[atomicnumber3]

I had one of their systems, a gazelle professional 4 if I recall right, it must've been around, oh say, 2013?

And it was quite a nice machine, great linux compat, the 4-core i7 in it performed quite well and it let me load it up with RAM. It wasn't too heavy or anything and I liked the display.

But the battery life. Good lord. 45 minutes, 55 if I messed and fussed with power settings and such. Basically gaming-laptop-tier "more like a UPS than a battery" battery performance.

My next laptop was a thinkpad T440s and it had similarly good linux compat and it performed much better for battery life - I got an i5 in that one and saw 8ish hours of battery life, and it had a hot-swap feature where I could swap in a big-ass battery once I depleted the slim one and get an additional 20(!!) something hours of battery life on a single boot. Great for car trips and heavy all-day use like at conferences.

But then superfish and I swore Lenovo had lost me for-ever.

So my current laptop is an XPS13 and I get 8-10ish hours off one charge with it, and it is super thin and the only Linux issue I've had is needing a very new kernel when I bought it new a year and a half or so ago, new enough that Linux Mint didn't ship it OOTB and the live ISO couldn't get WiFi, so I installed Arch instead, where their latest install image did indeed have a sufficiently new kernel.

So I'm a happy XPS user right now and I've found I like the 13" form factor. Would I be disappointed on battery performance if I went with a system76 machine for my next laptop?

[acidburnNSA]

I am on a Lemur Pro from them, and it gets 14 hours of battery life.

[arthurcolle]

That's amazing. Are you for real?

[acidburnNSA]

Yeah, I find it's totally as advertised. Charged it up for a flight last week. Worked the whole time. Turned it on in the hotel afterwards and it had 70% left.

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

[mattl]

How’s the rest of it? The trackpad, the sound, microphones, webcam, etc? If I had one of these would I need a bunch of external stuff to make it decent?

[acidburnNSA]

Depends on your tastes I guess, but for me none of them have been a problem.

I do usually have an external mouse on my desk when I'm using it at home, but the trackpad has been fine on the go. I've never noticed a problem with it.

Speakers are fine or hearing things in videos, etc., but I generally put on bluetooth headphones and/or a stereo system to listen to music. Bluetooth connects within 2 seconds of me turning on my Bose headphones. I think a lot of people don't like the speakers on this thing, and they're admittedly not as good as my VCR-sized Dell 2011 XPS with built-in minisubwoofer.

Webcam works great, but won't win any awards.

Screen brightness is good. Look and feel is good. Weight is excellent. Keyboard backlight is great. USB-C charging is great. Endurance seems good (I've had mine daily driving since 2020).

The only issue I've had was early one when I typed one key sequence too fast, sometimes there would be an extra letter thrown in there, but they fixed it in firmware.

[seibelj]

The only issue I’ve had is randomly the trackpad will stop working, then I reboot. I think I also made a few tweaks a while ago to some config for them. Otherwise, top notch machine.

[mattl]

That’s good to hear. In the past their laptops have been rebadged affairs and not great while their desktops were very solid.

[zdragnar]

Each of their lines are geared towards a specific market. The Lemur is the "portable" model, where weight and battery life are the top priority. They do also emphasize that it is a capable device in its own right, but it has a slightly smaller screen and lower max specs than the more powerful lines (14", up to 40gb ram vs 64 for others).

I wouldn't doubt that the claims are real; I can easily go a whole day of programming without needing a recharge on my lg gram, which was likewise advertised as having oodles of hours. If I'm careful with my usage, I could easily push 16. As it is, I've got two instances of chrome (different profiles), three instances of VS code, a server running, docker and postgres in the background, sitting at around 48% battery remaining and I haven't plugged in to charge in about 8 hours or so.

[hanifvirani]

I have a XPS 13 and I had arch on it but it would drain power while sleeping. The laptop would be dead overnight. Tried a lot of things but couldn't fix it. Had to go back to Windows.

[smallerfish]

XPS 13 w/ Kubuntu and I don't have this issue.

[atomicnumber3]

I don't have it either, but I have heard of it. It's something to do with the kernel not being set to allow the s2idle power level. I don't know what triggers it, but setting some kernel flag forces it to show that sleep level which will then be used for sleeping.

A such-afflicted laptop will be missing the s2idle that you see querying /sys here: https://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/sleep-modes.html