I have no experience with Linux, but I’d like to give it a try. I’m looking at the System76 Meerkat and Thelio with the Pop!_OS option.

I don’t see myself gaming on it because I have a Windows machine for just that. I’d mostly be using it for learning Linux and doing basic things like web surfing and word processing (Libreoffice perhaps).

Any recommendations or advice? Thanks!

  • bitcrafter@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    I got a Thelio and loved it–despite being incredibly powerful, it is so quiet that I can’t tell whether it is even on or not unless I am near it and listening closely. This is only true when running Pop!_OS, though; in Windows or other Linux distributions it’s a lot noisier, presumably because Pop!_OS has carefully calibrated their kernel to make this work.

    However, even on non-System76 hardware I’ve been using Pop!_OS as my It Just Works Linux distribution, and have generally had success with it, including for most of my gaming needs. There have been a couple of times where an upgrade borked things so that the system no longer booted, which is definitely not a good thing, but fortunately one of the installation options is “Refresh” which replaces all system files while leaving everything else in place so I’ve gone from unable to boot to back and running within 30 minutes, which is a big deal because I’ve had other Linux distributions spontaneously bork things before but I’ve never had it be so easy to recover when this happens. I did have to reinstall some system software packages, but the largest things on my hard drive are my games and those didn’t have to be reinstalled because they live in my home directory so it wasn’t a big deal.

    On the flip side, just so you don’t think I’m a System76 fanboy, I tried their Oryx Pro laptop, despite it being incredibly expensive, because I love my desktop and was expecting a similar level of experience, and it was terrible; sleep mode was buggy because it only ever worked when I first plugged in the laptop and then unplugged it, which makes the feature pretty useless when you’re on the go, which is exactly when you need a working sleep mode, and even then it only used a partial sleep mode so it would consume 10% of the battery per hour. I tried contacting support about this and got really bizarre responses about things that were completely unrelated to my questions, as if they weren’t actually reading my tickets. The whole situation was so bad that within about a week or two I just sent it back. A little while later bought a laptop at less than half the price which runs Pop!_OS just fine and more than meets my needs so in a way I’m glad that the more expensive laptop didn’t work out.

    • Michael Murphy (S76)@lemmy.worldM
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      1 year ago

      The fan curves are defined by the fan daemon within the system76-power daemon. This source code in particular. You can install this on any Linux distribution.

      Sorry to hear about the bad experience with support. I wonder when this was. I usually see comments praising the level of support that they received.

      The issue with the Oryx Pro laptop may have been firmware-related, and fixed by a firmware update from the Firmware Manager application. Although QA performs a lot of sleep and suspend tests before certifying a new firmware release or product, so I’m not 100% sure. It’s possible that the system could have shipped from the factory with an older firmware version though.

      We have engineers dedicated to open source firmware development, and they continue to maintain firmware for all systems we’ve ever released with open firmware. So firmware updates are more frequent than you’d typically expect from proprietary firmware. They’re currently working on implementing the SecureBoot feature for our open firmware models.