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

Figure I might as well drop a quick review after 2 years with the lemur pro 11<p>Pros:<p>* Most things &quot;just work&quot;, 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 this laptop doesn&#x27;t have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier.<p>* Great compatibility for building software between my desktop and this laptop, makes my personal dev work a lot more portable.<p>* It&#x27;s quite small and very portable.<p>* Nice keyboard<p>* Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader)<p>Cons:<p>* Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost as much battery closed as it does open.<p>* Not great screen, terrible trackpad, and silly webcam considering the price of the laptop.<p>* As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop.<p>Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a macbook after this, not being able to go a day without charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a bit anxiety inducing. Also (and this doesn&#x27;t matter to a lot of people) I really value a laptop trackpad and this one is just plain bad.

It’s a nice computer but calling it “repairable” is a farce, and System76’s customer support is unfortunately woefully inadequate.<p>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 information I provided or clarified.<p>Pop_OS! is really nice to be fair. I’ve also had issues with build quality. My Gazelle’s screen stopped working when the computer ran out of power and had a bent wire when I opened it up. Again they wanted hundreds of dollars to fix it, even though it was clearly a manufacturing defect. When they sent the computer back the chassis was cracked.

I have been using a Lemur Pro (lemp11) for ~14 months as my daily driver (coming from a Macbook Pro). It&#x27;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.<p>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).<p>So far it&#x27;s my favorite laptop. Here&#x27;s some pros and cons:<p>Pros:<p>- Screen is nice and clear with great color. For a non-Apple screen it&#x27;s great.<p>- Battery life has been great. I get about 11-13 hours of coding (Firefox, Terminal w&#x2F;tmux+vim @ quarter screen brightness). I have used it on full airplane rides, etc. Awesome battery life, especially for Linux.<p>- Video playback is good, even w&#x2F;1440p@60fps (hardware acceleration in Firefox, no frame loss). However, it does get the fan blowing.<p>- Suspend&#x2F;wake works and detects the dock and connects everything perfectly again (mouse, keyboard, monitors, etc).<p>- Disk speed is amazing. I feel like my old Macbook used to chug on disk reads&#x2F;writes. However, this machine&#x2F;nvme is blazingly fast.<p>- 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&#x27;s stable and everything just works.<p>Cons:<p>- Fan can be annoying when playing videos or scrolling quickly on Youtube.<p>- When doing a reboot while attached to the USBC dock, it doesn&#x27;t appear to re-connect to the dock post-reboot. I have to turn the dock off and back on (or unplug the USBC&#x2F;re-plug it).<p>- Webcam is meh-- but I don&#x27;t use it anyway.<p>I don&#x27;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.

&gt; System76 claims 14 hours, and I managed 11 hours in our battery drain test (looping a 1080p video). In real-world use, I frequently eked out over 13 hours. That’s off the charts better than any other Linux laptop I’ve tested recently.<p>This is the most intriguing part to me. I&#x27;ve been mulling a Framework for a while but what&#x27;s held be back so far is that the battery life is 9-10 hours after tuning, and I&#x27;d love it to be longer. 11 hours of continuous video on this laptop is pretty impressive for a Linux laptop I think. My Dell XPS 13 feels like it needs to go onto the charger every 4 hours so this would be a huge improvement.

I&#x27;ll say the same thing I always say when System76 hardware is posted here. A 1080p screen should be a non-starter in 2023. How they are still selling these with low DPI screens doesn&#x27;t make sense to me.

Been using a lemp9 since 2020 and I will say that it&#x27;s good but not great. Came to it from an X1 Carbon and it&#x27;s felt like a lateral move, but if you&#x27;re trying to replace an MBP or something I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;ll be satisfied.<p>_Pros_ * The battery life is incredible, that&#x27;s the one thing they totally nailed. For Linux especially that&#x27;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+<p>* 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.<p>* A pretty nice selection of ports (they have port-heavier alternatives if that&#x27;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.<p>* Chassis feels pretty premium, comparable to what I was using before. No deck flex, hinges are smooth, moderately slow to accumulate fingerprints.<p>_Cons_<p>Go to &#x2F;r&#x2F;system76 and you&#x27;ll get a lot. Top culprits I&#x27;ve seen and experienced are:<p>* Speakers are very, very bad.<p>* Keycaps have a coating that erodes over time, which is ugly. Can&#x27;t replace individual keycaps<p>* Intel options only<p>* You&#x27;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

$1150 for an 8GB PC laptop is very high. It’s the price of a 13” MacBook Air with twice the storage.<p>A better option would be a low-end Dell that works just as well with Linux and costs perhaps half as much. I am yet to see a low-end Dell that doesn’t excel with Linux.

