(sneezes) - Excuse me, I'm allergic
to short circuit. System76 is a bit of an odd company. I mean when you think
about it, they've got all of these products that
are relatively high end and yet, it's all based
on open source software. From the Thelio, to the
Serval, to the Oryx Pro which is what we're looking at right now. Honestly, I haven't unboxed
this yet I've opened the box to see what's inside but,
this is the first time that is actually gonna be taken out. This is a big box for a very small laptop. This is a 15 inch laptop. They got this kind of weird
packaging method here. Everything is bound up in this rather heavy duty
cardboard and plastic. And you're supposed to do is unfold it and it'll just slide right out, like so. That way you can reuse it
and it cuts down on waste which is honestly quite awesome. So let's get the main event
out here, that's better. The inside of the box is
pretty nice to actually when stopped to look at it. All around it are these
nerdy kinda designs like you can see the rocket ship
they're blasting off. You've got some kind of crystal here. Yeah, all kinds of really cool stuff here. So, that is definitely
something you'd want to keep which brings us to the laptop. As far as the aesthetics go,
it's a pretty standard design this is actually a Clevo unit
that System76 has customized for their own use. So, yeah it feels really nice. Glass trackpad, all metal
exterior, very thin bezels on the screen a little bit of
wobble but it's not too bad. But you might be asking
yourself what's so special about it then, it's a Clevo
laptop that's running Linux. And that is where things
get very interesting. This aside from the fact that
it just runs Linux, is running a custom firmware. It's running coreboot, that System76 has specifically engineered to allow it to not only use Thunderbolt, but also Nvidia switchable graphics. It's kind of a first in that
regard as far as I'm aware, it may actually still be
the only one that's capable of doing that. And what that essentially means
is you're going to be able to modify the firmware for yourself. You can go on GitHub download
the firmware, modify it, build it and flash it. I'd like to try to do that
today, that'd be nice. But first, our sponsor. Private Internet Access is a
VPN allows access to services and websites as though you're on a different country. Encrypts all of your
network traffic and uses a safe protected IP. You can connect up to five
devices at once, with clients for Windows, Mac OS,
Android, iOS and Linux. Buy a one year plan for 3995
and get two months for free at the link in the description below. I didn't even notice this but the packaging here actually comes with a nice little cleaning cloth. And what is this, is this is
a thermal pad, this looks like a thermal pad. I guess they expect you
to open it up, which is honestly kinda neat. It's also possible they
expect thermal pads to degrade over time. So they want you to be able
to keep this for a while. I'm guessing this would be a
thermal pad for the chipset. Perhaps the embedded
controller which, if I had to guess, probably mates
to the bottom shell here. So if you were to open
it up to replace your RAM or upgrade your storage
then, yeah you've got this nice little thermal
pad here, very nice. Nice standard but, decent
feeling powered adapter. Okay, so the power plugs into the back and it actually reminds
me I've been so excited to just fire this up and play with it, that I haven't even gone over the I/O. So on the back here we've got a Thunderbolt three port, power, HDMI. DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort actually. Over on the other side we've got a little expandable Ethernet
port, isn't that cute. I remember the first time I
saw those like 10 years ago. I mean, you used to be able
to see them on PCM CIA cards but, whatever anyway we've
got two USB 3.0 ports here. And then around the other side we've got
headphone jack, microphone jack. USB 3.0 and a micro SD card reader. So this thing is pretty kitted out. Before I power it on,
let's have a feel for how the keyboard is. It's got very striking
lettering, I'm not sure if that's a Clevo thing or a System76 thing. The keys themselves feel
pretty solid there, they have a very stable throw actually. System76 those guys are
actually kinda keyboard nerds. In fact, from what I understand
I think it's Jeremy, one of the lead programmers over there or lead product designers over
there, actually flashed their or created and flashed
their own keyboard layout for this computer. So yeah, that all feels pretty good. A little bit of deck flex
but I mean this is is made of metal so, you're not really
gonna have to worry about that too much. And when you're typing, there's nothing. So, let's go ahead and power it on. I've never used a core boot
enabled machine before. Press escape for Boot Options, cool. This trackpad feels amazing
by the way, holy crap. It is buttery smooth. One of the things that
