System76 Oryx Pro Linux Laptop is Now Thinner and Faster (betanews.com) 115
An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, System76 started to share details about its refreshed Linux-powered Oryx Pro laptop. It would be thinner and more powerful, while adding twice the battery life of its predecessor. Unfortunately, we did not yet know exactly what the laptop looked like. Today, we finally have official images. The new Oryx Pro is quite breathtaking, as it is a true Pro machine -- with the USB Type-A, Ethernet, and HDMI ports you expect -- while being just 19mm thin. It has the horsepower that power-users need, thanks to its 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-Series GPU.
Thinner doesn't appeal to me (Score:1)
System76 Oryx Pro Linux Laptop is Now Thinner and Faster
I don't want a "thinner" laptop. I want a laptop with a DVD drive, even if it makes the device slightly thicker and heavier.
(And I voted with my money last month: I purchased an HP with a DVD drive.)
Re:Thinner doesn't appeal to me (Score:4, Insightful)
I want a laptop with a DVD drive
You would be a small minority. USB memory stick replaced DVD long ago for nearly all consumer devices, with higher capacity, higher speed and better form factor. Blu-ray will be the last gasp for optical media, and then only for old-school home theatres. When that finally peters out, optical media will be as dead as tape.
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The easy solution to this is to have an external USB DVD drive for those increasingly rare occasions when you need to read/load/write optical media. I opted for this years ago and still have the ultraslim external DVD drive tucked away... It comes out of the drawer maybe once or twice per year now.... at most.
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For me, it's been something like ten years since I last used optical media for data, 5 years since running a PC game from it. Now only use it for console games and home theatre, and I'm feeling more than a bit retro there to be honest.
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So, your legacy collection. That's the point.
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You never know when you are going to come across a DVD. This is especially true if you actually travel OUTSIDE of your silicon valley cocoon.
Having a machine with what you need BUILT IN is far more portable and clunky.
A laptop is supposed to be neither of these things.
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Ok gramps.
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You're right. Lose the headphone jack!
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I don't want a "thinner" laptop. I want a laptop with a DVD drive, even if it makes the device slightly thicker and heavier.
How often do you actually use that? For me it's seldom enough that a USB2 drive works fine (I have three of them, I bought one in a store and got the other two from yard sales, so there's no worry about them failing because they're cheap... I can just bin 'em.)
No trackpoint (Score:2)
No trackpoint.
Pffffttt
I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in marketing analytics and we're constantly crunching through massive datasources which require servers/cloud-based systems to make the work and timing managable.
A simple MacBook Pro with 8GB and an i5 is more than enough for me to load RDP, terminals for SSH, and the applications I might be using locally.
Honest question, being I'm doing 100% of my development on remote machines either at the data center or in the cloud, how many people require actual big horsepower on their machine to get their jobs done?
Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 (Score:4, Informative)
Gamers... A lot of people play games on their home laptops.
Developers... i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.
Data crunching... faster CPU means faster data crunching (unless you're solely on the cloud).
MS Office... seriously, least efficient programs in the universe...
Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 (Score:4, Interesting)
i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.
There are much bigger differences between Intel CPUs than the i[357] designation. In the same year's releases, you can easily find an i5 that runs circles around an i7. I assume you're talking about two CPUs within the same market segment, such as ultrabook or mobile workstation.
Of course, within the same series the i[357] differentiation does have some meaning, but in my experience it's not that big a difference. To me, i3 is crippled in some obvious way, but i7 doesn't offer that much over an i5.
Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 (Score:4, Informative)
I use a "gaming" laptop for my live shows of algorithmic art. I can do basic stuff on Intel integrated GPUs, but for decent resolutions and smooth framerates I need a real GPU. For a short while I lugged around a Mini-ITX machine, partly because I was worried about cooling and noise.
In fact, while the Oryx Pro looks like a dream machine on paper (I obviously use Linux), I would still be worried about cooling. The "business" laptops I've used so far don't have enough cooling for all their CPU and GPU power, and they end up throttling the clocks in high loads over more than a few minutes.
Re:I've come to expect LESS machine in 2018 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Linux Consultant/Instructor and often have a need for running many (many) virtual machines simultaneously as I simulate a clients setup and possible setups. Sometimes for larger projects I'll run VMs from a datacenter but often it's much faster and more convenient to have everything local.
I'm running a Lenovo P51 with a Xeon, 64 GB ECC, and two 1TB NVMe drives in a zfs-raid (Hello 4GB/s disk read speeds on a laptop).
I'm totally only replying to this because I wanted to brag about my laptop...
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I'm running a Lenovo P51 with a Xeon, 64 GB ECC, and two 1TB NVMe drives in a zfs-raid (Hello 4GB/s disk read speeds on a laptop).
That's a big......drive.
