14 ms·

Figure I might as well drop a quick review after 2 years with the lemur pro 11 Pros: * Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with o

• prmoustache 3y ago
  > Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. I think any laptop sold in the last 4 or 5 years or so is plugged and charged with an usb-c cable and can be docked that way.
  • jhtrgefh 3y ago
    you'd think so, but my two year old msi delta 15 gaming laptop can't. it has a 240w barrel plug and two usb-c ports. one usb-c port can be used for displayport, neither for charging.
    • all2 3y ago
      Arguably it needs that 240W barrel plug. My current business class laptop also has one of those barrel plugs.
    • vondur 3y ago
      Yeah. That’s over the power limit that USB-C can deliver. We have some Dell 17.3 inch laptops with discrete GPU’s that are like that.
  • bitwize 3y ago
    Any of the super-thin ones, sure. But there are portable workstations and gaming rigs still hench enough to need a floor wart.
• gizzlon 3y ago
  Agree with your pros, but not your cons. Mine is a bit newer, so it might be a bit different (?). Feel the trackpad and screens are totally fine. (Although low res for the 13' version). Very happy with mine, specially how small and light it is. This is my 3rd "ultra portable", and it might be the lightest one yet.
  • discmonkey 3y ago
    Glad you are! I don't want to be overly negative. I am comparing my M2 work macbook trackpad with my 2 year old lemur pro trackpad - it's not really a fair comparison. The problem is that the pricing is similar enough where it's hard to justify the hardware downgrade. I should also mention that my free time to work on projects has dramatically decreased in the past few years, so I am valuing the ability to seamlessly switch between my desktop and laptop on personal projects less than I used to.
• chrismorgan 3y ago
  > * Nice keyboard Hang on, I thought this was still Clevo stuff. I bought a Clevo-ODM laptop a decade or so ago, the keyboard was atrocious in feel (no click left at all on most keys, just linearish sponginess) and activation (e.g. Space was quite difficult to activate, A would very regularly double-activate) within two years. And I know I’ve heard similar complaints regularly since then from others.
  • discmonkey 3y ago
    yeah - as seen from a few comments on my post, everyone has different opinions on non-objective stuff related to keyboard/trackpad. I feel like the keyboard is pretty responsive while the trackpad isn't, but the only way for you to know is to have tried it I guess.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Keyboards don't have to be non objective. I think everyone agrees that ThinkPad keyboards were great (though since the T14s gen3 they too have lost their quality)
      • powersnail 3y ago
        A friend back in college absolutely hated the ThinkPad keyboards, (thought they were too deep and bouncy) and loved Macbook's butterfly keyboard when it came out, marveling at the short travel and crisp feeling of it. It's indeed quite subjective.
        • wkat4242 3y ago
          Ugh, I considered those butterfly keyboards literally unusable. I refused a new Macbook from work over it.
    • chrismorgan 3y ago
      I’m not talking about subjective things, I’m talking about keyboards objectively wearing out 3–10× as fast as any reputable brand’s. I’ve deliberately filtered for objective cases like my own, including querying specifically on the nature of what was bad in at least a couple of cases. I’m not talking about opinions, I’m talking about a keyboard becoming decidedly spongy in less than one year (compare the feel of the least- and most-frequently-used keys—on ones like ASUS and Microsoft, it’s taken much longer than that before I can readily discern any difference), and and almost uselessly bad within two years, in ways that other companies’ haven’t failed in four years (… though others haven’t been without their problems, but I’ve never had one get anywhere near as bad in general in three or four years as the Clevo one was after a little over one year).
• barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Use gnome and your IDEs keyboard shortcuts and you'll almost never need to touch your trackpad. Until it's time to use a web app anyway
• jbeard4 3y ago
  Agree, battery life is atrocious. I get typically get 1.5-2 hours on a charge, after 2.5 years of ownership. I always have anxiety about plugging it in. It's the biggest problem with this machine. Other than that, I have been very happy with it. Keyboard, trackpad, screen - all adequate for me. In every way other than the battery, it pretty much gets out of the way and gets the job done.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    I wonder why. I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell Latitude and battery life hasn't been an issue for me. I probably don't really do power-hungry stuff but just browsing, editing code, ssh, email, etc. it's been fine.
    • all2 3y ago
      I think this might have to do with aggressive CPU throttling and backlight brightness. I've noticed both of those play a pretty big role in the discharge duration of my Dell Latitude.
  • ekimekim 3y ago
    I've had the complete opposite experience (I replaced their Pop OS with Arch Linux). With light usage I get about 10 hours, if I'm playing games or something then yeah it drops a bit but not that much. It easily lasts the duration of an intercontinental plane flight which is my primary use-case. Maybe it's because I don't actually use it all that much, so my battery hasn't had many cycles put on it. I only use my laptop for travel, normally I have a desktop. That's why I went for a small, highly portable model.
    • conor- 3y ago
      My experience is the same. I replaced Pop with Arch running a pretty low-resource desktop setup (i3 and generally lightweight programs) and I can get roughly 10 hours with very heavy usage: Firefox with a handful of windows/dozens and dozens of tabs open, Docker, Spotify, etc. Not terribly impressive compared to something like the newer Apple silicon MacBooks but also not terribly offensive considering I don't often work far from an available power source for super long stretches.
• dooglius 3y ago
  Re: Battery life, are you using stock Pop OS or did you put something else on? I have also gotten bad battery life but I'm pretty sure it is because I installed over it; the battery life claimns come as a result of power-saving features built into Pop OS.
