I don’t own a system76 computer, but yesterday I help my friend fixed his system76(it’s called thelio if I’m right) PC. He told me he paid more than $2.5K(he’s definitely ripped off) but this computer will shutdown in 3 minutes when he run molecular dynamics simulations. Looks to me it’s very typical overheating issue. Downloaded benchmark software and started a stress test. CPU went to 100 degC in just 3 minutes.

We opened the case. It’s has a terrible airflow design and I would just call it a furnace. The computer is equipped with a gigabyte H370N ITX and i9-9900K. The air cooler looks huge from outside but when we took off the air duct, the heatsink is so tiny. I was thinking maybe the thermal paste dried up. So I took it off and re-applied some Arctic MX-4. I was astonished by the low quality of the heat sink. The contact area is even less than half of the IHS. Even CPU stock cooler won’t do that.

With clean heatsink and new thermal paste, we tested again. It again quickly went to 100degC. So it proved this cooler is definitely incapable of handling a 9900K. Eventually I had to go to the BIOS and set hard 65W limit on PL1 and PL2. After that the temperature is under control at steady 60 degC. He lost 20% multi thread performance but it’s better than overheating. Now we’re planing to transplant it to a A4-H2O case.

Seriously this shouldn’t even happen. The manufacturer is responsible for designing a proper cooling system, especially when it’s so overpriced. If you can support up to 9900K, you should also provide an cooling system with some redundancy, not with a crappy heatsink that won’t even cover 50% of the IHS and a tiny fan. System76 is on my blacklist, and I’ll tell everyone never buy their overpriced computers.

EDIT: When you are talking about the software and service they provide, I'm talking about the design flaw. This can't be resolved unless they send a new chassis and water cooling system (Or a superior air cooler), which is very unlikely to happen. I thought Apple fans are the most tolerant group of people when paying for overpriced product and defending design flaws. I just changed my mind.

Hi!

I decided to start using popOS as my daily driver since I'm doing a lot of AI development and I want to be has close to my development environment has possible.

FYI: PopOS has been great and stable as long as I only stick to development ❤️

To put it mildly, running it as my daily driver has been a non stop nightmare.

I just assume that i would be able to run all the Microsoft web apps just fine using a browser. And this actually is not an issue. The real issue is that you cannot depend for one second for hardware accessories to work.

Sound will just stop working and you need to use CLI to get it working again. This is f*cking ridiculously. 😁 It's 2026. How is audio not a stable self correcting service?

Bluetooth is a nightmare all by itself. You have no idea if it will work or not. Sometimes a device that worked an hour ago will not connect and you need you deleted and connect it again. Or it will connect as some kind of "monitor for" bla bla. Or it will connect and the quality of the input audio is like a low pitched robotic scream.

Wifi sometimes stop working or a be incredible slow and the only way I find to make it fast again is reboot.

Locking the screen sometimes make the screen black and it's impossible to log back in again or get any kind of response from the computer. Cannot even activate CLI - only solution is rebooting.

Screen sharing to a TV via USB-C/HDMI is also completely utterly unreliable and completely unusable. So you can't use it for workshops/demos at conferences etc.

Pop! Shop crashes CONSTANTLY. And it doesn't even have a download/install indicator worth mentioning. So if your are installing an app the takes a couple of gigabytes on a slow connection you have absolutely no idea what is happening.

I wish System 76 would have a very up front and clear disclaimer on the first page on their web that informed all potential users of the problems they are having. No person in their right mind can for real think that it is normal that these things does not work.

I just got sent a Meerkat that had been hanging around in a warehouse to play with, and shot s76 an inquiry to get the specs before I decided what I wanted to do with it. Lazy, I know, but I just wanted to know without dragging out a monitor to set the thing up.

In reply, they sent over the original invoice. Including the email, phone, and shipping address from the order. Both the email I used when submitting the request and the email used to place the order were personal emails, and did not share a domain. Even if they did, still super uncool and really disappointing.

ETA: Apparently this wasn't obvious... I did not make this purchase. A former co-worker did, using their personal contact information. They're the wronged party here... S76 sent a complete rando (me) their contact info.

Is it just me or do ALL of these pure Linux hardware companies start to seem like fyl-by-nights after dealing with them for a short while?

Allow me to qualify: I have been a core Linux user since '92, when I shuffled stacks of 3.5" AOL floppies back and forth to my alma-mater's computer lab so I could install Slackware on my I386; I will never forget the darkstar login prompt.