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At work we are using some Lenovo P50s, nice beast, very simmilar to your setup, only difference is ours have dual graphic card: the intel factory and some nVidia(forgot model). This laptops are awesome, we run mostly some CRM/BPM crossover product which eats RAM and CPU cycles as if they were to be the last on planet earth.
Only drawback from this Lenovo models are their SSD: out of 11 laptops on our project, 10 had to be replaced(number 11 is mine, I'm still waiting my doom)
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So I'm guessing that your Facebook news feed regularly shows ads for Anstle machines, amirite?
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If you are using a laptop as nothing more than a terminal, then what's the point of paying for an Apple product?
If your PC or laptop is not intentionally crippled, it can do it's own number crunching. No need to treat it as a glorified VT-100.
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A simple MacBook Pro with 8GB and an i5 is more than enough for me to load RDP, terminals for SSH, and the applications I might be using locally.
You'd probably be just fine with a Chromebook.
Honest question, being I'm doing 100% of my development on remote machines either at the data center or in the cloud, how many people require actual big horsepower on their machine to get their jobs done?
You mean given what you do how many people do something else? Not everybody is managing computers, computers are used for a *lot* of things, if you're doing CAD, CAM or CAE, 3D or 2D content creation, animation, rendering, audio production, video production, gaming, etc... you're going to need performance on the local machine particularly in a laptop if you want to be mobile.
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Chromebooks don't run Office and I need to operate in a Windows world.
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Unfortunately, Microsoft only supports their Mobile Office applications in the Google Playstore, not the actual and, in my case, I need the actual ones.
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Then I'm not 100% sure why you've got a Mac... you can get far better machines for far less money that'll run Windows and do exactly what you need.
My Windows laptop of choice these days in a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. It's really small, portable, fast and does everything I throw at it well enough. It's also a shedload cheaper than a Macbook Pro and has a fantastic touchscreen (which yes, I use... with the stylus as well for handwritten notes in OneNote).
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1. It's a company machine.
2. When I did get the inferior PC from the office, I immediately disabled the touchscreen; it was awful.
3. I use a Mac at home and I'm more comfortable with it after 10 years of being off Windows.
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Chromebooks don't run Office and I need to operate in a Windows world.
Sure they do, previously they used to only run the mobile version of Office but since the end of last year they've been running the full Office 365 suite.
But you're reinforcing my point that just because a particular machine might be fine for somebody it doesn't mean that's right/enough for everybody.
Data cost for RDP and SSH away from Wi-Fi (Score:2)
A simple MacBook Pro with 8GB and an i5 is more than enough for me to load RDP, terminals for SSH, and the applications I might be using locally.
Ideally, you'd be making the most of what you can run locally. Because otherwise, how much data does your use of RDP, SSH, X11-over-SSH, and VNC-over-SSH amount to per month? And how much would such a cellular data plan cost? Not everybody happens to live in an area where city buses offer Wi-Fi at no additional charge to paying riders.
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A "simple" machine with 8GB RAM for ssh and RDP. I must be getting really old.
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Battery Life (Score:1)
Does the battery life still suck? That was the biggest problem with System76 machines.
battery life? (Score:2)
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The 44 W/hr battery seems adequate for this form factor, since the i3 is not exactly a fire breathing beast.
Price (Score:4, Informative)
Price is $1599. [system76.com] Not out of line if the quality is there. A bit of a surprise to see the VGA connector, but there are still a lot of VGA projectors out there for the road warriors among us. I guess, this looks like worth the money compared to the usual flimsy ultrabooks that sell for a similar price. And Apple... got an expensive one here with a display that developed white blotches all over it. Apparently common, and Apple tries to blame users. Rejected, permanently.
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Damn, it's everything I wish the MacBook Pro was and considerably cheaper: more powerful and upgradeable, includes common interface connectors... if only it ran OS X.
I'm not desperate for a new MBP yet, but since Apple switched to all-soldered/all-glued/zero upgrade potential and then added the crappy butterfly keyboard and touchbar, I have zero incentive to replace my current MBP with a new one. I might have considered Win7 when it comes time to retire the MBP, but there's no way I'll willingly use Win8/Wi
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Almost ditto here. Apple is headed in the wrong direction, and I'm slowly planning my Linux migration, hopefully complete by the time my current MBP dies. I guess I'm still silently hoping Apple makes good hardware again.
In terms of expandability, the Pismo PBG3 was probably the best. Two expansion bays (maybe one was battery only), cardbus slot, 2xfirewire, Infrared, upgradable RAM, CPU, and HD. The generation before that was OK if you had older peripherals.
Those were the days.
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Meh. System76 doesn't have the "courage" that Apple does. /s
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This will allow you to start building your linux workflow tools, applications, processes, etc while still being able to instantly switch back to OS X if you get stuck on something, without any serious interruption. So you can decide o
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Run Plasma 5 with Latte Dock. You'll barely notice the difference between it and OS X.
