Is This The Ultimate Linux Laptop?

we'll get something very special today we're spending my own money that's basically what this amounts to but what did I pick to spend with my own money it's a box from system 76 what does it contain well probably a laptop right but there's more than that in there [Music] so the year is 2023 and for the first time in a long time travel is on the menu I'm going to go to computex I mean there's all kinds of Channel travel too I still do the computer janitoring thing although at this point I'm really just doing a computer janitoring for the the stuff that I want to do not the stuff that I have to do in order to eat that's nice and that's thanks to you all of you thank you for watching and subscribing and patreon and Float playing buying the merchandise and the kvms and everything else anyway so you know you don't just run out and buy a bunch of stuff and then send back what doesn't work well unless you're a terrible human being and then you might do that that's why Amazon and Walmart have such a really high return policy so shopping around for a laptop the Pangolin caught my eye and I'll explain why in a minute but also on the table for consideration where laptops like the Lenovo X1 and the carbon series there's actually several different uh options in the Lenovo family and not really that long ago I did actually pick up a Lenovo laptop for another project but the Wireless in it was so crappy that I was compelled to do a video on replacing the wireless adapter in that laptop and it's a convertible too um I've sort of fallen out of love with convertibles and using the screen as an input device especially on the Linux side of things uh it's just it didn't really work for me I looked at the Developer Edition of the Dell which is intermittently in and out of stock and I seemed like procurement was maybe going to be a little bit a bit of an issue on the Dell side and I also like what system 76 is doing wait don't need another desktop environment system 76 is doing some really exciting stuff with rust in my opinion and I know it's definitely the old joke of oh there were 13 standards and then let's create a new standard to unify them all ah there are 14 standards there is a there is an element of Truth to that I really like pop OS I think pop OS is the right direction to go in for Linux for normies let's call it I certainly do not agree with every decision that they've made but that doesn't detract from the good that they're doing just like I hope that you don't agree with literally everything that I do and when I make a mistake I hope that you don't make it your personal mission to take me down or troll me on the Internet or whatever because I you know I see that kind of behavior a lot of the time and I just I don't know anyway system 76. welcome okay cool what's in the welcome packet system 76 thank you for purchasing system 76 appear if you're not already analytics user the system 76 crew cool and some stickers this is awesome this Harkens back to the you know Apple computer when Apple was cool I mean that's such it's a lifetime ago they would include stickers which is pretty cool oh we got a little pop-up robot Follow the yellow line cut out and strip and stand the desktop Sentinel Melvin that's cool a power brick 65 Watts now contrast this to the 65 Watts that we've been seeing from our small form factor desktop machines we've been reviewing obviously it's possible to make a more compact 65 watt power supply that's what this is and system 76 has gone out of their way to include that which is really awesome and the power cord itself is modular so actually the power cord is bigger and takes up more room than the actual power brick and this is it this is the Pangolin now I picked out a configuration with 32 gigabytes of memory a single one terabyte pcie E4 nvme and the 6800u for the processor the reason that I picked system 76 is as much to do with the system specs that were available and how this thing is built this is a magnesium alloy case this is metal so this is a very very durable construction it has ample breathing vents at the back and so like the physical design and the physical components of this you can see there's a dual fan design one here one over here it's got a Radeon 680m 4 to the GPU this is a Linux laptop through and through first of all I mean look they've got a physical flip down RJ45 connector that's all just gravy the design is metal so the first laptop that I really fell in love with like fell in love with hard and didn't see it as just a machine to get stuff done with is the Sony z505 it was not class leading in terms of performance or features or anything else but it had a modular battery and had a really nice magnesium alloy case and it used the magnesium alloy cases that heatsink for the processor and so it cooled its I think it was a Pentium 3 processor the cool this processor really well but it was ultra low voltage and it was really well designed so it didn't quite have to work as hard and that's basically the formula for the system 76 Pangolin solid metal case and solid construction modular design it's got some repairability it's not super glued together it's a laptop first and foremost this is not a touch screen not as I've configured it it is 1080p up to 144 Hertz for the display it has a nice feeling keyboard has a big big touch pad that they put a lot of work into in terms of the driver and functionality nice mechanical power button got an SD card slot on this side a type a port a lock slot and then on the other side we've got two more type A type c headphone microphone combo HDMI out power and then our physical switch this is the design formula of that z505 and this is also a similar design formula that Lenovo has hit upon in some of their designs occasionally sometimes the yoga sometimes the you know think pads and carbon X1 sometimes they