I’m done with System76. My Leopard is a mess, and Pop!_OS is a joke
I bought a System76 Lemur, and frankly, the hardware is a massive letdown. It feels incredibly "cheap" for the price point, and after living with it for six months, I’ve seen enough to know I’m not the only one. Between the flimsy chassis, the rattling bezels, and reports of hinges literally snapping off the lid, it feels like a device that’s held together by hope and prayer.
But the hardware isn't even the worst part. I couldn't stand Pop!_OS anymore. It’s an absolute disaster. It feels like the system tries to self-destruct every single time an update drops. It started with the trackpad just freezing, no movement at all, only clicks, forcing me to hard shutdown every time I needed to actually get work done. Then the whole system started locking up randomly. I’ve spent countless hours running Memtest86 for the RAM, smartctl for the disk, and stress-ng for the processor, and every single test came back completely clean. The hardware is fine. The OS is just rotting from the inside out.
Beyond the constant freezes, I’ve been dealing with proprietary firmware updates that refuse to install, wonky WiFi performance that drops at the worst times, and eGPU crashes that make this thing useless for actual professional work. And don't even get me started on their support. It used to be a reason to buy this brand, but now? It feels like you’re just talking to a script. You have to jump through ten hoops and basically argue with them just to get a human to acknowledge that their software is broken.
Last week, I finally had enough. I nuked Pop!_OS and installed Linux Mint, and honestly? It’s like night and day. Everything actually works. My trackpad is responsive, the system hasn't frozen once, and I don't feel like I'm constantly waiting for the next update to break my entire workflow. It’s stable, it’s snappy, and for the first time in six months, I feel like I have a reliable OS for my day to day work instead of a science experiment that crashes if I look at it wrong.
I’m really disappointed in this laptop and the brand. I wanted to love it, but I’m tired of paying a premium for a machine that forces me to be its full time IT support.
Thank you all for reading my rant and I hope this kind of feedbacks actually helps System76 understand they're doing something wrong.
Note: this post was written by me and corrected by Gemini because English is not my first language
FIX: my laptop is a System76 Lemur Pro