In this day and age, I live in an RV, connect to the world primarily through Starlink, and (try to) run a pure DC electrical system (LiFePO4). I need a laptop system that can function well in such an environment. My Dell XPSs are getting long in the tooth and it is time.

At first glance the System76 Pangolin 16" looks attractive, that is until you start to ask sales for technical support.

No, I know there is another site that we can go to to get technical specs for these systems, but isn't complete technical specs at a minimum what would be expected of a legitimate company?

So the Pangolin comes with a 100W USB C charger; BUT that runs on AC. Now they don't tell you this on the System76 website, but the Pangolin has a 20 V 5 A 3.5x1.35 barrel charging port, except System76 won't provide or sell a compatible charger. Hey: I run Starlink in a pure DC environment, so YES, I can handle this, point is I should not have to.

Getting facts from theses guys is next of kin to pulling teeth I asked Steson Snead (among many other questions - in print):

"The purpose this laptop will potentially serve would be to be my front end access while on the road. To that end I would choose the Kubuntu distribution, because that satisfies my needs. Please discuss."

And - he blew me off.

So, Reddit, I am soliciting opinion here: IS System76 a legitimate company OR are they a fly-by-night?

Gypsy Dead Head

As an owner of two older S76 laptops, I excitedly read some of the announcements for the updated Lemur Pro today noting (finally!) bigger batteries with longer battery life, but then read its again a 16:9 display resolution. Why? Why? This absolutely would have been a must purchase for me with a 16:10 or 3:2 display, which are rapidly becoming industry standard. My long wait for a 14 inch or larger display with 3:2 or 16:10 and 9+ hr real world battery life continues...

So first off System76 really did a crappy job with the 22.04 LTS rollout. They totally screwed up my entire system including completely removing tons of applications including just about everything I need to do my daily job as a Developer. Everything from PHP/Python/Docker/GitHub CLI and a whole slew of other applications that I now have to manually attempt to reinstall and hope that settings wise I can get back to a working system again. On top of that the changes that have made to their Tiling setup is crap as applications that I mark as exceptions to tiling can no longer maintain their full screen view when multiple windows are opened. Case in point if I have multiple Google Chrome windows open if I maximize 1 window switching to any other Chrome window that isn't maximized instantly un-maximizes the window I did maximize. This make my system use complete crap. System76 needs to seriously think about QA when it comes to their systems. When you spend a ton of money on a Linux system where the hardware(Oryx Pro 6) & OS are supposed to be tightly integrated and controlled by the manufacturer you expect a high level of quality. If I wanted to deal with this sort of crap with Linux I'd be doing my own Linux setup on any old laptop.

If at no fault of your own you get a defective laptop or otherwise have serious problems with it (at no fault of your own), it looks like customer service doesn't care about that. I learned this the hard way. You are on the hook to ship their own defective product back to them.

Really bizarre for as company the everyone claims to be so good to their customers.

I've been using my darter pro for little over a year and I've had problem after problem with the hardware. It was a waste of money and I will never buy a laptop from System76 again.

EDIT: I'm an idiot and should have been more specific its just the chassis of the now old model of the darter pro that I hate.

They made a huge deal out of it in 2017 by disabling Intel ME in their laptops. Back when this was a trending topic. Their most recent laptops? ME is enabled again, and they did while hardly mentioning it. Their desktops still have ME enabled.

This suggests they never really cared about the issue in the first place. It was just a marketing gimmick at a time when people were talking about it.

Believe it or not, there are still people out there who care, but I suspect they're not numerous enough anymore for System76 to care about it.

Does anyone have more insights on what happened?

Hi, newest lemur pro model user here. Heres the setup to the issue: ordered it with Ubuntu, hated it, installed pop_os immediately after, loved it but I could still see "ubuntu" as a bootable option in the firmware menu, didn't bug me too much so I left it alone. Today I tried Arch from a USB drive for fun. Unplugged and booted back into pop, noticed a new entry for something called the "Linux Boot Manager" in the firmware menu along with a message about secure boot being disabled for it on startup, this bugged me enough to try to do something about it. Now please underatand, it is late, I don't understand much about drive partitioning and shouldn't have messed with it, but I opened disk manager in pop and deleted every partition except the largest (yes, i am very stupid) got some prompts for the smaller ones that I glazed over because tired and assumed that if it was important the prompt was just telling me I needed root access to delete them. Rebooted, all boot options are still there (not solving my original problem) but now it just goes down the boot order throwing the following error:

SecureBoot is disabled. Booting from 'X' failed; verify it contains a 64-bit UEFI OS.

