| Work bought us System76 Gazelle laptops [1]. Quick thoughts after six months of use, coming from a MacBook Pro user: * Chiclet keyboard feels nice to type on * Plastic fake brushed-metal case is * Battery life is about an hour, almost unusable away from a charger. If I were spending my own money on this laptop, this would be a dealbreaker. * Built-in display sucks. It's allegedly matte, but still has incredibly high reflectiveness. 1080p resolution and just okay LCD color reproduction * Fan noise is a serious issue. I made the mistake of un-muting myself on a video call while the fans were going and other people on the call immediately muted me. They thought I was in a wind tunnel. * Webcam quality is low. Video calls with an open window behind you mean you will be washed out by backlighting * Performance is great. Runs a bunch of simultaneous headless Chrome browsers in Docker and completes our unit test suite pretty quickly. * The trackpad is truly horrendous. I use tap to click on my MBP, and I had to turn that off on the Gazelle real fast. Palm rejection is nonexistent - had false clicks every 15 minutes. That is not an exaggeration. * Keyboard is backlit * USB-A, HDMI, ethernet means it's easy to use it as a desktop * Built-in speakers sound tinny and low-quality * Large and clunky, but weight isn't bad I'm torn: Ubuntu and GNU/Linux generally are excellent developer environments, but the laptop hardware is horrible. It feels like the $600 Windows machines my friends used in college. |