Not long after updating its Pangolin laptop line, System76 is at it again, with a new updated version of its Gazelle laptop with your choice of Ubuntu or Pop!_OS preinstalled.
The folks at System76 have been working overtime lately. About a month ago the company released a new and improved version of its Pangolin laptop, and today the company announced that a fresh off the assembly line version of its Gazelle laptop will become generally available tomorrow.
The new laptop comes equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and an Intel i9 H-class CPU. The 13900H chip includes 14 cores and 20 threads and raises the laptop’s max clock speed to 5.4 GHz. It’s available with your choice of either a 15” or 17” 144Hz display with RTX-powered graphics. Out-of-the-box it’s ready to run up to three external
displays.
“The 13th Gen Intel processors provide unmatched performance and power efficiency, performing up to 8% faster than the previous generation Gazelle, and makes the perfect choice for professionals and developers,” System76 said in a statement. “With Gazelle now boasting faster processing alongside up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, users can easily multitask without any lag or slowdowns, optimal for the best Blender rendering, streaming, and gaming experience.”
If you work with video or audio and need a lot of storage and quick retrieval, the Gazelle has you covered. The machine can be ordered with up to 4TB of PCIe 4.0 and 4TB of PCIe 3.0 NVMe storage for a total of 8TB. PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, of course, substantially increases read/write speeds.
If you don’t know, System76 isn’t your average computer maker. What sets it apart? For starters, absolutely not one of its desktop, laptop, and server lines comes with Windows preinstalled (and because it’s not Apple, none come with macOS either). Everything comes with Linux installed and ready to go. Also, all of their lines are manufactured at the company’s Denver facilities (meaning they’re made in the USA for you true blue ‘Muricans), and the company takes great care in picking components that are going to work out-of-the-box with just about any Linux distribution you’re likely to throw onto one of their machines.
Although you are free to install whatever Linux distro trips your trigger on it after you get it out of the box, the Gazelle ships with your choice of Ubuntu or Pop!_OS, the latter being a distro that’s developed and maintained by the System 76 gang.
Take my word for it, if you’re going to get one of these, order it with the former, even if you’re planning on throwing some other distro on it as soon you get it out of the box. It’s an impressive distro, based on Ubuntu, but with its own desktop environment called COSMIC, which is a quite nice repurposing of GNOME.
COSMIC’s going to get even better in the not-so-distant future. The developers at System76 are currently in the process of scrapping COSMIC’s GNOME underpinnings altogether and building a whole new desktop from scratch in Rust, a programming language noted for its security.
Gazelle will be shipping with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, which System76 says “is built for creators, makers, and builders to unleash their potential. The combination of personalized workflows, auto-tiling, power profiles, and hybrid graphics to prioritize performance or battery life, and out-of-the-box encryption empowers users to build their most productive environment.”
Another plus when ordering any machine from System 76 is that they’re designed to be repairable. Not only that, users are free to open the case and swap parts without voiding the warranty. Oh, and Pop!_OS collects no user data.
Pricing for the latest and greatest version of Gazelle will start at $1,299, which puts it smack in the middle of System76’s six lines of laptops. It will be available for purchase tomorrow on System76’s website.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
1080p is a joke on a 13″ laptop, let alone a 15″ or 17″. Do they actually expect people to buy these?
@Jane Doe 1080p on a 15.6″ here and not a problem, it’s perfectly fine IMHO.
In fact it’s preferable to me instead of a bigger resolution that you have to scale down so the fonts don’t become unreadable and the buttons impossible to click.
“Take my word for it, if you’re going to get one of these, order it with the former,”
I assume that by “the former” you meant to refer to Pop_OS! even though I think that would be “the latter”.
Thanks for your review.