System76 Reviews 

Received an exceptionally well-made laptop configured precisely as ordered in just the usual shipping time over the Christmas holiday. The Cosmic desktop integration is superb and very well suited to moving my family off Windows and into Unix where I've worked since 1987. Kudos on all the hard work I see in putting together this distro and the UI development.

Exactly as described!

Super fast replies to questions and wonderful turnkey machine. I am loving my new pop os box!

Didn't need a hat,but wanted to support the project and it was the cheapest way to do it while still getting something back.
It's actually a nice good quality hat.

Well built, easy to install new drives, very happy with my purchase.

I am relatively new to Linux. I have tried Mint and Ubuntu. I saw a review on YouTube by Mr Explaining Computers (sorry can't remember the gentleman's name) and was impressed with what I saw. I installed Pop OS on my GMKtec and it has worked almost perfectly. I copied across a lot of data from my Win11 PC using and SD card. I got repeated error messages but the files transferred OK. Sadly, the SD card became corrupted and I can no longer access it but I think that was my finger trouble. I am having great fun learning the Pop OS system and I am very impressed with how responsive it is. Thank you System 76 for freeing me from Microsoft!

Honest overview of experience with System76's Thelio Mega machine after owning it for the first 2 months:

Pros:

* After you log in, machine is very fast and responsive. I have been able to run games like Cyber Punk 2077 at the highest graphics settings (going beyond Ray Tracing into Path Tracing) and still have smooth game play at 60FPS.

* They have very good tech support (which is a blessing because you are going to need it). I've worked with about 5-6 different IT guys so far and they've been pretty patient and polite.

* You have lots of options for desktop customization since it's a Linux machine and lots of the bloatware from OS like Windows and Mac are not installed. UI feels like you are using a Mac, so you don't have to use command line to navigate if you don't want to.

Cons:

* Expensive (mine cost over $10,000). It would be cheaper to build your own (save 25% or more) if you are engineering savy and are comfortable building the computer with the same hardware.

* Time it took to receive custom machine after ordering it: 4 weeks

* Initial setup experience for beginner Linux user: Terrible (setting up user profile was not straight forward and frustrating). Having to go through BIOS screens as part of account creation was intimidating.

* Process of swapping primary graphics card: long (took over an hour and had to take apart half the computer just to unplug the initial one installed and put in a new one. However, they do have some detailed documentation to help replace it though, so that's a plus at least).

* Downloading programs from their PopOS Shop are unstable. I was even told by their Tech Support not to use it, but to wait until they finished building their newest Cosmic Store for better stability. Instead they often give me commands to use to download it through command line - a bit of a learning curve if you haven't used Linux before.

* Computer broke after putting in new graphics card and downloading new driver through their PopOS Store. I had to spend days with tech support to try different commands through command line to get it a stable driver.

* Long boot up time: takes over a minute of seeing a black screen before a password prompt shows up (and this is with high end hardware - Threadripper PRO 9975WX, 256 GB ECC DDR5 RAM, 8 TB of SSD, NVIDIA 5080 RTX). After spending over a week with tech support, I was basically told that I couldn't speed up boot times on the system.

* Lots of the BIOS settings are locked and tech support told me I couldn't upgrade my motherboard firmware because their hardware integrations would break. So trying to download new drivers is kind of like trying to defuse a bomb.

* Even though this is a powerful machine, playing games on Steam is a hit or a miss because they don't always support Linux/PopOS. There is some community support to help mitigate this (Proton, libstrangle, Gamescope, Wayland vs X11), but I still have half of my games crash for random reasons. I spend more time trying to fix them on this machine so that I can play them properly instead of being able to just play them.

* Game development programs like Unity will just crash for random reasons (2-4 times per session). So you have to save often and never feel quite safe when working.

* Lots of hardware (like Logitech mouse, keyboards, microphones, speakers, etc) don't support Linux, so you have to download a lot of hacky community driven open source software to get things working as you want them to.

TL;DR: I've spent more time setting the machine up and wasting time fixing problems with Tech Support and Google than I've had time to enjoy the computer. For the high price you pay for them to set up the machine for you, I would expect the user experience to be much smoother right out of the box, but that's simply not the case. I'm a 3D modeler, a game developer, and a programmer with over 10 years of experience, but I still have lots of difficulty getting this machine to work right. When it works, it works great, but when it doesn't be prepared to waste a lot of time trouble shooting.

Everything is perfect and works as expected

The process of ordering and choosing the parts was very streamlined. I was able to find a device that worked best for my use case. And after having received the device and begun to use it, I love it. I've recommended the brand to various people, both for its good quality as well as the right-to-repair policy that System76 has.

Smooth buying process and they make sure you are who you say you are so no ones getting scammed.

Very bad fan noise on Darter pro. I had to return it ... very time consuming.

My experiences with ordering and receiving my computer were excellent. I really appreciated being able to call and speak to a human being the couple times that I had to. The people, the documentation, and the process were all very helpful.

The entire process was very easy - from selecting the features of my computer to ordering to following the progress of its build and delivery.

There's fantastic online technical documentation, too.

The laptop fails every time it goes to suspend. Power failing a brand new laptop is the only way to recover. A quick google search reveals this has been a known issue for about a year. I guess quality control is out of the question. To say I'm disappointed is an understatement.

Great laptop ups shipping sucked you lost a star.
Note, it would be nice to have a charger that uses the 12v port vs USB

Great customer service and tech support. Couldn't be happier.

Here's the updated version:

So Microsoft decided they needed permission to spy on every keystroke across all my screens to use Windows 11. That was the final straw for me - time to switch to Linux. I did what I usually do now and asked my AI which Linux computer to get. Actually, I asked three different AIs, and they all came back with the same answer: System 76.

I was planning to just order one of their pre-configured systems with some upgrades, but the company emailed me back and said I'd be better off with a custom configuration - and save money doing it. So that's what I did.

This computer is an absolute beast. I loaded it up with tons of memory, the fastest chip I could get, two SSD drives and a regular drive for a total of 12 TB of storage. The whole thing came to about $3,000. When I compared it to Windows computers with similar specs - Ryzen 9, 64GB RAM - those were running around $6,000.

The unit itself is attractive, very well built, fairly compact, completely quiet, and crazy fast. Oh, and half the price of comparable Windows machines. Their phone support has been great too. I'm very pleased with this system.