Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
My 2011 model System76 Pangolin Performance has been a truly great laptop computer. It is well-made, robust and nicely sized with a 15.5” screen. Just to put it in perspective historically, it originally came with Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal pre-installed on it, the first Ubuntu version with the then-new Unity user interface. That early version of Unity was pretty buggy and Lubuntu 11.04 was quickly installed instead.
Over the past ten years, Pangolin Performance has run several Linux distributions and has also been used to test many other ones for Full Circle reviews.
By modern standards, the Pangolin Performance is a bit heavy at 5.3 lbs (2.4 kg), with its CD/DVD drive and rotating hard drive, but, with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and a dual-core 2.9 GHz Intel i5-2410M processor, it has been most recently running Lubuntu 20.04 LTS quite happily. That said, though, it is ten years old and is showing its age.
I have been thinking about replacing it for a while, and considering the options for doing so. Really, it came down to buying a brand-name laptop from a local Canadian discount store, or ordering a new System76 laptop directly from the Denver, Colorado based company and having it delivered here to Canada.
Options
Buying locally would typically involve a unit designed for Windows, but, of course, I would install Lubuntu on it instead. In my city, there are a number of shops that sell laptops, including some large volume discount houses. The brands are the usual assortment of Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and so on. Right now, prices are pretty low for the lower-end laptops due to the fall back-to-school sales, but the quality of those units is at best questionable, as is the Linux hardware compatibility, and the specs tend to be fairly low end, often the same as my ten year old Pangolin Performance.
In pricing out the better quality Windows laptops, like from MSI, I found a few in the same specification range as the System76 units, with the prices about the same or even higher.
I also priced some Mac laptops just for comparison purposes, and found that, for a comparable unit, with a slower processor and less RAM, they cost about 35% more, which was unsurprising.
In the end, based on how impressed I have been with the quality of my last laptop from System76, I decided to buy a new System76 Galago Pro with a 14.1 inch (35.8 cm) screen and a weight of 3.1 lbs (1.4 kg).
System76 names their laptops after African animals, and the galago, or bush baby, is a small nocturnal primate, so I presume this laptop will work well after dark.
Configuring
The minimum baseline configuration for the Galago Pro includes: • Processor: 4.2 GHz quad-core i5-1135G7 • RAM: 8 GB Single Channel DDR4 at 3200 MHz • Hard drive: 240 GB SSD • Graphics: Intel Iris Xe • Price: US$1099.00 plus shipping and taxes
With this configuration, you get a capable laptop, but upgrades are available.
Aside from these features, the Galago Pro comes with open-source firmware, including the CoreBoot free software BIOS, which is really nice to have. CoreBoot means having all free software, and not the incongruity of a proprietary BIOS underpinning a free software operating system. It also has something else useful to me, an SD card port.
The factory operating system choices are Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or System76’s own Gnome spin, Pop! OS in 20.04 LTS or the latest 21.04 versions.
The global chip shortage of 2020-21 is limiting the company’s models available and also the options for upgrades in processors and graphics cards, but I was able to use the company's very simple configuration webpage to put together a unit upgraded from the base model that would be pretty much ideal for my use. This included: • Processor: 4.7 GHz quad-core i7-1165G7 • RAM: 32 GB Dual Channel DDR4 at 3200 MHz • Hard drive: 1 TB PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD • Graphics: Intel Iris Xe • Operating system: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (64-bit) • Price: US$1,647.00, plus shipping and taxes
Ordering
As with my last laptop order in 2011, System76 has a very impressive, simple, automated system for ordering. You create an on-line account with them, run though the configuration page for the model you want, place the order, pay by credit card, and then wait, although not for very long.
Even though I placed my order on the Saturday of a long weekend with a Monday holiday, I instantly received three automated emails. The first acknowledged my account creation, the second confirmed my order was in process, and the third looked for a credit card validation, which I quickly confirmed.
I received an email first thing in the morning on the next business day from a real, live person, who confirmed that all was well with my order. That was followed one minute later by an automated email informing me that my “order has been processed and is in the assembly queue. All systems are built to order. We will update your order page and send an email when your order ships.”
So far, so good.
This was the email I received on the third business day after my order was placed: “current order status: completely shipped.“ That is pretty quick service!
Shipping
System76 offers only one choice of shipping and that is via UPS.
