System76 Disaster

dearastronomer · 9 months

I would suggest you speak with the owner(s) if you haven't already.

There is a possibility that you were unlucky enough to be the rare care of poor support. I will also share an industry secret.

The "white box" laptops a lot of vendors sell are usually made by one of a small handful of laptop manufacturers in the world. The manufacturers are bastards to work with, and if you think you you have it bad, imagine the crap "dealers" have to put up with.

Dell, Apple, Toshiba, ASUS - those guys move enough units to where they can push the manufacturers around some, plus they also are big enough to where they can "budget" for DOA/Returned stock that they can repair and then later resell as discounted "refurb" units to reduce their losses.

Now, that being said, bastard manufacturers are no excuse for poor customer service on their end.

Some of the Linux systems vendors aren't much more than a few guys working out of a small office / garage - Linux systems are a niche market, and we all know how razor-thin hardware margins are.

I'm not trying to make excuses for the System76 guys - I just know ( from experience) the tightrope act "independent" vendors have to perform on a daily basis.

absurdlyobfuscated · 9 months

I have had the Lemur Ultrathin for many months now and haven't had any issues, but I am running Linux Mint 11 on it. Also, when I emailed tech support for various tech questions they answered me back within 15 minutes each time. I haven't had any issues at all and only good things to say about them, minus the crappy battery life.

Ascetue · 9 months

Thanks for posting this. Too bad, really. I was considering buying for the same reason as you, but I guess I'm sticking to thinkpads for now.

shazzner · 9 months

That sucks, I bought a laptop from them a few months ago and everything was ok. I think they need to hire more people to handle customer service, it always feels like it's one overwhelmed dude trying to put out every fire. Before you go buy from a huge corporate laptop maker though (with the included Windows tax), I'd check out some other independent Linux laptop outfits, like ZaReason.

bloodguard · 9 months

A sad truth is that you're better off going with a huge vendor with an established RMA policy. We had the same rational (support a linux vendor) and outcome with a penguin computing server. So now if I ever suggest anything but Dell my boss looks at me like I've lost my mind and reminds me.

vinnl · 9 months

I can't say anything about System76 (which isn't really a "new" company), but I got my laptop from ZaReason, and it works really great. It did have a few short hiccups along the ride, but I got really happy with my purchase when I then noted the excellent customer support ZaReason offers, so if you're in the market for a laptop, there's a least one Ubuntu laptop company I can recommend (though I assume System76 can still be pretty cool and probably has a lot of satisfied customers as well).

kveykva · 9 months

Had mine for a while. Works perfectly. Never any issues with customer service :/ Just a spot of bad luck on your side is my 2 cents. Worst I've seen is a friend of mine dropped his and ruined the screen, in a week he had it back and working fine.

linuxhooligan · 9 months

I have to respond to this post because the original post is a bit inflamatory. Here is a checkbox in the other column on the topic of how well System76 laptops and company have performed for us.

I am up to about 30k worth of puchases from System76 for our corporate clients, all laptops.

We buy System76 for the following reasons:

they do the testing and make sure the chipsets and bios are guaranteed to work with Linux. We have a lot of corporate clients that run Linux in desktop usecases and we don't have time to worry about Dell or Acer or whomever deciding willy nilly to change random parts out from under us even on the same laptop production run. This is extremely common with all of the majour top tier vendors, and EXTREMELY annoying if you run linux on desktops and require a steady supply of known supported models (important in a corporate environment as they never give us enough time to do testing, so System76 has filled that requirement for us nicely).
we no longer purchase Windows laptops. Instead, we buy System76 laptops (any machine that needs windows will inevitably one day need to be repurposed back as a Linux machine) and deploy our Windows image to them. The only two way install guarantee is to go through a manufacturer like System76 because all of their laptops have Windows drivers available and we can get our images deployed easily on the machines even though they are sold as Linux machines.