dilute things with the think pad and the ThinkPad is a not an enjoyable experience but this this is solid all right let's get this thing booted up and see what it can do if you want to experience the system 76 out of the box setup all you got to do is install pop OS it's basically The Identical process setting it up getting Linux configured opting for home encryption or not it's all good stuff takes all the boxes no complaints there the very first thing that I noticed about the touchpad is that it's a dual clicker I don't really know how to explain that people are very particular about their touch pads very particular this touchpad appears to have buttons on both the left and right side you can also tap to click so if you're a tap to clicker so you tap your finger but you don't press down on the touchpad it's fine you're not going to notice anything but if you press down harder on the touchpad it'll click with a tactile click because there's a button underneath the touchpad a lot of the time touchpads only have a single button and use software magic to look at where your finger is to decide is that a left click or a right click this touchpad physically has two buttons underneath it so if you move your finger from the left to right side and you're pressing too hard on it you'll feel a second click doesn't bother me but some people may be unsettled by the second click or not understand what's going on or think that you know the touchpad is giving mechanically in an unsettling way in a way that was not designed to and had a very fast update rate which we'll find out about the out-of-the-box screen refresh in just a minute because maybe it's a combination of those two factors now pop out of the box walks you through your preferences choices not just light or dark mode but also how do you want the application bar at the bottom to respond do you need workspaces or applications if you're coming from another platform Windows or Mac OS you might be used to certain things like gestures but not other things like multiple workspaces Linux sort of gives you the best of both worlds there's even this thing called a tiling Window Manager that's something a little more advanced you can set up but the tiling Window Manager stuff that's built into pop OS is actually quite good if you're feeling adventurous and you want to activate the tiling Window Manager you can do Super Why again built into pop OS you can download that and try that now on the G9 Neo where it's so super super insanely wide it makes it a lot of fun the laptop also has a built-in fingerprint scanner in the power button so if you want to use biometric locking or make it a little easier to log into your machine you can do that with your fingerprint in the power button out of the box 144 Hertz to start with and the power usage says that it's going to last about eight and a half hours on 84 charge right out of the box I can imagine people were wishing for this kind of thing after using Linux even in the late 90s but here we are in 2023 and it's an out of the box experience good job system 76. now out of the box I need to install OBS so I can screen capture and do some recordings and I'm also going to install the CPU freak genome extension which is pretty awesome normally on a laptop I don't know that I recommend it because having it in the background polling constantly doing stuff does negatively impact how many watts you're using I caution you because out of the box before I start fiddling with things idle power consumption is about 6 watts and now with all the stuff running in the background that's more like 9 or 12 Watts which is not fabulous for our battery life we go from eight hours to four hours or nine hours to roughly four or five hours having a bunch of background stuff you don't need that power top from the command line can give you a breakdown of what's using all of your power we can see OBS and the genome shell extensions that I just added or what's using all the power this is a really cool level of granularity you can run a Power report like this on Windows laptops but it's a little bit more of a pain although it does give you sort of a fancy HTML report when you do that but I've always loved the accessibility of this kind of stuff on a Linux platform now to help us with testing we're going to use the phonics test Suite open benchmarking and pharonic specifically have a lot more testing more comprehensive testing better testing using their test Suite but I just sort of want to use it to kick the tires you can use the fronix test Suite on your laptop to do some of the same kinds of automated tests just to make sure it's performing roughly where it should I mean this 6800u processor from AMD the six and seven thousand series processors from AMD in particular and especially AMV Advantage laptops this is not AMD advantageous as far as I know but especially AMD Advantage meaning that they've put all of the same love and care into tuning the system that I've seen so far from system 76 and that means that it's going to perform well it's not going to have any you know substandard components because sometimes people look at how much memory does it have and how big is the hard drive and how fast you know what processor it is but then the laptop designer will skimp on cooling or will skimp on the quality of the components this laptop also has a physical privacy switch and if we do LS USB with the switch toggled and untoggled we can see that the device is physically unplugged from the USB bus that is very very nice some laptops Implement a mechanical shutter for their webcam in this case it mechanically unplugs the webcam so you're not going to get audio or video from an unplugged webcam device and I was honestly kind of surprised at the price point I mean economic macro economic conditions as all the companies have you know sort of taken to say I really