I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.

Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.

But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.

The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.

I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.

Would definitely be interested in what battery life you'll get

Why'd you buy these kind of specs for a laptop, what's the point in having 1 hour battery life if it's meant to be used everywhere.
Or do you just use it plugged and really rarely unplugged ?
Personally I buy my laptops with low specs and no graphics card to forget about battery shortage.

With the gtx 1070 and If it has g-sync enabled then no way the battery is going last for more than 4 hrs.

@WhozorRakin that's usually my concern as well, but unfortunately laptops are blending in with workstation workloads at an eerie pace.. and AMD64's very architecture (let alone all the peripherals like GPU and high frequency RAM) aren't suitable for that.

But consumers demand ever more... So I doubt that this demand for "portable" workstations willl disappear anytime soon. In reality however they're just your average ATX workstation in a laptop form factor, equipped with a battery. With probably less battery consumption than a full ATX at full load, but even my HP Compaq nx7010 which I'm powering from my lab bench power supply takes about 40W at full load when fully charged. So much for "mobile" Centrino technology I guess. 40W of power consumption is pretty insane. The average smartphone takes 3W at full load,at most.

x86/AMD64 aren't suited for mobile computing, and throwing in high power components even less so. Hybrid GPU's are a possible solution, but really, the distinction between desktop and laptop should just be retained, and x86/AMD64 should be migrated towards the more efficient aarch64. Laptops or any portable devices are no good for high performance workloads, and should be regarded as such. Portable devices should instead be designed with "what should we include while barely meeting usability specs without meeting performance problems in UX" in mind, focusing primarily on battery consumption. Fortunately, the mobile phone industry has already migrated towards this design ideology.

@Haxk20

I've found gnome to a big power-leech, and it's not flexible enough for how I like to use my machine, so I don't use it. But yeah, this was definitely steep. About $2800US including taxes and shipping.

@HarleyQuinn

I suppose, but I've never in 18 years (when I got my first laptop) had a laptop under any brand that could consistently beat 3 hours. Toshiba, Dell, HP, Sony, Asus, Acer, Apple. None of them. So if this thing can, then I'm laughing.

@WhozorRakin

The majority of the time it will sit on the dining room table, plugged in, for us to use as a proper computer without having to go upstairs to my office. Battery life, while a nice bonus when you get it, is not a major concern of mine.

I don't like the rich desktop environments. They're all expensive, so they use more CPU, memory, storage, and power than other DEs or plain window managers. So I use Openbox. I have a nice script I've worked on for several years to get it working the way I want.

This laptop came with gnome by default, so one of my first orders of business was to install Openbox, and pull my script from my desktop. That's where the rabbit hole began.

Next post, after we get the toddler down for a nap.

Next chapter: http://bu.tl/gi