On 2025-07-11 22:03, sciguy via Talk wrote: ...
My attraction to System76 is that both the hardware and the OS are custom-built for each other. But looking back at previous GTALUG discussions on System76, I don't see too many glowing reviews. I know from past experience that "tricked-out" laptops like mine are generally not supported. I refer to my Acer Spin 3, which can be converted into a tablet and has a touchscreen and a stylus. It has Thunderbolt 3 but its support of my Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor (which says it only needs USB-C without going into further detail) is lacking and works maybe 10% of the time I plug it in. I know the monitor works because it works reliably with my Samsung S24 smartphone.
I didn't finish my point here. The fact that my laptop is "tricked out" with various weird hardware means that Linux is likely to not have drivers that support things like touchscreen, use of a stylus, screen rotation, video resolution, and so on. With some distros I've tried, it is a problem even getting the netowrk card to be detected (whether with wi-fi or cat-5). The fact that the makers of System76 went to any effort at all to select hardware they know should work with Linux I find appealing. While things like touchscreen and screen rotation is not essential for me these days, these are just examples of things that "just worked" under windows and can become a big problem with Linux. Paul