Hacker News Reader

Comment by cik | Hacker News Reader

I've never had a good System76 experience - over a decade of System76 use. I've repeatedly asked to have them purchased, merely to help the community, and every single one has disappointed.

The build quality is such rubbish, and you begin to feel it almost immediately. I'm careful with my kit, not terribly hard on anything and I manage to flake bits of plastic or metal off each System76. They've always been in neoprene cases within a laptop backpack - because I'm that paranoid. They're just rubbish.

At this point Ubuntu (or Mint, or Debian!) on Alienware is my laptop of choice, and I run those Kingdel desktops.

View on HN

> The build quality is such rubbish, and you begin to feel it almost immediately.

I would really like to buy another System76 laptop, except for the build quality.

PRO: Linux worked out of the box, the price/performance was much better than a MacBook, and the customer support was great.

CON: IIRC went through 4 keyboards and multiple other part replacements.

Afterwards, I bought a ~2015 MacBook Pro, installed Ubuntu, and it stills runs great.

I want to chime in a contrasting opinion here. I had an old Galago that I adored. Came with Ubuntu, swapped that to Arch then stayed happy with it for years! It was a plastic frame, but it was tough enough to shove in a backpack and take longboarding. After 3 years, the Ethernet port's spring clip finally snapped off (user error), but still worked. I also accidentally bent the audio jack, but it still worked. It finally "died" when my pup knocked it off the couch with the charger still plugged in. The charger plug, still in the port, hit the floor at just the right angle to snap the port's inner prong off making it impossible to charge. I didn't notice until the next day when the battery used it's last bits of juice then shut down.

Very happy with my System76 purchase. But! I've only ever used the one device.

You're aware they're all relabeled Chinese hardware yes?

That's true of System76's laptops, but part of their pitch for Thelio is that it marks a shift towards them doing their own design and manufacturing in the US. See https://blog.system76.com/post/179592732883/system76-on-us-m... for details.

Are there any computer brands that aren't manufactured in China?

They mean that System76 doesn't use an OEM, they use a white box ODM. You can buy the exact same laptop from several different companies.

I suspect they’re selling rebadged clevo laptops like almost everyone

This idea that they just re-label an existing laptop and call it a day really is not accurate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...

I wanted to add my experiences with System76 too, which agrees with the parent comment and disagrees with yours.

I’ve owned a large desktop and laptop from System76 and had tons of issues with both, along with consistently awful customer service, needing to argue for example that I should not have to pay shipping fees when returning the desktop that arrived with a non-functional motherboard when it was first shipped to me, and then later also having to argue for System76 to manage doorside pick-up for me to mailback the return (I live in a city without a car and no way to physically carry a huge desktop PC to the nearest UPS store, and I’m not paying for a taxi to mail back something that was broken on arrival).

I’ve since switched to Lenovo laptops and just reformat at install Ubuntu on them. Much simpler process, much better customer service.

I've heard similar complaints from others. It would be great is someone from System76 could join the conversation and have a spin-less discussion on the topic.

Is Alienware a good choice for laptops now? I’d always heard they were overpriced for the hardware you get.

I would recommend avoiding laptops with nvidia cards if you are planning to run linux. They are a big hassle due to bad driver support.

Only if you HAVE to use the open source driver. Running linux with the driver from NVIDIA themselves works really well these days.

Then again, it’s proprietary software, and much of the reason for using a System76-esque machine is for the FOSS-all-the-way-down (as much as is practical on modern-ish hardware).

Not only that but when it comes to Linux the FOSS-only systems are also easier to install and maintain.

NVIDIA driver is in the repositories and is installed just as easily as the rest of a modern repository-based distro. It literally just works.

Two of my last three laptops have had nVidia graphics and neither of those have had problems with the nVidia drivers; the newest one, a Lenovo T480 with an MX150, is completely fine with Nouveau.

The really big problem are the systems that don't work well enough with nouveau. If you are unlucky you can even end up with a computer that only boots to a black screen, which requires some nomodeset trickery to install the proprietary graphics.

That's true. My go-to is to do nouveau.modeset=0 on any machine with even a hint of trouble, which gets me where I need to go.

Currently on that T480 I use the Nouveau drivers with the built-in panel plus two external 1440p monitors via a Lenovo Thunderbolt dock and it's great.

I'm really happy with my Alienware 15 r4. The hardware has been great.

But I don't run Linux, so I can't speak to any hardware/driver support issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com