wasn't expecting this laptop to be as relatively inexpensive as it was in this configuration it's ballpark I think fourteen hundred dollars thirteen fourteen hundred dollars something like that I was shooting for like 15 or 16 1700 for a laptop so I was pleasantly surprised that came in pretty far under budget with LP ddr5 32 gigabytes and storage almost splurged for larger storage but I ultimately decided to just add my own storage later because there's actually two m.2 slots that are accessible inside this so I get the one with the one terabyte drive the system 76 shipped and if I have to dual boot or you know do something creative with virtual machines then I have a whole other m.2 slot that I can use for that purpose what about off-label uses amd's been sneaking in pcie tunneling their USBC ports will that work on this platform form I don't know let's give it a try in case you're wondering about Thunderbolt support well I hauled out the the old Monitor and the old dock just to give it a try and see if I could get it to work and in the out of the box configuration it's not going to work and I don't blame system 76 for not wanting to support that also tooled around the BIOS looking for options to enable pcie tunneling on amd's USB controller there's none of that I also had a weird problem when I first plugged into the Thunderbolt dock because it also enables power and sometimes in that scenario touch pads will go a little Haywire it's very strange it was like registering Phantom clicks but that was totally an RF thing and rebooting the controller in the touchpad fixes that and that's not really a system 76 problem that's just a thing that happens now it may be possible to hack support for pcie tunneling AKA Thunderbolt Thunderbolt compatible functionality into the system 76 Pangolin but that's not something system 76 really supports or condones and I don't blame them but it's not really exactly supported yet on the AMD platform universally across the board you see it in some laptops but but not everywhere now in case you want a game or do something really super fancy high-end DisplayPort is a better bet than HDMI you can do some really cool stuff with the HDMI out in this laptop but I'm using your handy dandy Moshi cable those are the Moshi bi-directional USBC is the highest quality USBC to DisplayPort cable that I know of and not only can we rock 144 Hertz on our ASRock Phantom gaming display we can also Rock 240 hertz on the ASRock G9 Neo with our Moshi cable that good in terms of if I had to come up with something to complain about you know there's undertones of that a little bit in the Thunderbolt discussion more type c ports might have been nice but I can see the gray beards preferring the type A ports and three type A ports on a laptop is sort of a differentiating factor I can sort of picture how that you know board meeting went it's like okay how many USB ports are we going to put let's do four USBC ports you know that's that's the Apple thing obviously and it's like no no we need type A and it's not the token type a port that you see on business class laptops from other other major vendors you have three full-size type A ports so I feel like most of the people that will be buying this and using it with Linux will probably prefer type A over type c I would have liked to add two type c ports and I would be okay with two type A ports but three type A ports and two type c ports that would be the sweet spot I would give up the HDMI port for that as a matter of fact and that pretty much takes us through everything that I look for in a laptop the Pangolin from system 76 is a very very impressive machine system 76 is not the size of Lenovo I don't think that's an insult or it's going to surprise anybody but the system 76 is able to craft such a nice machine a well put together machine a well-designed machine it's got the Samsung 980 Pro SSD so they're not messing around with updated firmware good job because that only happened like a couple weeks ago so again they're on the ball in terms of quality control and assembly and everything else it really is surprising to see somebody put that much love and care in their products in terms of How It's put together in their operating system and everything else notwithstanding just I want to buy a laptop I want the laptop to be a laptop I don't need the laptop to be a symbol of religion or anything else but system 76 that they're able to do this with a relatively small team and have something that is so competitive against big name laptops is hugely impressive it's a very nice machine and I'm glad that I went with system 76 for uh for for my my Linux laptop needs I'm gonna put some more hours on this and uh maybe maybe we'll do a longer term evaluation we'll see how it works after it's got about 50 000 air miles on it I'm one of those level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums foreign [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 74,566

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: vunGsQ_MtmM

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/binarypie]

Pretty good overview. I'll be very interested to see how this compares to Framework and Starlabs over the next few years.

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I'm also curious of the longer term review of the machine; but as the name suggests I'll be waiting for that.

[u/missingfaktor-gmail]

I'd be curious to know how it compares with Tuxedo Stellaris and InfinityBook.

[u/Lord_Schnitzel]

Best un-biased review I've ever seen.

[u/azangru]

Saw this discouraging feedback about the Pangolin on Hacker News today:

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.

(link)

[u/alien2003]

Maybe

[u/woodkm]

Nice overview! I have had my Gazelle 17" for a year now, and I absolutely love it. I only use my windows systems when I want to, for no real reason.