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System76 Refreshes Ubuntu Linux Laptops With Intel Kaby Lake, NVIDIA GTX 10 Series, and 4K (betanews.com)
Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: System76 is refreshing three of its laptops with some high-end parts. The Oryx Pro, Serval WS, and Bonobo WS are now all equipped with 7th generation Intel Kaby Lake processors. In addition, all three can be had with 4K displays and NVIDIA GTX 10 series graphics too. While the Oryx Pro already had the option of 4K and GTX 10, it is the 7th gen Intel chips that are new to it. In fact, all of the company's laptops now come with Kaby Lake standard. The computer seller throws some shade at Apple by saying, "The HiDPI displays that ship on the laptops have 3.1 million more pixels than Apple's 'Retina' displays, enabling sharper text, 4K video, and higher res gaming. Beyond that, the displays give video and photo professionals the ability to work more easily with higher resolution multimedia."
...when I sent my daughter off to college last Fall. Figured it might be nice for her to have someone beside Dear Ol' Dad to call if she had some complicated Linux problems (she can handle the simple and medium problems). Then I saw how much they were charging! Could not justify the expense, even with whatever phonecall time it might save me. Bought a Lenovo and had her roll her own OS into it. She, and my wallet, are both way better for it...
You can't "throw shade" at Apple over hardware capabilities in any meaningful way unless you can run OS X / macOS and its applications. Otherwise, you're in the position of a cruise ship boasting that it has roll stabilization in order to try and "shade" a luxury hotel. Pomegranates and kumquats. Irrelevant.
And I say that as a very unhappy Apple hardware user.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I guess they are going for the "wild animal" theme for their names. It looks like they order them in "strength" of the animal with small mammals being the low end of each line, hooved quadrupeds at the mid-level and great apes at the high end.
I just think the whole thing is stupid... who wants a desktop called "Wild Dog Pro"?
It's a neat concept and all, selling pre-configured Linux laptops, desktops and servers but I just would not be able to tell people that I am running a "Bonobo WS" (WS?) computer with a straight face... Let alone look at the name every time I sit down at my computer or pull out my laptop.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Typing this on a system76 Oryx Pro (work asked me to choose between Mac or Linux). Their Lemur lineup wasn't out yet at the time but it'd be the one I'd get today with 14' + 32G RAM
I just designed a Bonobo for shits and giggles with dual 1080 SLI, 16GB DDR4, two 2TB HDDs, and 867 Mbps WiFi, with a 3 year P&L Warranty leaving the rest of the blocks at the defaults. 4K is almost 1K too low. Total came to $4,892.
The Linux destktop is as dead as the democrat party.
Duh, these are laptops, dummy.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
One thing that I can't stand about these machines is that they have a num pad, which pushes the main keyboard and the touchpad way to the left of the device. This means you have to sit either with your arms pointing to the left, or your head pointing to the right.
The number of users who would benefit from a num pad are few and far between, and they could just use a USB num pad.
Strangely, there are only a few laptop manufacturers that align the center of the screen with the center of the keyboard and touchpad. I hope System 76 fixes this one day, because I'd love to replace my MacBook with a Linux laptop.
We bought around a dozen of Sager laptops in Octoboer so we could get 64 GB of RAM with 4k displays since our 16 GB MacBooks were just swapping so much it was painful to develop. We're in a top floor southwest-facing corner open office, and the screens were just too dim to use in the afternoon. I think all of the developers switched back to the much slower MacBooks because of the screens. Are the System 76 ones better than Sager? The Sager ones were nearly as bad as Dell.
I'm a potential customer of one of these or new MBP. These seem like the only two options for a high end laptop these days. So I priced them out for a similar config.
I compared as close a config as I could between a optioned up mac and Oryx.
So that means 15", because the Oryx only offers the hires display on 15".
Apple only offer 16GB ram on 15" models, so that's what I set it to on Oryx
Oryx only offer up to 1TB on nvme, where Apple allow 2TB. But on the Oryx you can have second drive, so I added 1 TB SSD.
The graphics card options are not choices since you need the max Orix option for the high res display.
Apple: 15.4" retina display 2880x1800. Radeon 455 4GB. 2.8GHz CPU, 16GB Memory, 2TB Storage, $4299. :$3154
Oryx 16.6" hidipi display . Nvidia GTX1070 8GB. 2.9GHz CPU. 1TB NMVe+1TB SSD.
If you drop back to 1TB (which you might because Apple want $800 for the extra TB. It's Apple $3499, Oryx $2695.
Other things you might care about:
I'm personally ok with either macos or Linux. You may or may not care.
The mac looks ok. The Oryx looks butt ugly.
The Orix lets you option it up further than Apple - 64GB Ram for instance.
In the past, claims that Apple were more expensive tended to ignore the horrible screens or limited storage on the cheaper counterparts.
In this instance the Apple for a similar config is $800-$1000 more expensive.
