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System76 – Galago UltraPro | First impressions

Today finally, my new Ultrabook by System76 arrived. I say finally because for one i was stuck with a Macbook and because the delivery was delayed due to a late shipment from Intel. (They were waiting for the CPU’s)

First thing one notices when unpacking the laptop is that the packaging is held really simple. I like that a lot. It was easy to open and i have no glossy packages that can’t be recycled properly.  When you open the laptop you will be greeted with a little note pointing you to the Ubuntu forums and the System76 support and some stickers.

Unboxing of the Galago

The Galago comes, like all System76 conputers, with Ubuntu 13.04. Now, i noticed some graphics issues in the default install. Basicly the X server would take up to 98% CPU and i would see flickering on the screen when playing HTML5 video. This however vanished completely when i did a dist upgrade to 13.10 and installed the System76 drivers. My guess is, that this is due to the new Haswell CPU running better with the 3.11 Kernel.

When hooking up the Galago to my 21″ Samsung screen also running 1080p, i could really see how good the IPS display on the Galago is.

Galago vs Samsung 21"
Galago vs Samsung 21″

Now i haven’t been able to test the graphics performance of the Galago yet and also didn’t test the battery life yet. My next step with this laptop will be to install Arch Linux and probably Steam to test the graphics performance a bit.

As far as the hardware goes i am really impressed by the screen and the overall build quality.

I must say i am also impressed with System76. The support is  very responsive, competent and engaging. One really notices how they take pride in a great product.

I will try and write one more post once i have installed Arch Linux on the Galago and update you on the experience.

8 replies on “System76 – Galago UltraPro | First impressions”

I’m actually looking for portable laptop, but linux-friendly modern hardware attracts me, not sure if a few inches do make a difference.
So it’d be nice to have some relative shots, and relative to human if possible.

Hey how is the keyboard? A lot of reviews find it to be terrible( missing ~5% strokes). Also 13.04 is not a LTS release, the one next year will be 14.04(LTS).

Thanks for you comment. I have updated the post regarding the LTS.

The keyboard could defiantly benefit from some more feedback as it’s sometimes hard to say if you actually pressed the key or not. I have had worse keyboards though. You know spongy ones.

Hey, i see you have a swiss TLD, are you living in Switzerland and thus ordered the ultrabook from the states? I am interested in getting myself the galago, but don’t know if i want to take on the hassle with customs…

Hey there, sorry I live in Sweden at the moment. For me it was no hassle at all. You get the package from UPS and then a week later a invoice for the sales taxes. UPS makes that pretty easy but also takes a bit of money for that service. (you can’t opt out)

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