With the 'reasoning' behind the purchases out of the way, and while 30k worth of laptops is not a huge amount of laptops, I do have enough units in the field used by the most brutal of users you can imagine to say that the problem rates with their laptops are exactly the same as with the Dells, Toshibas and Asus laptops that we used to purchase.

As with any company, there will be lemons sent out, there will be problems with support issues, we have run into all of these with all of the manufacturers. Our experience so far has been that System76's numbers are exactly no better or no worse than any of the others because their laptops are manufactured by the same ODM's that make the Dells, Toshibas and Asus boxen.

I would bet the other handful of Linux laptop/desktop resellers have equally as good performance numbers.

The only manufacturer that totally hosed us so far was Acer. We don't know what happened but we bought Acer for about 6 months and we had about 75% failure rate on the within 12 to 24 months of the 1 year manufacturer warranties expiring. Of course, we got what Acer promised, one years worth of life out of them so it's all good. It's just that, while all of the other manufacturers also offer only 1 year warranties, all of their laptops run easily for 5 to 7 years (yes, our clients run them into the ground) so this was a bit surprising.

I just wanted to throw out a check box in the other column to balance things out.

I hope this info helps someone.

///EDIT/// Oh yes, I forgot to mention (bah!), the great thing about all of the Linux vendors is that they are tiny. Usually you can speak to the same sales person for years and often you can even get to speak to the owner if you REALLY REALLY need something adressed. This really makes a huge difference for us as well.

xak · 9 months

I assume "memory card" = DIMM?

in_question · 9 months

dude just revert payment on your credit card, goods not received in usable condition, complete credit card refund.

sisyphus · 9 months

Bummer man. My 15" gazelle is working perfectly so far. Cross fingers.

[deleted] · 9 months

Might check out XoticPC if you're looking for good-quality no-Windows systems that come with AMAZING support. I've never had to use it, but I hear that you'll always be connected with the same person (an engineer, not a call support center) for the life of your warranty.

tuna_safe_dolphin · 9 months

Two things:

It's funny that just as I'm typing this, there are 76 comments in this thread. . . I'll be ruining that unfortunately.
I had a System76 laptop. I didn't like how it physically felt i.e. the actual scroll pad and left-click/right-click buttons. Hard to describe exactly, but my thumb hurt using it. Anyway, I returned it for a full refund. I felt bad because they were quite friendly when I called and I really did want to support a small company.

tldr; 77th comment, didn't like my laptop, had no problems returning it, felt kinda bad.

smulloni · 9 months

Like many others here, I've had very positive experiences with System76 technical support, who have really gone out of their way to be helpful.

professorchaoz · 9 months

Thats really terrible to hear (if true). I have bought two systems from them with good experience. It sucks to hear about your pains. I was under the impression they were a stand up company, but if they hosed you I this manner, its unacceptable. I've made great effort to purchase systems from companies that pre-install linux and I don't like hearing about things like this.

Halmonster · 9 months

Next time, consider buying from Zareason

potyl · 9 months

That's some scary customer service. If you payed your laptop with a credit card you can try to contact your credit card company and explained them what happened. Sometimes they can help you.

danknerd · 9 months

I have a Sys76 laptop from 2006, still running and quite good actually.. Sorry you had a bad experience, I still think they a good company

ngroot · 9 months

I've had good experiences with my System76 machine so far. When I was looking to order initially, the model I wanted was delayed (along with several others) due to Intel's Sandy Bridge recall. They were very informative about the state of their orders during this time, and even managed to get me my unit ahead of their target date.

Second dearastronomer's suggestion to escalate this to the higher-ups. They seem to want to provide good customer service; I'm sure they'd appreciate knowing about a failure in their support system.

[deleted] · 9 months

So the company's philosophy on a lemon is to do the laziest 'fix' possible, and then not to check if it actually worked.

