Review: System76 Lemur Pro Laptop

After years of searching for the perfect laptop—and making this search part of my full-time job here at WIRED—I've given up. I am sorry to say there is no such thing as the perfect laptop. There are too many variables at play, too many use cases to handle. All laptops have trade-offs.

There are, however, some that come close enough to perfect, and System76’s updated Lemur Pro is about as close to the perfect Linux laptop as you’re likely to get. Part of that is the simple, clean design, but much of it comes from the customization options. System76 has put in a lot of work in the firmware and software that ships with the Lemur Pro.

System76’s Lemur Pro line is the company’s thin and light laptop. It’s not a gaming rig, nor would it be my top pick for a dedicated video editing station. (That said, I edited a ton of video on it. It’s certainly capable, if not optimized for video.) However, if you need a solid Linux laptop that’s light enough to carry with you everywhere you go, offers a ton of expansion possibilities, and just works, then the Lemur Pro should be almost everything you’re looking for.

The Lemur Pro is a 14-inch all-around laptop that’s thin and lightweight. At just 2.5 pounds and 0.54 inches thick, you can slide the Lemur Pro in a small bag and forget you’re even carrying it. System76 makes larger, more powerful laptops if you need one, but the Lemur Pro is the ultraportable one in the lineup.

The latest iteration of the Lemur Pro arrived earlier this year, with new 13th-generation Intel chips inside. The Lemur Pro starts at $1,150 for an Intel i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM and a 256-GB SSD. The model I tested had a 5-GHz Intel Core i7 chip (1355U), 16 GB of RAM, a 250-GB SSD OS drive, and a 1-TB SSD for storage. That brought the price to $1,474.

The price is reasonable for the hardware (if perhaps a tad high), but part of what you’re paying for is System76’s excellent support for Linux, which is hard to come by in cheaper options. The Lemur Pro base model is also user-upgradeable, so if you already have a few PCIe SSDs and some RAM lying about, you could upgrade the Lemur yourself.

Performance was very good for not having a dedicated graphics card. I happened to also be testing the GoPro Hero 12 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) while I had the Lemur Pro, and did most of my video editing using it. While full-time video editors would be better off with a dedicated graphics card, I was actually impressed with how well the Lemur Pro performed. I never had any lagging in the playback of 5.3K clips and rendering was quite speedy as well. The 1080p matte screen (it's a 1920 x 1080 FHD panel) is also quite nice. I was able to work in relatively bright sunlight without issue.

Where the Lemur Pro really shines is battery life. System76 claims 14 hours, and I managed 11 hours in our battery drain test (looping a 1080p video). In real-world use, I frequently eked out over 13 hours. That’s off the charts better than any other Linux laptop I’ve tested recently.

The Lemur Pro ships with a 65W barrel-type charger, but fortunately is also capable of USB-C charging (65W as well). I primarily charged it using my Satechi wall charger. Speaking of ports, the Lemur Pro has one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, one Thunderbolt 4 port, a microSD card reader, and an HDMI port. There’s also a 1080p webcam that offered decent video quality on Zoom calls.

Like Apple, System76 makes both its hardware and its software. The major difference is that System76 makes repairable, upgradeable hardware and an open source operating system, meaning you can customize it to your liking.

In the interest of testing what you get out of the box, I stuck with System76’s Pop!_OS rather than installing my favorite Linux distro and desktop. I can’t stand the Gnome Desktop (which Pop!_OS is based on) but System76 has customized, changed, and fixed everything that bugs me about Gnome and rendered it a usable—I would even say pleasant—experience. It’s good enough that I felt no need to change anything (I did customize a few things to my liking).

It’s a testament to System76’s design chops that they’ve been able to take something I can’t stand and turn it into something I was happy to use. I never did install Arch Linux (though I am sure it would have worked fine). You can also order your Lemur Pro with Ubuntu Linux as well if you prefer, but I would not recommend it.

System76's laptops are made by a white label supplier named Clevo, but System76 works with Clevo to make sure everything works well with Linux. System76 then uses Coreboot, an open source firmware for booting, which means there is no closed source software in the stack. Among other things, this means that modern forms of suspend work out of the box. Having spent hours, possibly days, trying to make S3 suspend work on Lenovo laptops, I can tell you that this is a huge win for the Lemur Pro. The changes to Coreboot were contributed upstream as well, so others can benefit.

In the end, this is why I would buy a System76 laptop. The company makes a great laptop, stands behind it with lifetime support, and contributes to the community that makes Linux possible. If I were buying a Linux laptop right now—and didn't need a dedicated graphics card—this is the laptop I would get.