I love about Pop! OS is that it actually asks you
right off the bat, whether or not you want to encrypt
your hard drive or SSD as it were. What that lets you do is
protect your machine say if it got stolen. That way, they need your passport in order to access all your files. So it's actually quite
useful to have especially on a laptop, but we're not
we're not gonna do that for now. There's not really a whole lot of settings that you can change in
the bios of this thing. I guess that's the whole point
of the core boot thing you can just change it all and recompile it. So, one of the other things
that Pop! OS does really well is it has all of these
integrations for online accounts. So you've got Google,
Nextcloud, Facebook, Microsoft. Flicker, Foursquare and your
traditional enterprise IMAP and SMTP and stuff. What this lets you do is you can configure your email, your
calendar, your cloud storage. All that kinda stuff all at
once from here, you don't have to go through every
single application and log in each time. So we don't wanna do
any of that right now. Yes, you can't really
see this because I don't have any screen capture
right now but, the Oryx Pro has switchable graphics
and it's saying that here that you can just switch it
by going up to the menu here and toggling it, that's great. That's something that
like I said, I don't think has actually happened before now for a core boot enabled device. This is not running any kind of proprietary firmware whatsoever. It's mind boggling 'cause like this is a company again,
that is completely in the open ecosystem. So firmware, software even
their custom designed chassis. the Thelio is open source
and yet they're selling it. And they seem to be doing pretty well. This is Pop! OS, you guys
have maybe seen it before. I've used it in a couple
of videos now in our gaming on Linux updates and also
in the PC Bill challenge that Linus and I went through. It was a bit of a race and unfortunately Pop! OS, I'm gonna say it was half and half. Pop! OS let me down and I
let Pop! OS down 'cause, there were some configuration
changes I could have made that would have made things a lot better. Suffice it to say Pop! OS is actually a pretty nice operating system. It's a more or less stock gnome
or g-no-me interface here. So we've got our
notification area up here. We've got our system tray up here which includes our Wi Fi
control, sound control. Display brightness, we got
Bluetooth, our power settings. The fan just kicked in for some reason. It's getting warm, yeah a little bit okay. That's to be expected
when running primarily on the dedicated graphics card. And we have a quick access to our settings control panel here. I won't go through all the
different details of Pop! OS but, yeah let's let's
explore a little deeper. For one, looking at it, it
all really matches well like the the dark theme for
Pop! OS really matches with the theming of the machine. Don't you just love it
when you download Steam and then you launch
Steam for the first time and it's like updating Steam. What version of the Nvidia driver are we using here, 440.100. So it looks like this screen is not a FreeSync compatible
screen otherwise we'd have the G-Sync compatible button here. Which is fine, but it is a 144 hertz panel and it is silky smooth. It doesn't say what
technology the display is, that's a little unfortunate. Actually while I'm here, what GPU is this? It's an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. So that is the top of the line I believe. They have them available in
the RTX 2060 and 2070 as well. So that's cool. Looks like 64 gigs of RAM
so this thing is kitted out. NVMe boot drive, 512 gig I
think Steam is having trouble. Looks like there were some major maintenance
run on it yesterday. All right, I'm gonna
give steam one more shot. I'll switch to the US
server nope, wrecked. All right, gaming is
not all this laptop has to offer anyway. Part of the whole appeal here
is unleashing your potential. So, if we wanna build
something gonna have to install some build tools. We're looking at a KeyMap. So there are two layers on
a typical laptop keyboard. Your standard, keyboard
and then also the keys that happen when you
press the function key. So you can press function and
plus and minus for example, to change the backlight
brightness of the keyboard. You can press function and
let's see F9 to increase the brightness of the
monitor or F8 to decrease it. F6 to enable the sound to go up and down. Those are all handled here. This block here, this upper
block is our regular keys. You can see we've got
Escape, F1, F2, F3, F4, F5. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's all laid out in
the order you see them in the keyboard. Similarly, we've got the
same thing down here. I'm not entirely sure why, but there's not a whole lot assigned to
function and the regular keys. So let's just say for giggles
let's change function T to something else. Well I mean, let's just change it to L. So we can just do function L