  • jbeard4 3y ago
    I have been using stock PopOS, and my battery life has been poor.
• sdtrhub892 3y ago
  >Most things "just work", which you only appreciate after working with other linux laptops. For example, I can seamlessly plug this laptop in place of my work macbook with just one usb-c cable. That being said I think things have generally gotten better in the space so this may not be as much of a selling point anymore. Additionally this laptop doesn't have an nvidia gpu, which means its job is easier. This might be your experience with System76, but it hasn't been mine. My Adder WS had infuriating software problems. • It would regularly hang when disconnecting from AC. The only fix I ever found was a hard-boot. • When disconnecting from AC, the CPU would sometimes get stuck at 800 MHz. The only procedure I found to reliably fix this was to reconnect to power, wait a few seconds, disconnect, wait a few seconds, and then reconnect. • It would regularly fail to wake from sleep. • The screen randomly flashed bright white when suspended, so I had to get in the habit of shutting the lid at night to keep it from waking me up. • The fan would get stuck at 100% even when the temperatures were at 30°. Fixing this required sleeping and waking the machine. Maybe some of the problems were caused by Nvidia, but I don't much care. The fact remains that I've been using Linux laptops since I was in high school and I've never had problems like these. Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora all worked well on Dell, Framework, IBM, and Lenovo hardware (Yoga, not Thinkpad), as well as on my home-built desktops with Nvidia GPUs. Also some hardware problems: • The barrel connector was cheap and the power cable would regularly fall out. This exacerbated the software problems. The machine would get stuck at 800 MHz at least once a day and hang every few days. • The machine was generally cheaply-built. The rubber feet fell off, the case creaked and flexed, several keys cracked, small plastic bits broke off, etc. Credit where it is due, System76 support was responsive and replaced the mainboard promptly and free of charge. But that didn't fix the problems, so not all that much credit is due. I wound up installing Windows on my System76 and giving it to my cousin as a gaming machine. I owned it less than two years. >Moral points for supporting a small company that focuses on security (whether this is actually significant is up to the reader) System76 rebadges Clevo machines and isn't very forthright about it. I find that questionable enough to outweigh my preference for small businesses.
  • jklinger410 3y ago
    Want to also add that unless you want to stick with Pop OS!, custom firmware will need to be installed, that custom firmware conflicts with packages from many distros. Without that custom firmware, your fans won't scale properly and you will struggle with hardware sleep, battery life, performance in general, etc. Ironic that distro hopping on a linux-first laptop becomes difficult. But, priorities, I guess. Maybe being stuck on Pop isn't an issue for some, but for those of us who don't like a UI locked in brown and teal that isn't being updated because they are writing their own entire (also ugly) DE, it is a problem.
• darthrupert 3y ago
  Usb-C connections being unstable in Linux is definitely still a thing. My Asus laptop (amd cpu/gpu) works about 50% of the time, and the other 50 it keeps blinking the monitor on and off. I can fix this by plugging in hdmi first, then back to usb-c. Some sort of hardware reset gets executed that way, I suppose.
• jklinger410 3y ago
  > As mentioned no gpu, while costing about the same as razor laptop. Consider the lack of GPU a blessing. You absolutely do not want a hybrid NVIDIA GPU laptop, unless you want to sit with it plugged in at a desk while the fans try and keep the GPU from melting through the case. Worse battery life. With absolutely not a single other tangible benefit. Unless you are using the GPU for machine learning or w/e, in that case, the only utility it has.
  • ipdashc 3y ago
    Interesting, I've found hybrid GPU laptops to be pretty practical. I've had two over the years and on my newer one I installed PopOS, and there's a setting which puts it in hybrid mode, so by default the discrete GPU stays off, but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU. When I'm not running a game, I get plenty of battery life out of it (4-6 hours or so?) and when I run a game I get decent performance. Exactly what I wanted. I haven't tried ML yet but I don't see why it'd be any different.
    • jklinger410 3y ago
      > but you can run a program with some environmental vars and get it to use the Nvidia GPU Other than for gaming, which isn't worth it to do on a laptop anyway, I have seen no reason for this. Most discrete GPUs do a better job with drawing UI elements than a GPU anyway.
• acomjean 3y ago
  I have a system pangolin (AMD 6800) and I can get 5-8 hours routinely. Daily driving for work and it’s been great. My 6 year old oryx pro gets about 2 hours (on nvidia). It can game though… (steam is kinda amazing) I really like matt screens which all these laptops have.
• ostenning 3y ago
  > Most things "just work" I find it pretty hilarious that in 2023 this can still be a selling point. Don't get me wrong I ran arch on a thinkpad for a long time so I can appreciate the statement, but now I just use a macbook and get my work done
  • culopatin 3y ago
    These are product for certain type of people. I could’ve been that person maybe 10 years ago, or whenever I thought compiling Gentoo on a Pentium 4 was worth my time. But as I got busier with life, that opinion changed. To have to pay for a product that “mostly” works? (That doesn’t really once you read more details about it)
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Hate to break it to you, but the Pentium 4 was released in the year 2000.
      • CRConrad 3y ago
        Yeah, that's probably why GP was compiling Gentoo on it ten years later: By then it had become a little too tired for Windows, but still quite viable with a crisp Linux distro on it. In case you thought you saw some discrepancy there, I think you're mistaken.
    • sgarland 3y ago
      I only had a P3, which is why I thought it was a good use of my time to set up distcc with the other computer in the house, a Celeron 333. Funny how your priorities change over time.
    • red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Compiling Gentoo on a Pentium D was a great way to keep my dorm room nice and toasty