system76' laptops?

[DiTBho]

So, I am looking for a friendly Linux-laptop and found system76's models

• Oryx Pro
• Gazelle

They cost a little for customs duties: has anyone tried them yet?

Thanks

[SiliconWizard]

I had a eye on them, and they look pretty good. Don't own one. Had good feedback, but limited to one user... so...
But TBH, I was seriously considering buying one as my next laptop.

[Benta]

Why you see them as especially "Linux Friendly" escapes me. Your link talks about "Open Source Firmware", which has nothing to do with Linux. On top of that, it's NVidia graphics, which is totally proprietary and closed-source and gives endless problem for Linux users.

[Doctorandus_P]

Any laptop that does not come with pre-installed windoze (or the fruit brand os) is a plus in my book.
But they are hard to find.
Some of them have advertisements on https://distrowatch.com/

Recently I accidentally bumped into: https://www.skikk.eu/laptops
They also have an option to buy a laptop without an OS, or with Linux installed.

[SiliconWizard]

Why you see them as especially "Linux Friendly" escapes me. Your link talks about "Open Source Firmware", which has nothing to do with Linux. On top of that, it's NVidia graphics, which is totally proprietary and closed-source and gives endless problem for Linux users.

Maybe just because the only system they'll preinstall for you is a Linux distribution they have thoroughly tested and tailored for their laptops?

As to NVidia, unless you're a zealous open-source activist, that's often a minor concern here. I have absolutely never had any issue with NVidia drivers on Linux. And possibly the choice they made here is that while NVidia cards give good performance, they also allow an hybrid setup (NVidia + integrated Intel), which is handy on laptops. When you don't need high-performance graphics, you can just work with the Intel graphics which is a lot less power-hungry. The system can automatically switch between the two. I don't know if a similar setup can easily be done with Radeon cards, for instance. I've never seen it, but if it's possible and well supported on Linux, then OK...

[Benta]

Maybe just because the only system they'll preinstall for you is a Linux distribution they have thoroughly tested and tailored for their laptops?

Could be, I didn't go that deeply into their website, which is extremely marketing heavy.
Personally, I've never had any problems 'dozing M$ on any machine and installing Linux over it.

[AntiProtonBoy]

Why you see them as especially "Linux Friendly" escapes me. Your link talks about "Open Source Firmware", which has nothing to do with Linux. On top of that, it's NVidia graphics, which is totally proprietary and closed-source and gives endless problem for Linux users.

I think this is related to choice of hardware that offers the most reliable diver support in the kernel. Likewise, the firmware itself is properly documented and has good interop with the kernel. Some of proprietary firmware has been known to have buggy ACPI issues, and UEFI boot issues (particularly secure boot) with the Linux environment.

[woofy]

As you're in the uk, check out pcspecialist. Both pcspecialist and system76 are based on up stream clevo technology.
I have three laptops from them and run linux on two of them (mint/cinnamon) without any issues. I'm typing this on one of  them.
Unlike system76, pcspecialist don't support linux, they try to drive you to MS, but you can buy without the OS and install linux yourself.

[DiTBho]

Why you see them as especially "Linux Friendly" escapes me.

So they were somehow described on Youtube talking about their "Pop OS".

[DiTBho]

AntiProtonBoy
I think this is related to choice of hardware that offers the most reliable diver support in the kernel. Likewise, the firmware itself is properly documented and has good interop with the kernel. Some of proprietary firmware has been known to have buggy ACPI issues, and UEFI boot issues (particularly secure boot) with the Linux environment.

Yup, precisely 

[DiTBho]

I was seriously considering buying one as my next laptop.

Which one? { Oryx Pro, Gazelle } 

[SiliconWizard]

I was seriously considering buying one as my next laptop.

Which one? { Oryx Pro, Gazelle } 

Oh, didn't get that far yet. Probably the cheaper option which seems to be the Gazelle, as I mainly use laptops while on the go or in lab but not as my main workstations for "heavy" work.

The company seems to be a bunch of great guys knowing what they're doing. The only two things that seem slightly annoying to me at this point:
- The keyboards. I definitely don't like those flat keyboards... but I know that's pretty much all we can find on laptops these days...
- They come preinstalled with a Linux distro, and apparently there's no option to get them without anything preinstalled. Since none of the distros they offer are the ones I use... I suppose formatting the whole thing and installing something from scratch is possible though.

[DiTBho]

The keyboards

It seems the keyboard on System76' laptops is not in the Pros-list.
A review here, it doesn't brilliant but rather "decent" 

[rstofer]

If you have any interest in machine learning, NVIDIA cards are the way to go.  You could seriously need the GPUs for speedup.

Not a maximum configuration for a laptop but this Dell uses the NVIDIA RTX 3080 which has 8704 CUDA cores.  That's a lot of parallel computing!

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/alienware-m15-r4-gaming-laptop/spd/alienware-m15-r4-laptop/wnm15r409s

Dell has a PC with the RTX3090 with 10,496 CUDA cores.

