I have been so incredibly impressed by System76. Professional, easy to work with, open source, and great quality. I used to run a Dell-only shop, but my last few systems have been System76. (Oh, and they don't spam you ever few months like Dell.)
Not a paid advertiser. Just a very happy customer.
We ordered four pangolins from System76 and had issues with three out of four. Two were sent back for motherboard issues (video and power) and one was sent back because a metal support bracket had come unglued and was bouncing around the inside of the laptop. To their credit they did accept our return of all four even though one of the four had not exhibited any issues. It was depressing for me because I had always thought System76 was supposed to be the best Linux machines. The higher end Dell laptops are "the new ThinkPads of yesterday" as far as Linux support and solid machines go.
Compatibility with the higher end Dells has been great for me, but the hardware has been a raging dumpster fire in my experience. Monitors randomly turning off and on after the last firmware update, battery randomly deciding it's now at 5% even though seconds ago it said 60% (even after the battery replacement), fans failing and getting super rattly, the battery draining even when plugged into their $300 USB-C/thunderbolt dock I only have because they don't allow charging at >65W with non-Dell thunderbolt docks, etc. This is a $3000 Dell laptop. I'm never, ever buying a Dell laptop or recommending them if I can avoid it. Unfortunately this is my work laptop so any replacement is going to also be a Dell product...
If it weren't for the fact that I have to run Windows-only tooling for my job, I would have requested the Mac in an instant even though I'm generally not a fan of Apple.
I've used a dell latitude 5420 and I think it's got that quality. Always works. It has a few quirks (rarely hangs on suspend or similar) but no major problems.
The 5400s and 5410s had tons of issues with power, heat, and general acpi funkiness but the 5420s and 5430s have been rock solid for my org. I really want an AMD 14" Latitude but I don't think that's happening any time soon.
So interestingly enough, the Pangolin is the first laptop model I am aware of from System76 that isn't an outright Clevo chassis (via Sager). I don't know all the facts but I did find this interesting reddit comment:
Which suggests there are pretty major changes to how they have previously done laptops:
1) The manufacturer is Emdoor(?) instead of Clevo. (I have never personally heard of Emdoor)
2) Final assembly is done in-house @ System76 instead of via Sager. That is assembly for Pangolin is done in Denver at the same place the Theelios desktops and Launch keyboards are made.
While not necessarily all in-house yet, both of these changes are a pretty massive difference so as a former owner of several System76 laptops, I am curious how much better the Pangolin is.
Edit: So after doing some googling, it seems like Emdoor is a Chinese manufacturer out of Shenzen (https://www.emdoordigi.com/about.html?category_id=0). Personally, not sure moving from a Taiwanese manufacturer to a Chinese one is actually a good thing...but still curious none-the-less.
> Personally, not sure moving from a Taiwanese manufacturer to a Chinese one is actually a good thing...but still curious none-the-less.
As somebody working in a related space, _any_ diversification is a good thing simply because it forces System76 to redesign its processes to become less Clevo-specific.
Once you start, you're going to have a hard time to find an ODM that's willing to teach you the ropes _and_ accept that you're not a single-ODM shop _and_ deal with whatever fancies S76 brings up, so that limits options. (Any of these mean that S76 will be a high-maintenance customer for Emdoor, and these three more than compound in that way)
For what it's worth I used a Clevo (branded as Medion) laptop as my daily driver for about 6 years, while backpacking around the world. The thing was a tank and still works as my backup at about 9 years old now. It's been through rainforests and deserts and up mountains and definitely got damp in a few rainstorms. Some keys on the keyboard no longer work and the bearings on the fan are very worn out. But that thing is a tank.
They rebadge (mostly) Clevo laptops, which isn't inherently a problem. The value add is supposed to be in the QA/software side of things to ensure the devices work well with Linux (so far, so good).
Well, my Lemur Pro 10 suffered from multiple different bugs in their half-baked Coreboot firmware. They ripped out the default BIOS to replace it with a more open alternative (laudable!) but the process resulted in bugs that prevented sleep and caused the UEFI boot order to be reset at various times.
They shouldn't have shipped a device with bugs like this, but I was left waiting over a year to get both fixed. On a generic box which I've supposedly paid extra for the support!
Compare this to my Dell XPS13, which shipped with Linux on it too, and never had any such issues.
I admire their objectives, but the reality of the System76 experience is severely lacking compared to the ideal.
Isn’t their pricing pretty unfriendly? I was looking at the Thelio, which starts at $1000 and then any upgrade costs about sticker price. (e.g. upgrading to the i5-13600K, which retails for $320, costs $315.)
It basically seemed to translate to a $1k markup for assembling the PC (and the case, I guess).
Have bought from System76 for years, got a Thelio desktop a year and a half ago that I have been happy with (I run Ubuntu, not PopOS). My Nvidia card only has 12 gigs VRAM but I have had it grinding away on Stable Diffusion, LLAMA etc.
The Dells are far and away better machines. I have a five year old XPS13 and a year old XPS17. They are great. My only caveat is that I only buy them with Intel/AMD video cards.
The XPS13 is far from "great"; it overheats, the battery life is poor, and the speakers are straight out of the 90s. I have one and I regret buying it.
