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

I have been using a Lemur Pro (lemp11) for ~14 months as my daily driver (coming from a Macbook Pro). It's my main machine and has been running constantly the entire time (auto suspends at night). I have powered it off a few times since purchasing it.

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.

I paid 700 euros for a Samsung Ibook two years ago. i5, 16GB, 256GB SSD, intel iris xe graphics. Not a performance monster, obviously and I use a mac book for work. But I can run Manjaro on it and I can even do some lightweight gaming on it via steam. All the important stuff works. And it even manages to not look cheap (even though it is). Nice aluminium, quiet and effective cooling, etc.

So, this thing seems a bit expensive for what is effectively yet another generic laptop with the usual underwhelming meh screen, crappy trackpad, etc. Exactly the weak points of my setup as well. But a lot more reasonably priced.

Been using a lemp9 since 2020 and I will say that it's good but not great. Came to it from an X1 Carbon and it's felt like a lateral move, but if you're trying to replace an MBP or something I don't think you'll be satisfied.

_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

It’s Denver, CO, not Oregon: https://system76.com/manufacturing

Even the XPS 13 developers edition does have issues.

After the way netbooks went down, I have either used OS X, or Windows with VMWare/Virtual Box when needed.

Now with WSL there is one thing less to install, although with managed languages I hardly care as they abstract the underlying OS for the most part, or I just connect to a cloud instance.

Stil own an aging Asus 1215B, though.