~~laziest~~ cheapest -- and yes that's the same method that almost all the manufacturers use...

garoththorp · 9 months

Small note, I've bought 2 systems from their competitor, ZaReason, and both have been excellent systems. The support is friendly and quick, and I talked to them via gtalk. They even took some photos of which wire they suspect came loose during shipping on their end so that I could fix it myself.

eadwacer · 9 months

I've dealt with System76 for about five years now, and while their gear is not top-of-the-line (at least the versions I buy), I've always found them responsive. Once, when I had an update problem that killed GRUB, I posted a query on the Ubuntu forums, and it was a 76er who responded with the fix.

beatenwords · 9 months

Ohava.com. That's where I'm going to buy my Linux machine. They currently have free shipping, and you can use my username to save 11.04% :)

akoumjian · 9 months

That is terrible support. I've had great luck with my machine so I never got to experience this.

usrlib · 9 months

Nice try, Michell Dell.

msp3k · 9 months

I'm sorry to hear that. I ordered a System76 a few months ago and it's running like a champ. (knock on wood)

grishnav · 9 months

I'm on a serp7 and it's been great.

xiambax · 9 months

Buy dell systems if your going to run linux.

eddietours1 · 9 months

I have a Gazu1 the machine Been great and there support awesome.

naisanza · 9 months

That seriously blows man! Thanks for the review.

flux42 · 9 months

Some of their laptops use the same Clevo barebones as Sager. You might want to consider buying from one of their resellers such as xoticpc. Sager has a no-questions asked 30 day return policy so should be convenient.

malachus · 7 months

I wish my System76 laptop had started having problems early enough for me to have returned it. Their support has not be helpful and they have yet to make good any any warranty repairs. What a waste of money. I would have been better off with a Mac.

sahilsinha · 9 months

Sahil from Ohava here. We've had our own troubles with machines we've sent out before. It can be expensive to fix a problem like yours, shipping etc. Still its not something we would do. Just sayin... damn now I feel like an ass for saying we're better than the competition, but we are!

Aggrajag · 9 months

This might sound like trolling but I would have tried installing Windows and/or some other distro to see if it is Ubuntu that was causing the problems.

The_Chief · 9 months

They are way overpriced. Go on ebay and by a Thinkpad and install yourself.

hwuffe · 9 months

Amazing. You got to the front page. I had a similar story about my crappy Samsung Nexus S phone that i sent in three times for service and they failed to fix it link here. I gave the phone away in an attempt to get the word out and only got six responses.

Congratulations and thanks for the warning about yet another crappy company!

darksim905 · 9 months

Your problem is trying to be different, and ordering from System76 which is virtually no name unless it's very very niche Linux circles. I've heard of so many people having problems, whereas you can get a machine with real support, like a Thinkpad or otherwise and be backed or have a support network regardless of what happens.

SibLiant · 9 months

Sry for for your issues. I have a bonobo that i just ordered and everything is ok. Accept for FUCKING unity.. but i can deal.

They treated you like shit and they should fucking know it.

johnyquest · 9 months

The way I look at it, windows drives the hardware market. If it wasn't for windows, the majority of people that use PC's wouldn't be using them right now. Microsoft's constant development of a resource hungry OS has forced hardware manufactures to constantly develop faster and more powerful hardware, and then in turn forced Microsoft to find ways to use it (and games, too).

It's an endless cycle that leads to the availability of cheap hardware that we all now use to run our free software on -- and it wouldn't exist if it weren't for windows.

Secondly, win7 is an awesome OS. So, take your free copy, and let it surprise you. I stick to linux when it comes to my older hardware and / or laptops -- but for my new stuff, it's always windows.

The last part is just personal preference, but I've been a PC gamer since '94 and I'd rather spend the price of a PS3 on a graphics card then ever actually own one. But thats just me.

...The kid who mowed lawns until he had 3k cash -- and went to a computer show and handed every penny of it over for the PII-300 the day it came out. Just the board and chip, mind you. That plus a Diamond Monster 3dII (the first SLI-able video card) --- I owned quake 2 back then. It was quite the feeling.

I just brought myself to throw that thing away a few weeks ago. ;(

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