My dell xps was poorly designed and clearly the focus was on hitting spec numbers than actual usability. The touchpad stopped registering input every few seconds momentarily, enough for a lot of people not to notice. I assumed minor software or hardware fix, they sent 2 engineers to my home who proceeded to replace different parts of the laptop to no success. OS did not fix it. Apparently just poorly selected hardware from vendor at design phase. The overheating CPU was a similar story. Going for thinness over function as its easier to market how it looks.
I'm impressed to see this paragraph in the README:
> System76 customers may request board schematics for their system by sending an email to firmware@system76.com with the subject line "Schematics for model", where model is one of the supported models listed above.
> Please include the serial number of your system for verification.
This means that you can actually troubleshoot and repair the board yourself, if you're so inclined.
That's awesome. I've emailed other manufacturers asking for documentation and the best I got was an unrelated user help page. If I remember correctly, some of their laptops are based on Clevo parts. I wonder why they can release documentation but Clevo can't.
Framework is selling Chromebooks and laptops pre-installed with Windows or BYO operating system. Windows and ChromeOS have a massive installed base.
System76 are still mostly selling rebadged generic laptops with their own custom linux distro (which I have no interest in). They do some good work but they are considerably more niche and don't really add much value to Framework which has the potential to grow much faster.
I have known of System76 and been interested in their products for almost 2 decades and I bought a generic laptop to match one of their models once because I didn't want to ship a rebadged machine from the other side of the planet and deal with the potential RMA/repair problems. I bought a Framework last year because they were happy to ship not just the product to me but any parts I needed to self repair. This ease of repair/ugrade could be just as appealing to a Windows/BSD user or anyone else. Months later Framework announce an AMD and battery upgrade option. This is something System76 can't do while they are slapping a badge on other companies designs.
The System76 collab with HP is a good example of what that company can do very well, bringing Linux customization experience to other manufacturers. Framework don't really need it and I would rather see them innovate on hardware than waste money on developing yet another Linux desktop environment.
I don't know that they're a good merge match. That said, it would be cool if Framework sold units with PopOS supported by System76, and/or System76 selling Framework unit with PopOS on their site. Since it would align with a relative miss.
Framework seems to have a better build quality than the System76 hardware, and they did a similar deal with a dev laptop from HP, that got discontinued. So it wouldn't be completely unheard of. Could also be a boost for development overhead for both considering firmward development.
That is a worry I have, but on the other hand, more pro RTR brands out there is more opportunities to win over customers.
I had a galago ultrapro 10 years ago. Loved it, loved system 76's support for it (they shipped everyone a replacement keyboard at no cost simply because they weren't happy with the one it launched with). The only part I didn't like was the plastic body which saw a lot of wear and tear. But the laptop is still working fine.
Now I have a framework. The first touchpad on mine had issues. Wasn't registering clicks unless I pressed really hard. They shipped me a replacement, I swapped it out myself and shipped them back the defective one at no cost to me.
I wish both companies the best, but yeah I do hope there is enough business out there for them both.
Anecdotal, but my couple-years-ago work laptop was a System76 and my recent work laptop is a Framework. Both are running the same flavor of Linux and being used for the same things, I just decided that I liked the Framework's hardware much better (and that Linux was supported adequately on the Framework).
System76 support was very good, but the build quality of the Framework is definitely better (to say nothing of all the very exciting upgradeable bits)
More context would be helpful. Are the model identifiers listed in the README the current top-spec machines, or older ones, or discontinued? What does "open firmware" mean in this context? Is it possible to boot these machines free of proprietary blobs entirely? I was under the impression that's not strictly possible given that the Intel ME needs at least the minimal/neuter/HA firmware blob to not forcibly power off the system shortly after boot.
I immediately thought about Open Firmware as the bios competitor in SPARC and PowerPC. It’s been a few years since I’ve used it, the last time was trying to boot from USB on a 2005 iMac G5.
I wouldn’t really call IEEE-1275 Open Firmware a “BIOS competitor” so much as an actual attempt to standardize firmware.
By all rights, EFI, UEFI, and all the various random boot loaders shouldn’t exist because a manufacturer can just leverage one of a number of independent, interoperable implementations of the standard and support booting arbitrary software on their systems.
Despite not being large and quite well-designed, about the only thing that’s survived from IEEE-1275 into the modern era has been the “device tree” concept.
But that can still change! There are Open Source implementations of Open Firmware these days, they’re rather straightforward to bootstrap, and since so much of the higher levels are implemented in FORTH and the lower levels in platform-independent C, you get a lot of bang for the buck in adopting it, including things like booting from an arbitrary IP network or arbitrary local storage, using an arbitrary text or graphics device for output, and using arbitrary devices for input. All it needs is a set of straightforward drivers for the local hardware, since it doesn’t need to be super-fast.
OpenBIOS (www.openbios.org) is an OF1275 implementation that can be built as a coreboot payload (or it used to be possible, at least). There's a certain historical overlap between the teams (some OpenBIOS folks moved to LinuxBIOS, which became coreboot), so that kinda makes sense.
My system 76 Wi-Fi card is bad. Get random application level failures when checking out repos that appear as if they are in the app stack but disappear the second Ethernet is used. Other than that inconvenience the machine has been perfect.
I ended up buying a second hand Evoo Gaming Laptop, with like 12 CPU 16 GB Ram, Nvidia GPU. It cost me around 800 dollars. I installed PopOS and I like the performance and convenience of this machine.
Not a paid advertiser. Just a very happy customer.