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&#x27;t justify the markup. You can get a better sturdier laptop with good Linux compatibility cheaper elsewhere.

It’s ok.<p>Webcam is potato, speakers are webcam sized and only one usb c port right next to the dc charge jack.<p>Ditch the barrel jack, give me a thunderbolt port on both sides and increase the trackpad size and I’ll overlook the webcam speakers and cramped display.

I&#x27;ve used System76&#x27;s products for a decade now, and always been happy. Recently, my (non-techie) wife and teenage daughter started using them as well, and they&#x27;re happy as well.

&gt; Among other things, this means that modern forms of suspend work out of the box<p>That sounds very promising. That has always been a major annoyance to me. I don&#x27;t think i have every owned a laptop with linux where I actually trusted that it would still have battery the day after if I just closed the lid.

Please someone show this to the Tuxedo guys, as their supplier is the same (Clevo), but apparently it IS possible to get the Lenovo-style 6-button cursor arrangement in this form factor, and as a bonus, with separate Home&#x2F;End&#x2F;Ins&#x2F;Del! I will never buy a laptop without this.<p>Does System76 ship laptops with an ISO keyboard layout? I don&#x27;t see this as a configuration option.

Why on earth have they shipped with a USB-C that you can charge from _and_ a barrel charging connector? Article says exactly the same power delivery on both.<p>Anybody know what&#x27;s going on there? Why not drop the barrel and put something else there (like another USB)? Seems bizarre.

Needs TrackPoint.<p>ThinkPads were an early favorite of Linux.<p>Brands like System76, Purism, and Framework are appealing today.<p>But we require our TrackPoints.

Why in god&#x27;s name are they _still_ using 1080p displays?

Last time I tried a System 76 laptop it was great when I was plugged in at my desk doing dev work. Better than a Macbook Pro.<p>But when I had to unplug it in the office to go to a meeting it was just terrible... support for plugging&#x2F;unplugging external monitors&#x2F;docks was atrocious, I had wifi issues, and doing something like a Zoom meeting (Webex at the time) would reduce it&#x27;s battery life to 1 hour or less. Stuff just got messed up using it as a laptop that was getting used at the desk and then not at the desk.<p>That was quite some time ago, I hope the software has gotten better. I stopped using it cause I was messing with linux too much instead of doing my work. That was depressing, cause it was kind of the same story as every time I&#x27;ve tried to use linux on the desktop back to the 90s.

It&#x27;s great there are companies focused on delivering great Linux hardware.<p>For context though, every Dell and HP laptops and desktops I&#x27;ve had the past 12 years has been really great with Linux.<p>The several Lenovo laptops I&#x27;ve had the past 12 years have been great with Linux.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;lemur" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;lemur</a>:<p>&gt; Display 14.1″ 1920×1080 FHD, Matte Finish<p>I&#x27;ll pass. It has a 16:9 display.

As a AMD fanboy, I have been using the Pangolin for a few months now. I can&#x27;t currently use PopOS (Intune only works on LTE Ubuntu), so I&#x27;m not getting the full benefits of the laptop - notably the battery life. I get about 5hr with a pretty big stack of containers running, as well as working in Rider. This is strictly less than the M1 that I was using prior to this laptop. A flight-safe Anker battery pack bumps it up to the 10hr I was hoping for.<p>Performance-wise? It makes the M1 look like a complete joke. Our MITM proxy (ZScaler, a <i>truly</i> terrible product) is CPU-bound, and the M1 would stutter during large container image pulls. I don&#x27;t notice pulls on the Pangolin - I just keep working while they happen in the background. Builds are on the order of 30% faster. It also handles two external monitors.<p>Something is strange with secure boot and the System76 kernel; I just couldn&#x27;t get it working.<p>Monitor is average, definitely less usable in sunlight (by virtue of being actually unusable) than Apple&#x27;s offerings. Keyboard and touchpad are great. I did have some issues with the touchpad, and support told me to (gasp!) open the laptop and make sure the ribbon cable was seated properly - 10&#x2F;10 repairability.

