System76 Laptops

[jlpoole]

Has anyone run Gentoo on a System76 brand laptop? I'm specifically interested in the Kudu. I'd prefer to use AMD over Intel. And if you run Gentoo on such equipment, are you encountering throttling?

I have had two Dell Inspirons (17") over the last decade. My complaints about them are: 1) a recent BIOS upgrade screwed up my keyboard layout such that my arrow keys partially map. 2) the older 2013(?) keyboard is starting to freeze on keys and I am concerned that replacement of the keyboard is going to be a time consuming task just to find the parts. 3) When I have some hefty compiling, the CPU is "throttled" -- so why have a powerful CPU if it only is going to be throttled when I place a high demand on it? 4) I really hate the mousepad, I'm constantly touching it and my mouse does unexpected things, 5) Dell requires you to pay for upgrades to firmware after 2 years unless you purchased extended service. This paradigm that firmware upgrades are a paid-for "service" is most unfortunate.

And I'll take a moment to share an approach that proved more trouble than it was worth. With my first Dell Insprion, I erased the Windows and just installed Linux. Then, when I learned I needed a firmware upgrade from Dell, I was straight out of luck because Dell's firmware installer requires Windows. So, for the 2nd Inspiron, I undertook great pain to use Sakaki's wonderful guide to install Gentoo while preserving the Windows partition. Two problems: 1) Dell requires you to purchase extended support beyond 2 years, so I could not obtain the firmware upgrade that hopefully would fix a prior upgrade than reconfigured some of my keyboard mappings, and 2) Sakaki disappeared. So, in the end I would have been better off just installing Linux and not trying to preserve the Window partition. So now I'm really interested in dealing with a company that supports its products in Linux.

While some of my complaints may be applicable to all laptops, I guess in addition to wondering about the the System76 brand, is it unrealistic to expect less throttling? I just do not understand why a powerful processor is specified for a laptop when it cannot be run at full speed/power. It's like owning a jaguar and having a governor put on it to limit it to 55 mph because its cooling system would overheat.

Lastly, the Kudu comes with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 . I'm new to artificial intelligence ("AI") and have tried Google's Coral board and Google's Jupyter notebook to perform edge detection. My tests have shown that one needs to have a GPU or equivalent to realistically do any AI edge detection (27 seconds vs. 1-1/2 hours for an AMD Bulldozer(2013)). I would very much like to know if anyone has worked with NVIDIA's rtx-3060 board in an AI environment. I'd certainly like to learn if there is some feature to that board that is turned-off or made inaccessible for AI use. I understand that NVIDIA limits central servers in how they expose the GPUs or the use of certain hardware as they are trying to protect their revenue streams. For instance, one AI proponent asserts it is 100x cheaper to build your own unit rather than subscribe to a server, e.g. Google, because services are constrained by NVIDIA as to what NVIDIA hardware they may run in a service center.

url fixed by NeddySeagoon

[kernel_tux]

I own two System76 laptops (Gazelle purchased in 2019, and Kudu purchased in 2016), and I run Gentoo on both of them. I've only experienced thermal throttling, but nothing that I would describe as "artificial" like your experience with Dell. I use a cooling pad on my laptops, though, which minimizes the amount of thermal throttling.

Haven't experienced any weirdness using a distro that they don't officially support, all the hardware's working fine using gentoo-sources & genkernel, and didn't have to dig through menuconfig to get something to work. Also, their support team's great; even though I've mentioned that I'm not using Ubuntu or Pop OS, they've always answered my questions to the best of their ability.

Both of mine have Intel iGPU's, and haven't used Nvidia since I switched to Linux 8 years ago. So I can't comment on that part of your question.

[Goverp]