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.
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.
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.