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This actually looks quite good for the price. The only thing I'd upgrade is the SSD to NVMe, 250GB is fine for mobile.
Side note: Why can't I get it with no O/S? I don't want Pop_OS or Ubuntu.
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Side note: Why can't I get it with no O/S? I don't want Pop_OS or Ubuntu.
I assume because it's cheaper to just have them all imaged. Might be a supply chain thing? They can get them imaged at/near manufactur, then shipped in bulk to for distribution. So by time they're ready to be ordered and delivered, they've all already got an OS on them.
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I have a system76 laptop with a 4000 series i7 still running strong. My only gripe is it doesn't have a dedicated vid card. Otherwise it's handled compilation, transcoding, and VM's very well for the ~4 years I've owned it.
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Is Russia making laptops now?
without updates (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. (Score:3)
No optical bay, no mobile phone radio, no smart card reader, no 7-row keyboard, no middle mouse button, volume controls crammed into a shift on the function keys. The article doesn't show the keyboard or monitor, which are extremely important when selecting a laptop. I found shots of it elsewhere at https://system76.com/guides/or... [system76.com]. There's just not a lot there that isn't different from any other laptop.
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Were you trying to be clever by referencing stuff that haven't been on laptops for a couple decades? Is it somehow uncouth to want to know what the physical user interface is like? Are cellular data radios obsolete?
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No middle mouse button?! (Score:2)
Who the heck makes a Linux laptop and leaves out the middle mouse button? I mean, come on. Know your target audience. I'll stick with Thinkpad laptops with mouse nubs and middle clicks, thank you very much.
Numeric keypad? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I sympathize. Laptops these days are made with very little distinction between brands. The Thinkpads (particularly T series) were perfectly tuned for people who actually spend an appreciable about on time on them. After the sale to Lenovo, it quickly became yet another Brand X.
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Do we really need numeric keypad? I haven't touched it in the past 20 years.
As someone who types about three hundred IP addresses per day - dear god yes, please keep the numeric keypad. Now with that said, there are plenty of options that do not include a number pad, and I don't think having options is a bad thing. And for what it's worth at home I use an 87U tenkeyless with external 23U tenkeypad.
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...types about three hundred IP addresses per day...
Sounds like a little automation can change your life. Number pad is not always the answer.
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It depends. I use the numpad a lot on my work PC, but I ditched it on my home computer and don't miss it most of the time.
Also, a $480 wireless keyboard? And it's a Logitech?
Looks sweet! (Score:1)
I welcome the 8th generation Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, M.2 storage, and the Nvidia 1060 or 1070. It looks like a Pro machine to me, I'm not sure why so many other comments are just whiny complaints. It packs a lot of power in a nice looking machine. For the tin foil hat folks, they also disabled the Intel management stuff (same as Purism https://puri.sm).
Still only with QWERTY keyboard layouts? (Score:2)
At the time we bought our two Tuxedo laptops, last year, Syst76 proposed almost the same configs but didn't offer anything else than US keyboards -contrary to the German guys at Tuxedo...
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Obviously, 1G network is the most you will get on any laptop. 10 Gige remains clunky and expensive, and not needed for anything I can imagine doing with a laptop. That said, isn't it strange how 10G USB is already shipping on mid-priced desktops, but consumer Ethernet is still stuck at turn-of-the-century. What is the path forward, 10 Gige USB dongles?
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Almost no wiring closets support 10Gig over copper to the desktop workstation. So it utterly makes no sense at this point. 10gig over copper can't go very far. Most laptops don't even come with RJ45 ports, you use your type-C dock if you want hardwire or you use 802.11ac which is faster than 1gig copper if done right.
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Obviously, 1G network is the most you will get on any laptop. 10 Gige remains clunky and expensive, and not needed for anything I can imagine doing with a laptop. That said, isn't it strange how 10G USB is already shipping on mid-priced desktops, but consumer Ethernet is still stuck at turn-of-the-century. What is the path forward, 10 Gige USB dongles?
I'm assuming he wants dual 1G ports, which is pretty cool if you can have it on laptop.
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That said, isn't it strange how 10G USB is already shipping on mid-priced desktops, but consumer Ethernet is still stuck at turn-of-the-century. What is the path forward, 10 Gige USB dongles?
Not really. People don't need 10GbE because they don't need to transfer anything locally at those speeds in most cases and their broadband isn't anywhere near that. Not to mention 10GbE switching is still very expensive compared to 1GbE. So 10GbE locally isn't of much use in the vast majority of uses cases. USB offers an option for transferring files universally inside your network, outside, etc. The average consumer is far more likely to need to copy to their external USB hard drive than to their NAS.
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I've only seen DVI on some of the early HDTV's. Nothing that's been in made the last 10 years, probably longer. HDMI replaced DVI, and if you need to hook up DVI a converter is cheap.
A VGA input is still pretty common.
Re: Meh (Score:5, Funny)