- It was a pleasant surprise for me that the System76 Oryx Pro actually did pretty well for this channel. You guys seem to really enjoy it. So here we are again with
System76, once again, again. This one is the Darter Pro. So far the box looks pretty much the same. (box scuffing) Yep, this is just a shipping box. Unleash your potential. Open box, alright, (box scuffing) lift platform, (parts clacking) and flatten. Oh!
(parts clacking) (sighs) Wait! Don't cut it! Packaging is reusable. A couple of people actually said, oh, that doesn't make any sense. It's, why are you gonna reuse the box? I mean, there's a good reason like if you had to RMA it or something. So let's see. We've also got the power adapter
in here and a little card. Only complaint I have about
this box is it's huge. But I mean, it's a shipping box, so what do you expect? Nothing too interesting
about the power brick, I don't think. (paper rustling) They do give you a little
cleaning cloth and a SSD, a thermal pad, which is nice. And now we have this card from System76. Oh, a Desktop Sentinel. Okay, (chuckles) Thank you for purchasing
a System76 computer, if you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I was hoping there
would be more to that but it's just a, hey,
it's a warranty thing. This is like a punch out little thing, a little guy that you can stand up. There we go. Yeah, Melvin. Oh, there's more in here. Yeah, all kinds of stickers here. Enough with all that. What is going on here? Oh, okay. (paper rustling) Oh, that is quite a fetching unit. No, actually it looks, it looks really nice. I mean, I know this is a Clevo design. Actually, I don't have
exactly what one it is here, but it's actually an NS-50-MU. They say it's under four
pounds and I believe them. Let's see if they're lying to us. 3.956, 1.795 kg. There will be some variation in the weight depending on how you spec it out, because this has two DIMM slots, as well as two M.2 slots
on the inside for NVME, one of which is PCI Express 4.0, which is very nice. On the left side, we have
the barrel jack for power, HDMI, a USB 3.2 Type-A, a USB 3.2 Type-C, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. On the back, we got nothing and we've got a vent, actually two. On the right side, we've got a headphone-mic combo jack, an SD card, micro SD card reader, a USB 2.0 port, the power button, and this lovely little
collapsible ethernet jack. I love those. Oh, also a Kensington Lock port. That's not all there is
to the exterior though. If we take a look inside
here, under the lid, we can see that we've got a really weird little camera bump. What's that for? Well, it's a 720p webcam, so there's nothing special about that. But it also has Windows Hello sensors, and you can use that with
a program called Howdy to actually use Windows Hello in Linux. So you're not missing out on that. There is a, I think it's a 73 watt-hour battery, and that is the same battery
that's in the Oryx Pro that we looked at before. Ours is kitted out with a Core i7 1165 G7 with Intel Xe Graphics. 16 gigabytes of RAM and 2x8 configuration, and a one terabyte PCI Express, Gen 3 SSD. Now, why Gen 3? Well, it's gonna be a little
bit less power hungry for one, and two, most people
aren't gonna need Gen 4. But if you do, the slot is there. āŖ Train āŖ Deck flex is pretty much
minimal for this kind of design, like the lid doesn't
really flex all that much. It's pretty much what you'd
expect from a metal chassis. What else is there to say here? The keyboard layout looks
pretty standard for a laptop, not bad, a full-size
arrow key cluster here the inverted T. Keys feel well stabilized actually screen is a nice matte finish. But we'll see more about
that when we boot it up. First, I need to talk to you about honey. Honey is the free shopping tool that finds the best promo codes whenever you shop online
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Razer, Best Buy, Walmart, and many more. Honey gets a small commission from sites, whenever they save you money, get honey for free right now at jointhoney.com/shortcircuit. Anyway, let's plug it in. Having the power button on the
side is actually really good because since this is
using open source firmware you can make it so that
you can turn the laptop on while it's like the lid closed but yet the power is plugged in. Alright, we're in Canada, we're not French. Why do they keep saying
that Canadians are French? It's always defaults to
French when we select Canada. All the Quebecers are
like, "Oh, excuse me." If you are a touch-typer, you can set the keyboard
to whatever layout you want via the firmware. Because it's open source. So you can make it Dvorak, you can make it Colemac, you could make it QWERTZ or AZERTY. Anyway, it's really cool. (chuckles) So, here we go. Let's encrypt, 'cause why not? Screw it, one two, three, four, one, two, three, four, Please don't steal my files. By default, they suggest that
you do full disk encryption. - [Man] Oh, I see. - Just for privacy security reasons. Restart device, let's do it. Booting. This'll be familiar to anyone who's seen the Oryx Pro video, or if anyone who's used Pop OS. But here's the Pop OS desktop. It's super clean. And it's got this little
tiling thing here. What's that? That, I don't think was
in the Oryx Pro video. You can basically just do
everything via the keyboard now, so I can do, I can hold down the Windows
key and press the arrows, to move around between
the different windows. Let's see what all the shortcuts are. Yeah, so I can increase
the size like that. It's cool, if not super
useful for everybody. And because it's based
on Ubuntu, I can install Steam, if I go into the Pop Shop. I wanna know, just how well Intel's Xe
Graphics works under Linux. Because unlike Nvidia, it's not a proprietary driver. It is open source. Basically everything on
this machine is open source, with the exception of CPU microcode and the Intel Management Engine, which System76 actually disables by default, or at least as much as they can, because it's a security risk. So you have pretty much total
control over the hardware. Processing shaders. Oh, God! The progress bar went backwards
and it straight up says, "known Intel driver issues. Not supported." Alright, let's put it down to the test 'cause we just spent the past
15 minutes installing it. Play. Doom Eternal, I donno know why they don't make this skippable. Oh, man. Alt + Enter. So it looks like it