So the Oryx is looking pretty good, except for the butt ugly case.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Should we be expecting one everytime dell/lenovo/etc comes out with a new laptop model too?
I don't mind the slashvertisement at all, I do mind not being able to get a 4k in a 17 inch size.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
This distro seems to become a bigger train wreck with each passing release. The arbitrary bullshit that my current install (16.04LTS) keeps throwing at me boggles my mind at times. Who the fuck thought it made sense for a laptop to lock the display configuration files when it goes to sleep? Now any time I put my laptop to sleep I have to move .config, and .kde, and reboot the next time I want to connect to an external monitor. Otherwise it will happily detect and lock out any external monitor until the magic locked file is out of the way. A simple reboot doesn't resolve it, the files have to be moved manually out of the way.
I wish that was the worst thing they've done, that is just the problem I run it to most often. The long term solution to it seems to be to just never put my laptop to sleep (as I use a different external display configuration at home than I do at work, and there are times I need to use only the laptop display while at work or on the road).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Is... has System 76 fixed the godawful keyboard yet? The gazellel prof 76 I have is a real pain to type on. It would be a fine laptop if not for the double-blasted horrible keyboard.
-Matt
System 76 is a pretty good value for the machine you get. Lets go over your choices to build a ~$5000 machine.
> dual 1080 SLI
Yes, that would be expensive. It's SLI on a friggin laptop. The "low end" option is a GTX 1070, which totally blows away what you can get on, say, an Apple. The dual 1080 SLI option adds 1500 bucks to the price. This is what you would expect, and also, not something you would buy unless you were actually sure you wanted it. This is a top end graphics card, and you're talking TWO of them in a laptop. This alone is 30% of the price.
> two 2TB HDDs
Lets be clear here: included in the price is an 256 GB SSD. You are adding two additional 2.5" HDDs to this.
The 5 thousand dollar machine you built has a top of the line (which commands a VAST premium) Nvidia graphics card, then it has A SECOND ONE OF THOSE. It has THREE storage media- an SSD, and two HDDs. That sounds about right.
Note that in raw power, this machine totally blows away anything offered by Apple, which can't progress beyond a middle of the line Radeon, and I'm pretty damned sure it can't do three media. Heck, I think the option on that is just a big SSD (which the Bonobo also offers in the configurator). I can't even get close to these specs on Alienware, where I couldn't find the option to get TWO friggin GTX 1080s, nor THREE media in the rig.
My view: If you need the hardware you selected, this is a good deal for it, and you'd be hard pressed to find it at most mainstream shops, because the options chosen are wildly excessive for most users. The main name brands don't even offer this sort of stuff, it's super packed with metal.
Maybe, but probably not. System76 deserves some attention as a top tier integrator for Linux laptops. They appear to be the roughest analogy to Apple in Linux-land. The last time System76 made noise, here on slashdot we mostly shit on them for having such pricy laptops that didn't have a 4K option. Well, now they do. It's clearly of interest to slashdotters, as we chided them on it last time.
You seem to be one of my fellow citizens, which means you're probably a pretty good person. Posting a message this results in nothing good, and I don't believe that you would say such a thing if we were in company together. I'm pretty concerned at this point that we're going to reach levels of partisanship that will result in civil war, and I don't think that's a thing any good citizen could desire. Please consider carefully what you write.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Nothing else matters, right?
Relevant questions in this situation are, "Will it handle my workload?", "How much does it cost?", "What kind of warranty does it come with?", and "Will it fit in my laptop bag?"
Do my employers pay me to make a fashion statement? No, they do not. So gives a rat's ass what it looks like?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Do they provide Steam as well? Or have a SteamOS option? That would really be welcome
In Linux, do you still have that? In PC-BSD, they had me create a root password, but do not create a root account that one can log in via the login manager (One can do it on CLI using sudo, but not directly). Note that I'm talking about the login manager, not if you are one of those traditional CLI warriors
Do they provide Steam as well? Or have a SteamOS option? That would really be welcome
Just install it yourself. Installers have been incredibly simple for a very long time. I doubt there are many people who know what SteamOS is and want it but are perplexed by the installer.
Please note... I wasn't complaining about the price. I was just noting for Hog- who made the commentary about 4K being the price instead of the screen resolution that yes it could very well have been the price. The laptop as designed has roughly the same CPU Cores & threads, twice the GPU, and 1/4 of the storage of my desktop. Also note that my tower is running an i7-4790K O.C. to 4.8GHz, so although a little faster, it's several generations behind. I paid roughly $2,500 for the tower. I fully expected a laptop with the same power specs to easily be twice as much in price. To have a laptop system that's on current gen processing with twice as much GPU cost just less than 2x what I put into my tower, I'd definitely consider that a good deal. I just don't need a laptop with those specs right now.
They also had the "courage" to have an integrated optical drive option. I have been bitten too many times by not having an optical drive to play movies from.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?