I’ve been a fan of System 76 for a while and have been reviewing their machines for a few years, including their Colorado made Thelio Linux desktop. My most recent dip back into the Linux desktop world has been their Pangolin laptop. It’s a 15″ laptop with a full AMD chip-set. I have been using the Pangolin as my daily driver for a few weeks now and overall the experience has been good. Please note, that I am going to focus on the hardware for this review as I have a review of Pop!_OS 21.10 forthcoming. Also, please be aware that I am comparing this to ARM Macs, because I see them as the other leading developer mobile workstation. Here’s the config!
The Bad: I am going out of order here a bit, but I think it’s worth leading with the bad, since there are a few issues. I don’t feel any of them are deal-breakers but they are certainly worth mentioning.
As is the case with every Linux machine I’ve tried, fan-noise is an issue. If you’re coming from an Apple background, you’ll find it jarring how often and how intensely the fan spins up. At this point with the current generation of Mac laptops being nearly silent, that’s going to need to be the standard for all other laptops going forward in terms of fan-noise.
The Pangolin is a nice plastic machine, but it’s plastic. It’s good plastic, but it’s plastic. If you’re looking for Apple build quality, you’ll be disappointed. Additionally, the keyboard feels mushy.
Battery life is another concern. It’s not bad, but it’s by no means industry leading. In my use, it’s good for about six hours.
The Good: There’s a lot to like here. For starters the machine just works out of the box and by using AMD through and through, you’re secure in having good open-source drivers indefinitely.
I know I mentioned trying to focus on hardware here, but the reality is that I needed good Windows VMs for my use-case and Apple is increasingly disinterested in facilitating that. My previous solution on Mac was Parallels for Visual Studio, but that’s becoming increasingly challenging as Apple transitions to ARM.
No driver issues at all! I am just going to leave that there.
Ports! While I have been living the dongle lifestyle for a while, it’s nice to have ports and not you know daisy chain myself to near death.
The Ugly: The speakers are truly terrible. They sound like a potato inserted into the anus of a dying llama and that’s just awful. It’s so bad that I won’t watch my favorite Jupiter Broadcasting shows on YouTube on this device without headphones. Honestly the OEM (Clevo) should hide their head in shame on this one.
At the end of the day, I am happy with the Pangolin as a work machine, because it’s got the power I need and frankly because Apple dropped the ball on Windows VMs. My biggest disappointment in writing this review is that I know System 76 can do better (they do in Pop!_OS) but they are hamstrung by Clevo in the case of this unit. In many ways, the Pangolin leaves Pop!_OS and Linux desktop overall to apologize for its short-comings and poor build quality. Like it or not, Apple has changed the landscape again and all notebooks must be compared to the M series if we are being truly honest with ourselves. Let me know what you think on Twitter.
