9 ms·

Is this system better than, say, Lenovo Legion 5 or HP Envy, they have similar price, are those System76 laptop offer better build quality, etc?

samstave 6y ago
I have owned multiple S76 machines - the machine was built by Clio? The guts were good, but the case was chintsy. I had four of these laptops - and on ALL 4 they would have screws come loose and fall out inside the case. You could hear it rattling around when you turned the machine. Two of them had one type of connector for the screen and the other two had a different connector - One got fried and on the other I broke the screen on - so I couldn't harvest parts from one to the other. S76 wanted $90 for a new charger after one of mine failed. I have an HP Omen laptop as my primary machine now - here is what is cool: I had an HP Omen and it failed to power on one day - so I contacted support and they had me send them the machine - instead of fixing it, they sent me a brand new Omen which was way better than the failed unit. The design is super elegant, and it has dual NVME slots, so I have dual drives in it. The screen is matte so no glossy reflections like my macbooks have... Yeah - I think I'll stick with Omens for the foreseeable future. HP's support was FANTASTIC. When my macbook pro caught fire in my sleep and nearly killed me (it was laying on my bed and I fell asleep watching a movie and the machine caught fire - something that that model was recalled for) I took it to Apple's main store in San Francisco - and they kept it for two months "analyzing it" then came back and told me that even though it was a safety issue and the machine was under recall for CATCHING FIRE, they found that one of my moisture sensors had been triggered and therefore, they were not going to replace, fix or help me. (I had spilled a small bit of water on the keyboard many month prior to the machine catching fire) Then they tried to sell me a new machine, or have them "replace the machine for $1,500" A total joke. Ill never buy another apple machine nor a s76 machine again. HP support is AMAZING. Also - When HP bought Compaq - we had a bunch of Compaq/HP servers back in 1998 - and the support back then on those servers was top notch - and the HW design was as well. I used to rebuild those servers in minutes in the literal dark. All the Sun servers we had, like the 650s would bitch if their case was even slightly off center and would refuse to boot.
- robotbikes 6y ago
  I had good experiences with System76 support. I've bought 2 laptops off of eBay and had no problem getting support even though I wasn't the original owner since the original owner bought the 2 year support package. If I had a loose screw I would have removed the case and found it. They're reasonably able to diy and your warrant isn't voided just because you replaced the RAM. Apple support has gotten horrible based upon anecdotal experiences friends and family have had. The build quality isn't the greatest but having everything work well under Linux and be supported is a good thing. I gifted my Oryx Pro to my step-kid who uses it to play games etc. Linux battery/power management has never been great as this isn't the focus of most kernel developers and there is a lot of microcode optimizations that might be possible.
  - samstave 6y ago
    I opened them up. I spoke to S76 support and they charged me $9 for a new screw kit... I am quite familiar with breaking down/working on all types of machines... they had lock-tight paint on the screws, which didnt work. and the sad thing was that the connector type between the two broken machines had changed, even though they were the same model "Gazelle" - they are also a super pain in the ass to work on. The screen connector requires you to basically dismantle the entire machine... Obviously this machine was a white-label Clio machine, and S76 has more recently started designing their own machines (supposedly - so I dont know how much of that design is in-house vs them spec'ing things out to other design services...
- easton 6y ago
  > HP support is AMAZING. Can anyone else back this up? Has HP changed? I've sworn off HP products (both enterprise and consumer) because of their terrible customer service and documentation. Dell/Lenovo always offer something very similar in price and performance, and their enterprise support is fine to great.
  - samstave 6y ago
    I might have just hit the HP Support Jackpot. But it was hands down the best experience I have had between machine manufacturers - HP/Sun/S76/Dell/Apple etc... I was completely dumbfounded when HP just said "we are going to send you a new machine, at no cost, please pick from this list... And I picked this dope Omen machine and when I opened it up to look at the guts and put in a second SSD, I was taken aback by the elegant symmetry of the design. The only downside is that even though the sound is "bang & olufsen" - its a bit too quiet. However, the support guy on my case was dope, and I love this machine
lhl 6y ago
If you're running Linux, I'd recommend avoiding the Envy (and maybe all HP laptops) as they typically don't have S3 support: https://www.linux.org/threads/acpi-bios-error-and-suspend-dont-work-on-hp-elitebook-g7.30870/ https://www.linux.org/threads/acpi-bios-error-and-suspend-do... A Legion 5 will have an Nvidia dGPU, so you have to decide if you want to run PRIME or something else and see how the external monitor outputs are muxed if that's important to you.

