The new upgrade to System76’s Serval WS reminds us of an old song by The Band because, “it’s a gamer’s dream if we ever did see one.”
Today the folks at System76 announced an upgraded version of its Serval WS laptop computer, designed with engineers and gamers in mind, From the looks of it, this one’s so fast it threatens to reach escape velocity.
If you like gaming on Linux and you’re looking for a lightening fast laptop where everything Linux works perfectly out-of-the-box with no issues, you couldn’t do much better than this. Not only is it fast, it ships with an upgraded screen that offers totally fluid animations. For engineering types who have to spend hours with eyeballs glued to a screen, the new display also boasts text so crisp that you’ll greatly reduce your use of eye drops.
While it’s true that these days you can buy laptops running Linux from just about any computer maker, with System76 you’re highly unlikely to find some sort of hidden hardware conflict down the road that the folks at Dell, Asus, or HP might’ve missed because their focus is on their Windows bread-and-butter. System76 is different. Since the company got started 20 years ago, it’s produced nothing but high quality Linux machines. In fact, the company is so hard-core Linux that I doubt anyone there remembers what a BSOD looks like.
If you think I sound as if I’m a fan of System76, you’re right. And if you had to wonder about that, you must not be from around here.
Looking at the New Serval WS Specs
I’ll start with the new display, because that’s where the System76 folks started in their press release.
It’s a 16-inch, 2560×1600, 240Hz screen (the company’s PR folks call it a “marvel that pleases the eye”) which is notable for the already mentioned fluid animations and crisp text it offers, which is made possible by the laptop’s utilization of the new NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti GPU which bring faster graphics to the table, making the Serval WS laptop better equipped than ever to run AAA games and helpful AI tools.
You’re also not likely to have this machine go into swap and then freeze, during a crucial moment in a game or while performing a compile, as the Serval WS can be ordered with up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM. It also comes equipped with the Intel CoreTM Ultra 9 275HX CPU, featuring 24 cores and threads.
Specification highlights:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti graphics
- Up to 96GB DDR5 RAM (5600 MHz)
- Up to 12TB PCIe 5.0 & 4.0 storage
- 16” 16:10 2K display at 240Hz
- 2.5GbE Ethernet
Cosmic DE Update
The company is continuing to work on Cosmic, the new open-source desktop environment it’s creating for its in-house developed and maintained Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
If you’ve been using Pop!_OS and think that you’re familiar with Cosmic, think again. That’s the old Cosmic desktop, that’s quite popular but built on Gnome technology. The new Cosmic is a completely scratch-built DE, that’s currently seen several alpha releases and will soon be entering its beta phase. The ready for prime time release should soon follow, as the company seems to be delaying the next release of Pop!_OS in anticipation of including the new Cosmic.
That only makes sense, since the new desktop promises longer battery life, noticeably less resource use resulting in cooler operating temperatures, many additional features, and a more intuitive user experience.
Serval WS Pricing and Availability
The Serval WS engineering and gaming laptop starts at $2999, and is now available for preorder. It will begin shipping late May.
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
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