and then T, T or function T and then T, T and we've got L, T, T. Now I need to close all
running applications. Unplug everything from the computer aside from the power adapter meaning,
you'll lose screencap sorry. And run make flash internal. I'm more excited than I should be for my stupid little custom KeyMap 'cause it really is truly stupid. All right, we're back let's
open up our text editor and let's see what happens. Function T, that looks like an L. Shift T, that is capital L. T, T, L, L, T, T, L, L, T, T, L, L, T, T. This is way more amusing than it should be but basically I can make any key on the keyboard any other
key on the keyboard. You can change the layout of
the keyboard at your own whim. And that's just the start of it. You can change the fan profiles,
you can change all kinds of stuff in the in the
embedded controller here and that's all built
into the the Oryx Pro. Like it's (chuckles) pretty amazing. So what you're getting is
basically complete control over the computer like the embedded controller
handles like power delivery. It handles the fan curves like
I said the voltage curves, the frequency curves all
of that stuff is handled in the embedded controller and it is completely open for you. The only problem is that there
is a price to all of this which is, 1699. And that's for a family 15.6
inch panel, GeForce RTX 2060 and a 250 gigabyte SSD which
is SATA on the base model. So you've got some upgrades
to do, but the good news is you can do them. What is the price of
freedom really, you've got a completely open source
operating system you can do whatever you want with. You've got a completely open
source firmware, you can do whatever you want with. You can adjust the internal
spec of the computer as much as you want. You can expand it with thunderbolt. You can choose to run it with or without the Nvidia graphics card. It's a cliche and I already
used it in this video, but it's basically the
apple of the Linux world. You're paying a premium,
but I mean you are getting a pretty premium machine. I think it feels fantastic,
I think the philosophy behind it is fantastic. The company behind it is pretty great. The CEO I met him a little while ago at the Superfan III event. He kind of gives me a Hank Scorpio vibe and like I wanna support
worth that again, it's just how much are you willing to pay for it. That's the question you have to ask. These guys are premium,
you get a premium product. Is that what you want for Linux? It's what I want, but it's
a question you're gonna have to ask yourself. Thanks for watching. Make sure to get subscribed so you can see more short circuits like this one or unlike this one,
this is kinda different. And see you later.
This but AMD dedicated GPU. I need it.
Ideally AMD CPU and dGPU with the Thunderbolt 3 as well but eh I can survive without the Thunderbolt.
Keep it up u/AnthonyLTT!
It's sad that both times Anthony tried to showcase gaming on linux (Steam + Proton) it failed.
It's just plain bad luck, because it does really work.
And it's twice as bad because both times failed while using Pop_OS which I've been using daily for 2 years without any kind of issue. Not even through version upgrades and hardware changes.
3rd time's the charm.
I really hope Linux takes off in the gaming world. It feels like it’s getting there. I’d imagine in 5 years most gamers would be on Linux.
I know this is waay off topic, I reckon Anthony is the best LTT guy. I want him to lose some weight so he can live his best life.
Maybe Linus could do the Linus thing and make a video series about it or something.
It's the Apple of Linux in that there's a slight premium on the hardware... But the open (down to the hardware and self-modify/repair) vs walled garden strategy is more like matter and antimatter in approach.
If System76 really wanted to go down that road (I mean, it's Anthony's characterization and probably not what they want to do, but just theory-crafting...) it'd be nice if they made ready-integrated open ecosystem products, like a "PopNAS" that runs OpenMediaVault with any necessary plugins or software for seamless integration with their Pop!_OS computers. Etc. etc. The sell would be ease of use like the walled garden approach, but "use it any way you like" if you don't want to lock in since it would all be open standards behind the scenes.
Anthony is like the entire reason I resubbed to LTT. Loving all the Linux coverage they're giving nowadays.
Anthony is amazing. Absolutely love his LTT videos! Always so informative and genuinely entertaining!
Video seemed fairly rushed. Could've shown the BIOS/firmware options proper because they sounded interesting (at least I wanted to see what the options where but maybe that's just me).
Little pause on a Neofetch would've been nice.
Definitely should've spent a little bit more time getting steam up and running and shown off a few games so we got to see them running.
Oh well, it is what it is, it's still good exposure for PopOS and Linux.