samstave 6y ago

I have owned multiple S76 machines - the machine was built by Clio? The guts were good, but the case was chintsy. I had four of these laptops - and on ALL 4 they would have screws come loose and fall out inside the case. You could hear it rattling around when you turned the machine. Two of them had one type of connector for the screen and the other two had a different connector - One got fried and on the other I broke the screen on - so I couldn't harvest parts from one to the other. S76 wanted $90 for a new charger after one of mine failed. I have an HP Omen laptop as my primary machine now - here is what is cool: I had an HP Omen and it failed to power on one day - so I contacted support and they had me send them the machine - instead of fixing it, they sent me a brand new Omen which was way better than the failed unit. The design is super elegant, and it has dual NVME slots, so I have dual drives in it. The screen is matte so no glossy reflections like my macbooks have... Yeah - I think I'll stick with Omens for the foreseeable future. HP's support was FANTASTIC. When my macbook pro caught fire in my sleep and nearly killed me (it was laying on my bed and I fell asleep watching a movie and the machine caught fire - something that that model was recalled for) I took it to Apple's main store in San Francisco - and they kept it for two months "analyzing it" then came back and told me that even though it was a safety issue and the machine was under recall for CATCHING FIRE, they found that one of my moisture sensors had been triggered and therefore, they were not going to replace, fix or help me. (I had spilled a small bit of water on the keyboard many month prior to the machine catching fire) Then they tried to sell me a new machine, or have them "replace the machine for $1,500" A total joke. Ill never buy another apple machine nor a s76 machine again. HP support is AMAZING. Also - When HP bought Compaq - we had a bunch of Compaq/HP servers back in 1998 - and the support back then on those servers was top notch - and the HW design was as well. I used to rebuild those servers in minutes in the literal dark. All the Sun servers we had, like the 650s would bitch if their case was even slightly off center and would refuse to boot.

robotbikes 6y ago
I had good experiences with System76 support. I've bought 2 laptops off of eBay and had no problem getting support even though I wasn't the original owner since the original owner bought the 2 year support package. If I had a loose screw I would have removed the case and found it. They're reasonably able to diy and your warrant isn't voided just because you replaced the RAM. Apple support has gotten horrible based upon anecdotal experiences friends and family have had. The build quality isn't the greatest but having everything work well under Linux and be supported is a good thing. I gifted my Oryx Pro to my step-kid who uses it to play games etc. Linux battery/power management has never been great as this isn't the focus of most kernel developers and there is a lot of microcode optimizations that might be possible.
- samstave 6y ago
  I opened them up. I spoke to S76 support and they charged me $9 for a new screw kit... I am quite familiar with breaking down/working on all types of machines... they had lock-tight paint on the screws, which didnt work. and the sad thing was that the connector type between the two broken machines had changed, even though they were the same model "Gazelle" - they are also a super pain in the ass to work on. The screen connector requires you to basically dismantle the entire machine... Obviously this machine was a white-label Clio machine, and S76 has more recently started designing their own machines (supposedly - so I dont know how much of that design is in-house vs them spec'ing things out to other design services...
easton 6y ago
> HP support is AMAZING. Can anyone else back this up? Has HP changed? I've sworn off HP products (both enterprise and consumer) because of their terrible customer service and documentation. Dell/Lenovo always offer something very similar in price and performance, and their enterprise support is fine to great.
- samstave 6y ago
  I might have just hit the HP Support Jackpot. But it was hands down the best experience I have had between machine manufacturers - HP/Sun/S76/Dell/Apple etc... I was completely dumbfounded when HP just said "we are going to send you a new machine, at no cost, please pick from this list... And I picked this dope Omen machine and when I opened it up to look at the guts and put in a second SSD, I was taken aback by the elegant symmetry of the design. The only downside is that even though the sound is "bang & olufsen" - its a bit too quiet. However, the support guy on my case was dope, and I love this machine

lhl 6y ago

If you're running Linux, I'd recommend avoiding the Envy (and maybe all HP laptops) as they typically don't have S3 support: https://www.linux.org/threads/acpi-bios-error-and-suspend-dont-work-on-hp-elitebook-g7.30870/ https://www.linux.org/threads/acpi-bios-error-and-suspend-do... A Legion 5 will have an Nvidia dGPU, so you have to decide if you want to run PRIME or something else and see how the external monitor outputs are muxed if that's important to you.