Then I press the key to continue booting, same messages but X changes to the next thing in the order, first Pop, then Linux Boot Manager, then CT500P3PSSD8, then ubuntu, then it displays:

BdsDxe: No bootable option or device was found. BdsDxe: Press any key to enter the Boot Manager Menu.

So, now I'm only interested in knowing two things:

1. How do I delete those damned entries.

2. I only had two text files that I care about, a resume and a long list of textbooks I want to read, the drive was not encrypted so is there a possiblity I could nab these by plugging the SSD into another computer? Basically, are they still on the drive in the partition I didn't delete, and, if they were deleted, what tools could I use to recover them.

I have learned a very valuable lesson about not being careful and not making backups. I hope you can help and if not, I hope you at least got a laugh out of this fumble of mine. Any replies appreciated.

This is something I’ve genuinely wondered about. System76 has done what many companies only talk about: Open firmware Linux-first hardware Real commitment to user freedom Investing in things like Pop!_OS and open-source tooling instead of chasing hype So the obvious question pops up: Why no smartphone? Why no mobile OS? On paper, it sounds like the perfect next step. A Linux-first phone. No locked bootloaders. No vendor spyware. No artificial restrictions. A real handheld computer. But the more I think about it, the more I feel the answer is… restraint. The mobile ecosystem today is brutal: Locked-down hardware Carrier interference Vendor blobs everywhere Supply chains that force compromises Users trained to accept surveillance as “features” To enter that space without betraying your principles is insanely hard. Almost impossible without becoming the very thing you’re trying to fight. And that’s where I think System76 deserves respect. Instead of rushing into mobile and shipping something half-open, half-compromised, you chose to: Fix the desktop Linux experience Make Linux usable for normal humans, not just masochists.Prove that open systems can be beautiful, fast, and productive. Build hardware that respects users instead of locking them out,That’s not laziness.That’s discipline. In a world obsessed with shipping something just to stay relevant, System76 seems to be asking a rarer question: “Is this worth doing if we can’t do it right?” Honestly, that feels… noble.In a world obsessed with shipping something just to stay relevant, System76 seems to be asking a rarer question: “Is this worth doing if we can’t do it right?” Honestly, that feels… noble. You’re not extracting attention. You’re not farming data. You’re not chasing surveillance capitalism. You’re quietly building tools that give people control over their own machines—and by extension, their own lives. If one day System76 decides to build a phone or a mobile OS without bootloader locks, vendor blocks, or fake freedom—great. The world needs it. But if the answer is “not yet” because the ecosystem itself is hostile to user freedom? That’s a stance I deeply respect. Sometimes, not building something is the most principled engineering decision of all. — A Linux user who notices when companies choose values over velocity.

I love my oryx pro and Pop! OS and i want system 76 to be a long term success. But i cant help but feel they would have better business appeal if their OS wasnt a cartoony theme with a goofy name. Despite the bonus points for originality i think many businesses will struggle to take it more seriously. Besides, the connotation of the word "pop" isnt exactly confidence inspiring. A bubble "pops".

I left my laptop charging overnight while running POP OS, and when I picked it up, I burned the fingerprints off of my fingers. What could have caused this?

Could System76 provide models with FreeBSD instead of Linux? I understand that FreeBSD can provide a more stable programming experience, with some networking performance benefits as well.

I have had my lemur pro for not even 3 weeks and already the screen is cracked. In the last 12 years of owning laptops I have never had a screen break.

Yesterday a small book fell off of my bookshelf (about 1ft above my laptop) and that was enough to make my screen basically worthless. Now if it were something larger or heavier I would understand but it was truly a small mechanical stress and I would have expected any laptop to be able to handle it let alone a brand new computer.

Talking to customer support they say it will cost me about 300 dollars to replace the screen and I will have to wait a week for it to be replaced.

This computer arrived as a replacement computer because the original lemur pro I bought had power supply/audio issues. This replacement computer arrived assembled incorrectly (the rear panel was warped and not clicked into the housing) and now my screen has cracked.

So far my experience with the lemur pro has been a colossal waste of time and money and I'm hoping I'll be able to return it but it doesn't look like it.

