New Laptop, System76 rocks

After drooling over it for months, I finally got a hold on one of those beautiful Darter laptops from System76.

Sometimes companies push us to post annoying rants about their service or product, and, much more rarely, sometimes we get such a good service/product, that they just make us want to tell everyone else about them.

I’m not going to go into every little detail, but a few things do deserve to be highlighted.

In every step of the way from choosing the laptop, placing the order, paying for it, shipping, and post-sale support, I had the feeling everyone was going out of their way just to help me the best they could.

I’m very picky about my laptop, so I was surprised that after unpacking the neatly packaged laptop and checking it out, it had exceeded my expectations. The laptop looks very apple-like, it’s in fact very lightweight, has all the features I could possibly want (tv-out, mmc card reader, bluetooth, monitor out, USBs everywhere, etc), and has very nice polished touches to it. It even suspends and hibernates perfectly!

Another great thing about System76 is they give support on the Ubuntuforums, in the open, and just to show you how open they are about their business, they also use Launchpad to track bug reports and problems.

I knew almost every single gotcha about my laptop before I ordered it. And I did. That’s how good these people are.

Carl Richell is just a great guy and has a great company on his hands.

Now, back to showing off my Darter…

Martin Albisetti

July 5, 2007

Ubuntu

9 responses to “New Laptop, System76 rocks”

JGJones

July 5, 2007 at 8:26 pm

I’ve had my eye on them for a long time in the hope that they’ll have a UK store…mind you…we’ve now got the http://efficientpc.co.uk/ which also talk on Ubuntu Forum too – so here’s to hoping that they do well as well.

Their range isn’t as extensive as System76, but they are a new store so that’s to be expected.

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Andrés

July 5, 2007 at 9:29 pm

¿Te la mandaron hasta acá (Argentina)?¿Cómo es el tema de la aduana?

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beuno

July 5, 2007 at 9:40 pm

Andres,

No me la mandaron a Argentina, pero fue una excepcion de todas formas.
Hasta donde se, por el momento solo las estan vendiendo en Estados Unidos, pero no descartes ponerte en contacto con ellos para ver si pueden enviartela.

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Andrés

July 5, 2007 at 9:46 pm

Gracias, lo tendré en cuenta! 😉

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Weeber

July 6, 2007 at 12:01 am

I’m wanting one of those Darter laptops. The 13” display is exactly what I’m looking for, someone have to remember the world that the laptops are suppose to be ‘mobile computers’…

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Marius Gedminas

July 6, 2007 at 6:01 am

Does suspend/resume work out of the box?

I seem to recall a blog post about a new Darter laptop on one of the planets saying that suspend worked but resume didn’t. I found that very surprising in a laptop that’s sold with Linux preinstalled.

(If Darters had a thinkpad-style keyboard, I’d probably be looking at one for myself…)

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beuno

July 6, 2007 at 7:08 am

Marius:

Suspend and resume does work perfectly out of the box.
I do believe it needed a workaround at some point (maybe with Dapper?), but it’s definitely fixed now.

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C

July 6, 2007 at 11:52 am

THanks for confirming that, very glad to hear the suspend/resume work. I’m torn between Dell and S76, but since the S76 delivers where I am I’ll have to go with S76.

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Marius Scurtescu

July 6, 2007 at 12:47 pm

The second issue of Full Circle Magazine has a review of Darter, and it reports suspend/hibernate problems with Feisty:
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2007/06/28/full-circle-issue-2/

See the “Hardware that Partially Works” and “Hardware that Does Not Work” sections.

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