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System76 Oryx Pro Linux Laptop is Now Thinner and Faster (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the beast-hardware dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, System76 started to share details about its refreshed Linux-powered Oryx Pro laptop. It would be thinner and more powerful, while adding twice the battery life of its predecessor. Unfortunately, we did not yet know exactly what the laptop looked like. Today, we finally have official images. The new Oryx Pro is quite breathtaking, as it is a true Pro machine -- with the USB Type-A, Ethernet, and HDMI ports you expect -- while being just 19mm thin. It has the horsepower that power-users need, thanks to its 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-Series GPU.

18 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by garcia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I work in marketing analytics and we're constantly crunching through massive datasources which require servers/cloud-based systems to make the work and timing managable.

    A simple MacBook Pro with 8GB and an i5 is more than enough for me to load RDP, terminals for SSH, and the applications I might be using locally.

    Honest question, being I'm doing 100% of my development on remote machines either at the data center or in the cloud, how many people require actual big horsepower on their machine to get their jobs done?

    1. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Informative

      Gamers... A lot of people play games on their home laptops.
      Developers... i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.
      Data crunching... faster CPU means faster data crunching (unless you're solely on the cloud).
      MS Office... seriously, least efficient programs in the universe...

    2. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Informative

      I use a "gaming" laptop for my live shows of algorithmic art. I can do basic stuff on Intel integrated GPUs, but for decent resolutions and smooth framerates I need a real GPU. For a short while I lugged around a Mini-ITX machine, partly because I was worried about cooling and noise.

      In fact, while the Oryx Pro looks like a dream machine on paper (I obviously use Linux), I would still be worried about cooling. The "business" laptops I've used so far don't have enough cooling for all their CPU and GPU power, and they end up throttling the clocks in high loads over more than a few minutes.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    3. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by Xenolith0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm a Linux Consultant/Instructor and often have a need for running many (many) virtual machines simultaneously as I simulate a clients setup and possible setups. Sometimes for larger projects I'll run VMs from a datacenter but often it's much faster and more convenient to have everything local.

      I'm running a Lenovo P51 with a Xeon, 64 GB ECC, and two 1TB NVMe drives in a zfs-raid (Hello 4GB/s disk read speeds on a laptop).

      I'm totally only replying to this because I wanted to brag about my laptop...

    4. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      If you are using a laptop as nothing more than a terminal, then what's the point of paying for an Apple product?

      If your PC or laptop is not intentionally crippled, it can do it's own number crunching. No need to treat it as a glorified VT-100.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    5. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by exomondo · · Score: 2

      A simple MacBook Pro with 8GB and an i5 is more than enough for me to load RDP, terminals for SSH, and the applications I might be using locally.

      You'd probably be just fine with a Chromebook.

      Honest question, being I'm doing 100% of my development on remote machines either at the data center or in the cloud, how many people require actual big horsepower on their machine to get their jobs done?

      You mean given what you do how many people do something else? Not everybody is managing computers, computers are used for a *lot* of things, if you're doing CAD, CAM or CAE, 3D or 2D content creation, animation, rendering, audio production, video production, gaming, etc... you're going to need performance on the local machine particularly in a laptop if you want to be mobile.

    6. Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Interesting

      i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.

      There are much bigger differences between Intel CPUs than the i[357] designation. In the same year's releases, you can easily find an i5 that runs circles around an i7. I assume you're talking about two CPUs within the same market segment, such as ultrabook or mobile workstation.

      Of course, within the same series the i[357] differentiation does have some meaning, but in my experience it's not that big a difference. To me, i3 is crippled in some obvious way, but i7 doesn't offer that much over an i5.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  2. Re:Meh by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    Obviously, 1G network is the most you will get on any laptop. 10 Gige remains clunky and expensive, and not needed for anything I can imagine doing with a laptop. That said, isn't it strange how 10G USB is already shipping on mid-priced desktops, but consumer Ethernet is still stuck at turn-of-the-century. What is the path forward, 10 Gige USB dongles?

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  3. Re:Thinner doesn't appeal to me by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I want a laptop with a DVD drive

    You would be a small minority. USB memory stick replaced DVD long ago for nearly all consumer devices, with higher capacity, higher speed and better form factor. Blu-ray will be the last gasp for optical media, and then only for old-school home theatres. When that finally peters out, optical media will be as dead as tape.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  4. Re: Meh by Type44Q · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not to mention, a proper "pro-grade" laptop should have at least two connections to AC power, for redundancy.

  5. battery life? by jkajala · · Score: 2

    Hope the battery life is dramatically improved. System76 laptop are (or at least have been) based on Clevo laptops which have poor battery life.

  6. Price by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Informative

    Price is $1599. Not out of line if the quality is there. A bit of a surprise to see the VGA connector, but there are still a lot of VGA projectors out there for the road warriors among us. I guess, this looks like worth the money compared to the usual flimsy ultrabooks that sell for a similar price. And Apple... got an expensive one here with a display that developed white blotches all over it. Apparently common, and Apple tries to blame users. Rejected, permanently.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    1. Re:Price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Damn, it's everything I wish the MacBook Pro was and considerably cheaper: more powerful and upgradeable, includes common interface connectors... if only it ran OS X.

      I'm not desperate for a new MBP yet, but since Apple switched to all-soldered/all-glued/zero upgrade potential and then added the crappy butterfly keyboard and touchbar, I have zero incentive to replace my current MBP with a new one. I might have considered Win7 when it comes time to retire the MBP, but there's no way I'll willingly use Win8/Win10 as my primary OS. I don't want to encourage anyone by buying a machine that's pre-infected with Windows even if it's immediately nuked & paved with Linux, so maybe it's time to start looking at these other outfits...

  7. Re:Thinner doesn't appeal to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The easy solution to this is to have an external USB DVD drive for those increasingly rare occasions when you need to read/load/write optical media. I opted for this years ago and still have the ultraslim external DVD drive tucked away... It comes out of the drawer maybe once or twice per year now.... at most.

  8. without updates by misu124 · · Score: 4, Informative

    System76 rejected to support LVFS for firmware updates https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsi...

  9. Nope. by LaughingRadish · · Score: 2

    No optical bay, no mobile phone radio, no smart card reader, no 7-row keyboard, no middle mouse button, volume controls crammed into a shift on the function keys. The article doesn't show the keyboard or monitor, which are extremely important when selecting a laptop. I found shots of it elsewhere at https://system76.com/guides/or.... There's just not a lot there that isn't different from any other laptop.

  10. Numeric keypad? by Shompol · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do we really need numeric keypad? I haven't touched it in the past 20 years. I learned about it by accident: https://www.amazon.com/967428-... -- a separate numeric keypad ended up never being used. It's just there to create clutter and make finding the Enter key difficult.

    1. Re:Numeric keypad? by jon3k · · Score: 2

      Do we really need numeric keypad? I haven't touched it in the past 20 years.

      As someone who types about three hundred IP addresses per day - dear god yes, please keep the numeric keypad. Now with that said, there are plenty of options that do not include a number pad, and I don't think having options is a bad thing. And for what it's worth at home I use an 87U tenkeyless with external 23U tenkeypad.