In my opinion, if you have the money, a Razer or Asus laptop is the highest quality machine that you can get to run Linux. Of course there is also Framework, but those are not as well built in my opinion. Personally, I have the new Blade 14 and it is great. Large trackpad, 16:10, 6 hours of battery life (pretty good for linux) and an RTX 4070. That said, it is absurdly expensive.

Slightly OT, but was looking at system76 mini recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;desktops&#x2F;meerkat" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;desktops&#x2F;meerkat</a><p>Can&#x27;t get any sense of whether the memory is baked in at build time, or if I can swap out later. The &#x27;tall&#x27; option seems to imply there&#x27;s more room, and that&#x27;s what I&#x27;d need to get to manage my own memory, but ... I can&#x27;t tell. There&#x27;s no FAQ page, and... I was going to send in a question today, but since there&#x27;s a system 76 topic here, thought I&#x27;d ask here and see if anyone else can shed their experience with the meerkat and after-market upgrades.

My biggest beef with it is the arrow keys are nestled among the page up&#x2F;page down keys. I&#x27;m constantly miss-striking PgUp when I&#x27;m just trying to arrow around.<p>Secondary issues are bad multi-display support. It kind-of works, but often at least one screen glitches out if there&#x27;s not at least one window maximized on it.<p>And all the USB ports, C included all run into the same host controller, so you&#x27;ve just got the one bus-worth&#x27;s of bandwidth which is a bit rough if you&#x27;re docking into multiple screens, a good camera, audio, network, etc.

I&#x27;m glad they didn&#x27;t put power button on the keyboard as Mac copycats do.<p>But there are no home&#x2F;end&#x2F;pgup&#x2F;pgdn keys, but couple of them cramped with cursor keys (I assume home&#x2F;end and pgup&#x2F;dn must be pressed with Fn).

I have a System 76 laptop that I bought it 4 years ago. It has reliable. Although PopOS has not been reliable. Their support and customer service is great. Drivers work and I&#x27;m happy with it.

System76 is doing us all a favor by showing what a Macbook could be if it were actually &quot;Pro&quot;. Do a spec for price comparison and System76 is blowing them out of the water.<p>* More cores on wider supported chips<p>* Nvidia Graphics cards that are far better supported for machine learning than the M1, M2, M3 series (as i understand, it&#x27;s not my specialty)<p>* Discrete memory instead of unified<p>* Market similar prices to storage upgrades (eg $200 for .5 -&gt; 2TB instead of $600<p>Ok a couple cons -- $190 for an extra charger is a bit much, but likely due to 330w vs 140w. Also pointing out power draw is much higher.

I&#x27;m team barrel connector after having broken many usb-c ports. That&#x27;s a plus not a minus.

Very happy user of a System76 Lemur Pro laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) for the past year, FWIW. I&#x27;m running stock Debian on it, not System76&#x27;s Pop!_OS.<p>I get the kind of battery life the review mentions if I put the laptop into &quot;Power Saver&quot; mode. In &quot;Balanced&quot; or especially in &quot;Performance&quot; mode the battery doesn&#x27;t last as long, of course. So when I can&#x27;t be plugged in, I put it into Power Saver mode (this is super easy via the Gnome upper-right settings popup panel; I assume it would be just as easy in other window managers).<p>I got <i>great</i> customer service from System76 when I ran into a hitch at the start of my Debian installation process (TL;DR: see Debian bugs #1024346 and #1024720 -- the file &quot;.disk&#x2F;info&quot; existed on the pre-installed Pop!_OS partition; getting rid of that enabled the installation to continue). System76 support went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking this down and solving it, considering that I was installing an OS that wasn&#x27;t even officially supported by them.<p>Happy customer; would buy again; I get no commission for any of this -- I just want to see the company flourish so they&#x27;re still there when it&#x27;s time for me to upgrade my laptop!

The reason I don’t have a Linux laptop is simple. There is not one that has a touch pad as nice as a mac’s. It needs to be large and very responsive.<p>My attempt at Linux at a Chromebook was ruined because of a terrible trackpad.