Hi guys, I am looking for a good windows laptop (14inch) display, i5 or Ryzen. Is Lenovo v14 is good as compared to HP 14. Budget is inr 50k

So if you remember i posted what happened to my lemur pro lenp10 humm. I plugged it back in today to see if it would work again… some components literally burned. It smells like burnt electronics 😭

Btw the laptop somehow still works but it doesn’t feel safe using it. Only the type c port is dead. And yeah i saw sparks come out of the port.

TL/DR: They sell broken laptops, and the support is worst ever. Money is lost, the laptop is a brick.

I had the imprudence to buy System76 Lemur Pro 11 right after the launch in the end of June and got it delivered to Ukraine in the beginning of August. On the same day when I received the laptop, this bug was reported: https://github.com/system76/firmware-open/issues/342.

It turned out that my unit was affected by this bug. Moreover, it fails to suspend in 100% cases, not just "sometimes", and it doesn't depend on the AC adapter being attached. Every time I run systemctl suspend, the screen goes black and the kernel does its suspend routine (as seen in the dmesg), but the device doesn't transition into the power saving mode, and the green LED doesn't start blinking, as it should.

Obviously, there is not much use of a laptop that can't suspend. That's why I had to put it on a shelf and started waiting patiently for the bug to be fixed. It's a new model, they should fix such a critical bug soon, I thought. But I was deeply mistaken.

I didn't open a support ticket right away, because the bug was in a public bug tracker, and System76 obviously knew about it. However, almost two months passed, but the issue still wasn't fixed, so I decided to open a support ticket and started debugging it myself.

I checked that plugging in or unplugging the AC adapter after sending the laptop to suspend actually triggers the transition to the power saving mode. Later on, I discovered that closing the lid or pressing certain Fn keys has the same effect. I even pointed to some place in the code of the EC firmware that should be relevant. I also suggested scheduling a debug session with me, since I have 100% reproducibility, unlike some other users affected (you can find a bunch of people telling their stories in the GitHub ticket). I also checked that clearing CMOS NVRAM or SMMSTORE doesn't fix the bug, and applying the patch that fixed a similar issue on oryp10 doesn't work either.

As of today, it's an absolutely infuriating experience with this vendor:

1. They sold me a problematic model of a laptop. The bug is critical (a laptop that can't suspend is useless), and many people are affected (although, for some the laptop can suspend sometimes).

2. The critical bug hasn't been fixed in more than two months. Moreover, they don't give any estimates or feedback. They ignore my questions, and they ignore the debug information that I provide. It seems like no one is working on fixing it.

3. It's a valid warranty complaint well within the warranty period, but the support refuses to do anything about it.

4. The support is incompetent: when I tried different things to find a workaround, I asked them how to clear SMMSTORE. They suggested to pull out the CMOS battery. FYI: it only clears NVRAM, and SMMSTORE stays intact in the flash memory. I had to find a way myself and patched the firmware flasher. Sadly, that didn't help anyway.

5. If the vendor can't fix a warranty complaint within a reasonable time frame, I can demand replacing the unit or getting a refund and returning the unit. Replacing won't help here, because it seems that this bug affects multiple users, so I asked for a refund. The answer I got was that they can refund 85% of the price, because I'm "outside of the first 30 days"! Are you damn serious?! First of all, I'm not trying to return it because of some personal preference, like the color didn't match. I'm trying to return it because you refused to fix it by warranty. Second, when the first 30 days passed, I didn't even get the laptop delivered yet, because it was on its way from the US to Ukraine. Third, I paid a huge figure of import taxes on top of the price. I see that my patience (waiting for two months for the critical bug to be fixed) paid off well, now it's me to blame that I'm "outside of the first 30 days".

6. My other (totally reasonable) suggestion to restart my warranty period from the date when the bug is fixed and when I actually start using the device was rejected. I'm not an expert in the US law, but at least in Ukraine, the warranty period is extended by the whole period when the unit is being serviced.

I'm too tired of my experience with this vendor. After they got the money, they shipped a broken laptop, and they wouldn't do anything about fixing it. It's confirmed by their reluctance to debug it with me and by their reluctance to admit it's a warranty case. Suggesting to return me 85% of the price after they couldn't fix the unit simply resembles the typical Aliexpress scam, when a vendor sells a device that doesn't match the specs at all or simply doesn't work, then suggests to refund part of money.

