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$1150 for an 8GB PC laptop is very high. It’s the price of a 13” MacBook Air with twice the storage.

A better option would be a low-end Dell that works just as well with Linux and costs perhaps half as much. I am yet to see a low-end Dell that doesn’t excel with Linux.


EDIT: The parent post originally said "$1,500 for 8GB". I'll leave this anyway.

> The Lemur Pro *starts at $1,150 for an Intel i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM* and a 256-GB SSD.

For $179[1], you can upgrade it to 40GB of RAM for a total of $1,329.

[1] https://system76.com/laptops/lemp12/configure

Do they just stick a 32gb in the other slot? Seems like dual channel will not work correctly if one stick is 8gb and the other 32
It's possible that there is no dual channel, so the laptop would not take a performance hit due to mismatched sticks.

I can not tell the configuration of the slots from their specs page [0].

Their configuration page [1] confirms that it's 8GB+32GB to get the 40GB.

Why wouldn't they just offer 2x16GB to get the dual-channel memory? Unless, of course, the laptop does not support dual-channel memory...

--

[0]: https://system76.com/laptops/lemur#specs

[1]: https://system76.com/laptops/lemp12/configure

Most likely the motherboard has 8GB soldered on, they do that with a lot of laptops these days unfortunately.
This is my guess too. It's a very weird design decision, especially for a developer targeted laptop. I would probably be less unhappy with a 16 GB RAM chip soldered, but than an 8 GB one.
i get that for achieving higher memory speeds, you need to often solder instead of making it available as a slot.

but most people would like to upgrade, and if it is going to most likely work on the slower speed of the second stick, it defeats the performance point altogether.

just poor design in this case.

> so the laptop would not take a performance hit due to mismatched sticks.

My impression is that it would take a performance hit because it can’t “RAID-0” the memory sticks as it’d do if they were the same size.

My wording is confusing, by "not taking a performance hit" I mean that the performance of the 32GB stick is not limited to the lesser 8GB stick, like it would have been with dual channel.

Of course, dual channel is always better than single channel, and it gives you a performance boost if you have 2 of the same stick.

I paid 700 euros for a Samsung Ibook two years ago. i5, 16GB, 256GB SSD, intel iris xe graphics. Not a performance monster, obviously and I use a mac book for work. But I can run Manjaro on it and I can even do some lightweight gaming on it via steam. All the important stuff works. And it even manages to not look cheap (even though it is). Nice aluminium, quiet and effective cooling, etc.

So, this thing seems a bit expensive for what is effectively yet another generic laptop with the usual underwhelming meh screen, crappy trackpad, etc. Exactly the weak points of my setup as well. But a lot more reasonably priced.

Upgrading beyond the base spec is a very different game between the two: a base 13" MBA with maxed memory and disk (24GB/2TB) is $2300, whereas machine with the same upgrades is $1470.
Even the XPS 13 developers edition does have issues.

After the way netbooks went down, I have either used OS X, or Windows with VMWare/Virtual Box when needed.

Now with WSL there is one thing less to install, although with managed languages I hardly care as they abstract the underlying OS for the most part, or I just connect to a cloud instance.

Stil own an aging Asus 1215B, though.

You get an artisanal laptop created by passionate Linux enthusiasts that work for a Small Business in Oregon.

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