[mekoka]

I've used 2 System76 laptops in 5 years. I would buy again and would recommend them. They're not as fancy looking as the more mainstream brands, but they do the job quite well for their price tag (approx 700-800$ for a Gazelle). They come in various size and weight.

The first one I bought was a Pangolin that I used everyday for work and play, in an average of 12hrs/day, and lasted 4 years, before the display started to have problems, at which point I bought another one.

Most things work as expected on delivery, usb ports, camera, mic, audio jacks, hdmi, etc. The laptop itself feels pretty solid.

The low points: speakers are crap (I use headphones), touchpad is crap (I use a mouse), not the most innovative design (I once had someone commenting to me that my laptop must be pretty old, it was only 2 years old).

[japhyr]

What was your experience with battery life? I had a Pangolin around 2010 that I loved, but the battery would only last 1.5-2 hours.

I have a Thinkpad 430s with a bay battery now, which gets 4-6 hours of battery life. I would have a hard time going back to a machine with a battery life much shorter than that.