I am aware that Americans love UPS and perhaps they are fine at delivering packages within the continental US, but I have only had bad experiences with deliveries to Canada over dozens of packages. My Galago Pro did finally get here after five shipping days, including four days of it sitting here in my home city, plus many contradictory messages. Suffice to just say UPS couldn’t organize a sock drawer.
I did suggest to System76 that they at least look at an option of some other method for shipping to Canada and they agreed to consider the matter.
With my order placed on the Saturday of a long weekend, it was one week from the first business day until it arrived.
Unboxing
The package arrived in good shape and I carefully opened it up. System76 uses its own packaging method that clearly says “wait, don’t cut it, packaging is reusable” and it is, too.
The box yielded up the Galago Pro, along with its charger, all neatly protected for shipping, along with the paperwork and an envelope of System76 decorative stickers.
The unit was charged already and it booted up in seconds to the installation screen for my choice of operating system, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This is a slightly modified Ubuntu version, with a selection of System76 wallpapers, including the default one, and some specialized open-source hardware drivers installed, namely the system76-driver.
I was up and running on Ubuntu about a minute after opening the box!
The Hardware
The Galago Pro is a very nice unit. It is lightweight, slim and portable. The overall dimensions are 12.79 × 8.86 × 0.69 inches (32.49 × 22.50 × 1.75 cm).
The case seems robust and well-made and normal use produces very little heat. The screen has a matte-finish, with a 1920 x 1080 pixel display and is very sharp. I found that on a 14.1 inch screen, the 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution made all the screen elements too small, but a quick monitor size adjustment to 1368 x 768 pixels addressed that.
The ports fitted are a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C / Thunderbolt 4, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI, a built-in SD card reader, plus a Kensington lock port, which is quite a lot in a slim design like this.
The integral Intel wifi card offers both 2.4 GHz (802.11n) and 5 GHz (802.11ac) band wifi. For me, this is of great benefit, as my old laptop was 2.4 GHz-only, and, with just 11 wifi channels available, had frequent issues with RF interference from my neighbors. The 5 GHz band offers faster speeds, more channels and wider bandwidth, which all adds up to no interference at all, at least where I live.
Swapping Operating Systems
Nice as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is, I had always intended to install Lubuntu 20.04 LTS instead. It’s just my own personal favorite operating system. Once I was sure the hardware ran properly on Ubuntu, I was ready to install Lubuntu from a USB stick.
Lubuntu booted and ran well from the stick, even without the hardware-specific drivers installed. The wifi, keyboard, touchpad and everything else all tested as working fine, which was expected. System76 has website instructions for other operating systems and the company seems quite happy that customers use their hardware to run any Linux distro at all.
With hardware compatibility confirmed, I went ahead and tried to install Lubuntu and immediately ran into a glitch. It didn’t offer the usual “erase and use entire disk”, and instead only offered “manual partition”. Checking the Lubuntu website documentation suggested the issue might be hard drive swapping, and that running:
$ sudo swapoff -a
should fix it, which it did.
From that point, the installation was very fast, all completed in about four minutes! That compares to 14 minutes for the same operating system installation on my old laptop with its rotating drive.
Boot times with Lubuntu 20.04 LTS are similarly impressive at 16 seconds, compared to 1:45 on the old laptop. Even the shutdown took a paltry two seconds. Idle RAM after a reboot is 515 MB.
As part of my installation I also used the System76 drivers:
$ sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:system76-dev/stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install system76-driver
The rest of the installation was just a matter of setting up my own favorite configuration from my personal checklist and reinstalling documents, which took about 35 minutes.
In testing my new Lubuntu installation, I found that the Galago Pro’s Li-Ion 49 Wh battery gives about 6-8 hours of normal use before it needs to be plugged in to charge. That is quite impressive, as, in the past, many Linux distros have been noted as having short battery endurance. That certainly was true of the 2011 Pangolin Performance, which, even when new, had barely two hours on battery.
Conclusions
The Galago Pro is a really modern, slick and capable laptop that I think most Linux users would be happy to own and run their favorite Linux distro on.
While not cheap, System76 has a well-deserved reputation for quality and service that makes this a good value, especially when compared to equivalent quality laptops for Windows or to similar Macs.
Will this one last a decade, like my last System76 has done? Ask me in 2031.
External links:
Official website: https://system76.com/laptops/galago