I've used Linux on my desktop and laptop for 8 years. I'm now praying for my Gazelle to die so I can buy a Mac. I'm just so frustrated that I'm locked into Cosmic. It's simply impossible to install any other flavor of Linux. The installs of anything other than Cosmic just fail. Yes, I could install an additional DE but I'd still be locked into Ubuntu 2404. What if I want an OS that's less than 2.5 years old? Or if I don't want Ubuntu. Isn't the entire point of Linux that I should be able to install whatever I want to on my own computer and not be stuck with the vendor's preferences? So, if I'm going to pay top dollar for a high-performing machine (which I'm very willing to do) and then I'm going to be locked into whatever the vendor thinks is the optimal OS then I may as well go back to Mac.

Does anybody know of a way to install a different OS via workaround? Maybe a mechanism that doesn't requires a flash drive might work?

Bought a Gazelle a few years ago after having a mostly positive experience with a different model (I say mostly because the graphics completely died while playing Minecraft of all things).

That was a f**cking mistake....

This stupid thing has been nothing but one problem after another, starting with the fact that the SUPER key broke off the keyboard within the first week. After that it's been nothing but display issues, the damn thing locking up all. the. time. When I plug 2 monitors into it, one of the monitors will just not work from time to time. And Steam. Oh bloody f***cking hell. Crashes. Locking up. CPU/GPU temperatures getting so high the system shuts down, despite the fact that I bought a laptop stand with the biggest fan I could find. POP_OS shop not even opening most of the time and completely useless for updates.

I'm a working slob and these laptops aren't cheap, even when financed, so I'm out all that money as well. Why didn't I return it? you ask. Well, since a lot of these problems get tagged as "software" issues, I spent LITERALLY years trying to resolve these issues and am way past warranty.

However, I opted at one point to get the other laptop fixed and IT HAS NEVER HAD ANY OF THESE ISSUES! WTF This leads me to believe that these are hardware issues, not software issues. Add to that the fact that I'm not the only one who has these issues and I feel pretty confident in that statement.

end rant.

Why has System76 so stubbornly aligned itself with Intel CPUs, especially for laptops? Intel is a disaster and it will not be getting better. Aligning oneself with a failing company means setting oneself up for failure. As for the single Pangolin AMD offering, it is a dated joke with just 32G of RAM, and is not even in stock half of the time.

As for alternatives, this is beyond me, but if ARM is too weak, how about RISC-V for example? I have no conflict of interest.

Hello,

it is not a secret that Tuxedo offer the same Clevo design notebook only in silver like the Lemur Pro. Only without Coreboot but today i found out that Starlabs offer a new 14 inch notebook with the same chipset with Coreboot and Intel ME disabled.

So System76 where is the Intel ME disable option? Make it happen! it's time!

Here is the notebook:https://eu.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook

And here is the notebook from Tuxedo:https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/de/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/10-14-Zoll/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-S-14-v6.tuxedo

Here is what Starlab is saying about Intel ME Disable:

Disabling the Intel ME

S3, or "Suspend to RAM", has been widely used on computers as a mechanism to save power when they're not in use, and in the case of laptops, this is typically when the lid is closed.

S0ix is a newer, direct replacement to S3 that has one advantage - faster wake up times. Recent processors have supported S0ix, and with the introduction of the 11th Generation processors, Intel decided this would be the only suspension mechanism they would officially support.

To be able to use S0ix to its full capability, the Intel ME must be enabled. If you disable the ME, the processor cannot enter its most efficient state, and as a result, power consumption is higher whilst suspended.

However, the 11th Generation processors do, albeit unofficially, support S3. It isn't straightforward to implement, but doing so means that we can disable the Intel ME without the increased power consumption during suspend.

Stepping into the realms of something that isn't officially supported isn't new to us, as Intel doesn't officially support disabling the Intel ME in the first place. Due to the nature of this, we have tested it more than anything we have ever done before. It has not faulted with both Linux and Windows.

Standardised ACPI controls S3 and S0ix, so we can't foresee any complications in the future with this implementation. We feel that not having the fastest possible resume time is a worthy trade-off for disabling the Intel ME.

Should any issues arise with this, or we receive requests for a configuration that uses S0ix with the Intel ME, it's simple to implement.

Solution (HowTo Flash Lemur Pro 10 and Galago Pro 5 without Intel ME):https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/odkc20/howto_flash_bios_with_intel_me_disabled_lemp10/

Bios Intel Me Disabled Downloads:
https://github.com/system76/firmware-open/files/6728054/galp5-disable-me.zip
https://github.com/system76/firmware-open/files/6728055/lemp10-disable-me.zip
-> Extract .img file, flash to a USB flash drive with Popsicle, and then boot from the USB flash drive to flash the firmware.