I’m the kind of person that likes to run tech into the ground. The average lifespan of one of my phones or computers is about 5 years. It’s probably a bad habit of mine to stubbornly no upgrade until there’s a very compelling reason, but I tell myself I’m being frugal. Well I finally hit that point with my old HP laptop I bought in 2019. But my main usage for a laptop is just to have something to do work on and some light gaming while on the go. Something lightweight with enough battery life to get me through watching movies on plane flight. So there was really nothing wrong with the specs on the old machine, but it’s been losing battery capacity rapidly. It got to the point where it would only hold like 2 hours of charge which was barely enough to watch a movie on a plane while not plugged in.
So I begrudgingly started looking for a new laptop. I do enough side projects (nothing complete enough to post on here, but I will probably start updating soon) that a Linux laptop is appealing. At first I considered either a modern Thinkpad, or going full autist and cobbling together an old Thinkpad from parts. But then I asked around some some friends suggested I check out System76. They’re an American company that makes laptops and desktops with Linux pre-installed. I ended up buying A 14" Darter Pro laptop for $1,588 with the following specs:
-Processor: 4.9 GHz Intel Core Ultra 5 225H (14 Cores) -Graphics: Intel® Core Ultra 5 - Intel® Arc™ 130T -Display: 14" FHD+ (1920x1200) 16:10, Wide View Angle, Matte Finish -Networking: WiFi 7 + Bluetooth 5.4 -Memory: 32 GB DDR5 5600 MHz (2x16) -OS Drive: 1 TB PCIe4 M.2 SSD -Webcam & Mic Options: Built-in Webcam & Microphone -Weight: 3.5lbs -Battery: Up to 8 hours
This isn’t the most specced out laptop I could get, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I have a beefy desktop at home for anything serious. It strikes a good balance between battery life, being light, and performance. I’d had it for about a month and had been using it for some projects. The distro it comes installed with is called PopOS and it’s built on top of Ubuntu with a desktop environment based on GNOME, so it was pretty familiar. I had to tweak several things to get the UI to match what I like and there were some settings that weren’t obvious. For example, there’s no way to set battery charging limits for batter life preservation in the UI. Luckily it’s Linux so a couple of command line calls sorted it out.
I’ve had it for almost a month now so I’ve had some time to put it through its paces. It works great for local dev work and I can run VS Code while listening to podcasts in my browser with no problems. I went on a cruise with some friends last week and it worked great for watching movies on the plane while being light enough to travel with. It’s compatible with my work’s remote desktop software so if something comes up I can log in. I even installed Steam and tested out a few games. Halo 3 from the Master Chief Collection and the original Deus Ex run fine, which isn’t much of a shocker for games that are 20-25 years old. But the fact that they run on Linux at all is cool.
Overall, I liked it after the first month. It may be a bit more expensive than what the hardware is worth, but I thought the coreboot and preinstalled Linux were worth it.