Many years back, I was running Redhat Enterprise Linux on a Dell Precision Workstation and every time Linux had an upgrade, I would  have to rebuild the NVIDIA drivers.  It was a HUGE PITA.  I don't recall having that problem in the recent past.  I eventually just gave up on doing upgrades!

Given that Linux represents about 2% of desktops, you can see why manufacturers don't want to get into the market.  Just 2% after 30 years!

[Someone]

A laptop 3080 isn't the same performance at all as a desktop 3080, for instance, and many laptops thermally throttle long before you can take full sustained advantage of whatever the built in peak CPU / GPU power actually is.

Even worse beyond thermal/power/current throttling, clock speed differences, or memory clock/width (all of which usually favour the desktop versions)

The 3080 example use a completely different die with a different count of cores/compute units!

mobile 3080 = a hobbled/underclocked desktop 3070 Ti

its almost getting to be as bad as desktop processor model numbers

[DiTBho]

If it were an ARM or MIPS laptop I would buy it right away.

[Halcyon]

I looked at them but instead settled for a Lenovo ThinkPad. Extremely Linux friendly, better support and they are a well established brand with a good reputation.

[DiTBho]

I looked at them but instead settled for a Lenovo ThinkPad. Extremely Linux friendly, better support and they are a well established brand with a good reputation.

Prices are somehow equal to Lenovo. This because System76 is located in Canada and you have to consider importing fees and related duties.

That's a shame, but that's it.

[rstofer]

What the previous poster said about ML is true and good advice, though I'll add that in a lot of cases you get a lot more
performance for the dollar if you just build / buy a desktop PC for "heavy duty computing" e.g. GPGPU or SMP / HPC etc.
Then one might have a much more modestly priced / equipped laptop and just RDP / VNC / SSH into one's desktop / server to run high performance CPU / GPU jobs on the higher performance machine remotely (or locally).

A laptop 3080 isn't the same performance at all as a desktop 3080, for instance, and many laptops thermally throttle long before you can take full sustained advantage of whatever the built in peak CPU / GPU power actually is.

I was more concerned with battery life on the laptop.  My need for a ML machine is limited but my grandson may need something for grad school.  It depends on his actual major - yet to be determined, I think.

Then the issue is portability, is it necessary for ML?  It seems as though he will be using distance learning so perhaps not.  For my uses, I would just build up a desktop.  A few grand will build up a pretty decent machine - or a room heater.

All to be determined in the next month or so.

[DiTBho]

I was more concerned with battery life on the laptop.

The battery in my second-hand ThinkPad Carbon X1/2017 allows me to run for up to 6 hours. Despite having an itnel i7 CPU, I don't use the laptop for heavy FEM calculations, but rather to write and debug code intensively, as well as Firefox to search for stuff and lots of open PDFs.

With Premiere I only have 4 hours, but keep in mind that the battery has definitely aged.

The best thing ever seen on the battery is the new Apple M1 laptop: a colleague loaned me a month ago and I had up to 11 hours of use on average!

No Premiere there, only Finalcut.

My need for a ML machine is limited

ML is something you should better run in a cluster. Say J-cluster, of which, the laptop should only be a terminal 

[rstofer]

I don't think any of my laptops have exceptional battery life.  I suspect using the CUDA units in the graphics adapter won't improve on that.  Maybe I should look around for benchmarks specific to ML.

It's not clear to me how a cluster of relatively small PCs improves on the concept of tightly coupled CUDA units with shared system memory.  I looked briefly at AWS but that's a little out of my league.  If I were doing this stuff for a living, it might be affordable.

[DiTBho]

It's not clear to me how a cluster of relatively small PCs improves on the concept of tightly coupled CUDA units with shared system memory.

J-cluster = some NVIDIA Jetson boards (4?) + Carrier Board

[rstofer]

It's not clear to me how a cluster of relatively small PCs improves on the concept of tightly coupled CUDA units with shared system memory.

J-cluster = some NVIDIA Jetson boards (4?) + Carrier Board

I have the Jetson Nano and it's pretty clever.  It only has 128 CUDA cores but, still, it's a start.

Maybe something like this:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Jetson-Mate-Cluster-Standard-with-1-Jetson-Nano-and-3-Xavier-NX-p-4935.html

Even then, it would only have 1664 CUDA cores, nowhere close to one of the high end graphic cards with 10,000+ cores.

I have a lot more reading to do!  I know exactly diddly about ML and even less about NVIDIA's offerings.

[chickenHeadKnob]

Prices are somehow equal to Lenovo. This because System76 is located in Canada and you have to consider importing fees and related duties.

If by "Canada" you mean Denver Colorado then, yeah.

[DiTBho]

Prices are somehow equal to Lenovo. This because System76 is located in Canada and you have to consider importing fees and related duties.

If by "Canada" you mean Denver Colorado then, yeah.

d'oh, that's what reported in the wiki

System76 is an American computer manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado, specializing in the sale of notebooks, desktops, and servers. The company supports free and open-source software, offering either Ubuntu or their own Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, Pop!_OS, as the preinstalled operating system

I didn't check it, and got confused due to a promotional link, probably from one of their supporter.

Anyway, it doesn't change the problem: USA or Canada, you always need to *import* things