just doesn't like Intel. Okay. Let's, see us go. Just need to wait for this cutscene to end 'cause they added this for some reason and you can't skip it. Alright, cool. We're in business. Oh, oh, here we go. (video pops) Oh, can I not? Oh. (chuckles) This is horrible. Palm rejection, is a thing, so I can move and I can turn, but if I press a key on the
keyboard and try to turn, I cannot do that. So I need to stop, to turn. And I got killed by a bot. (man laughing) - [Jono] How is it looking
though? Like frame rate? - [Anthony] Frame rate is like 70 or 80. There's actually a lot of weird graphical glitches going on here. I don't think the driver
is perfectly adequate yet, which would explain why it
didn't really work very well in Doom Eternal. Alright, so gaming isn't
this thing's forte, at least not right now
until the driver is, you know, improved. But that's not too bad because this machine isn't really
meant for gaming anyway, it's more of a portable workstation. - [Jono] How much is this
spec going for right now? - The current spec, I
think is $1550 roughly, I'll have the full price on screen here, but it's $1,099 for the base unit. So that's I think with the
Core i5 and eight gigs of RAM and 250 gig SSD. So, with that in mind, let's
test that out the speakers. (upbeat music) I think the speakers are coming up, yeah, the speakers are on the bottom. (upbeat music) - [Jono] Can we use this video also as a screen quality check? - [Anthony] I mean, the screen looks fine, nothing fancy as far as like
HDR or high refresh rate goes, but it looks pretty spot on to me. Lemme load up Linus Tech Tip feed video and see what that looks like. You know, it looks like
a perfectly fine display. It is IPS. So it's not going to let
you down in that regard. You're not gonna have
difficulty seeing it off-axis. Brightness of the screen though, this is as high as it goes. Let's do like half brightness
iPhone right next to it, yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing about this is that it's actually
straight-up a Clevo design. So, if you've seen one of these, you've seen them all, physically. So, there's not really a whole
lot else to say about it. The secret sauce as it were, is all in the operating system and in the firmware. For the money, it's not a bad machine. It's just not amazing, it's not gonna outdo a MacBook Air M1, which is on around this price point. So it really depends on what
you value as a consumer. Like would you prefer a Windows laptop? I mean, maybe, would you prefer Mac OS? Also maybe. But if you prefer Linux, if you want to get into something
that you can tinker with because you can change so many things like the battery charge rate, the battery, I think the maximum charge you
can probably tweak as well. You can change the TDP of your CPU, to turn it down or turn it up, the keyboard, basically,
anything you can think of, which is really cool. So, there is a little
bit of overhead for that, and I think that should
be kinda considered, when you look at the price
for this kinda thing. Like the thing is, this is here today. It works, it is very well integrated. As far as integration goes, System76 is probably
more deeply integrated with the hardware and the software than any Windows PC manufacturer, just as a result of the coreboot, the custom firmware for
the memory controller. But they don't take that away from you, they give it to you, and that counts for a lot. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking for a nice portable workstation
that you can upgrade, that you can service and that isn't actually like, it doesn't really have any major downfalls aside from the fact
that the speakers suck, it's, it's good. They do have their own
in-house laptops coming though. There'll probably be a couple
more generations of these before they actually
manage to get a laptop out. But when they do, I'm
looking very much forward to seeing what they can come up with. Thanks for watching, get subscribed, so you don't miss the
next time we take a look at a obscure piece of hardware
from a semi obscure company.
I can personally say that Linux on a laptop is a dream. I had an old laptop with I think an old 2 core intel cpu, ddr3 and an HDD. Booted faster than my current laptop. Unfortunately it stopped working 2 days after I discovered you could make it reset by dropping a phone on a very specific spot. Iām sure the too are disconnected.
On an unrelated note, anyone know of some things I should look for when getting a new laptop for Linux? Looking for something in the 600-800 CAD range
Hell yeah
once linux becomes more mainstream, hell yeah
imagine a gaming laptop with linux and it has that extreme gamer aesthetic and they use a gtk or qt theme that actually matches it
What you talkin' 'bout, Willis? They're the present.
Linux Laptops are my past, present and future.
It may not be the year of Linux on the Desktop but it was the year of Linux on the Laptop for me a few years ago. Been full time using Linux on my laptops ever since and not looking back. Anything which I need Windows for is something I do on a desktop and not on a laptop, so there's really no reason for me to use Windows on a laptop at all. Photoshop? Competitive online first person shooters? I don't do that stuff on a laptop. I use my laptop for web browsing, file management, coding, youtube, discord, etc. I don't need Windows for those.
Funny how the only segment where they go into Linux gaming in this video is to show how the Intel Xe graphics drivers are a bit busted for gaming at the moment. Then they move on saying, "you aren't really getting this laptop for gaming, anyway."
Despite this, we don't really have any comments discussing that part of the video- you guys did watch the video, right? It does make me wonder why this was posted on this subreddit ( r/linux and r/linuxhardware seem more fitting ). In any case, I'm really excited to see their new Ryzen/Vega laptop and how it does in games. That should be a much more interesting Linux gaming device, but so could this laptop once they work out the kinks.
Im hoping to grab a Pangolin when it finally comes out from System 76.
Linux on the laptop has been getting better and better for years now. System76 does good work. I only game on Linux, too, and that's getting better on laptops as well. More laptops coming with AMDGPU, nVidia finally providing an official solution for Optimus, and the advances in wine and proton are improving at a staggering rate. Life has never been better!