way and gets the job done.

Wow, I'm surprised to hear this about the battery from you guys, as that appears to be one of their top selling points: "Most battery life!" I see that the article describes it as repairable, but is it really easy to get and put in a new battery? I don't see them for sale on system76.com/components I almost bought one of these in late 2021 when I was in the market for a new Linux machine. They were one of the few man…

As far as I'm aware, every System76 laptop is a rebadged OEM laptop with an opinionated set of expansion components that they've effectively certified as functional in Pop!_OS by ensuring good driver and DWM compatibility. I think the OEM is Sager, but I'm not confident on that, or if that's uniform. Anywho, because of this, it should be reasonably possible to source replacement components upstream.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#126

Post by conor- »

ekimekim wrote: post #95
jbeard4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, battery life is atrocious. I get typically get 1.5-2 hours on a charge, after 2.5 years of ownership. I always have anxiety about plugging it in. It's the biggest problem with this machine. Other than that, I have been very happy with it. Keyboard, trackpad, screen - all adequate for me. In every way other than the battery, it pretty much gets out of the way and gets the job done.

I've had the complete opposite experience (I replaced their Pop OS with Arch Linux). With light usage I get about 10 hours, if I'm playing games or something then yeah it drops a bit but not that much. It easily lasts the duration of an intercontinental plane flight which is my primary use-case. Maybe it's because I don't actually use it all that much, so my battery hasn't had many cycles put on it. I only use my lap…

My experience is the same. I replaced Pop with Arch running a pretty low-resource desktop setup (i3 and generally lightweight programs) and I can get roughly 10 hours with very heavy usage: Firefox with a handful of windows/dozens and dozens of tabs open, Docker, Spotify, etc.

Not terribly impressive compared to something like the newer Apple silicon MacBooks but also not terribly offensive considering I don't often work far from an available power source for super long stretches.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#127

Post by wkat4242 »

powersnail wrote: post #117
wkat4242 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboards don't have to be non objective. I think everyone agrees that ThinkPad keyboards were great (though since the T14s gen3 they too have lost their quality)

A friend back in college absolutely hated the ThinkPad keyboards, (thought they were too deep and bouncy) and loved Macbook's butterfly keyboard when it came out, marveling at the short travel and crisp feeling of it. It's indeed quite subjective.

Ugh, I considered those butterfly keyboards literally unusable. I refused a new Macbook from work over it.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#128

Post by winkwinkwink »

FFP999 wrote: post #10

Given my experience with System76 laptops, I know they can make a good impression at first, but after seeing how flimsy they are in long-term use, I can't justify the markup. You can get a better sturdier laptop with good Linux compatibility cheaper elsewhere.

After almost 10 years of wanting a computer from System76, I was finally able to afford one and bought a Galago Pro 5 (galp5) in 2022. Since then I've come to deeply regret that decision.

I've replaced the keyboard within the first month because it shipped warped. It recently started to "ignore" key presses and needs to be replaced again (according to support without any diagnostics). $90 for the part that saw minimal use? No thanks.

The machine doesn't handle undocking well so it stays plugged all the time. Image burn even with power saving enabled? You betcha!

I hate to gripe. I really want them to succeed but it's just been one disappointment after another. Before buying I had read the posts referencing build quality and should have taken heed.

Re: System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop

#130

Post by ostenning »

discmonkey wrote: post #31

Figure I might as well drop a quick review after 2 years with the lemur pro 11 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…

> Most things "just work"

I find it pretty hilarious that in 2023 this can still be a selling point.

Don't get me wrong I ran arch on a thinkpad for a long time so I can appreciate the statement, but now I just use a macbook and get my work done

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