{"id":965,"date":"2014-01-11T22:36:22","date_gmt":"2014-01-12T05:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/?p=965"},"modified":"2014-05-10T16:28:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-10T22:28:07","slug":"galago-ultrapro-laptop-the-good-and-the-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/galago-ultrapro-laptop-the-good-and-the-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Galago UltraPro laptop: the good and the bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had a Galago UltraPro laptop <\/a>from System76<\/a> since August of 2013, and I use it every day at work (thank you, Vivint<\/a>). Overall, I love it — but would have looked for another option had I known about the bad parts.<\/p>\n

The good:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Ships with Ubuntu by default, including drivers for the hardware.<\/li>\n
  2. Powerful: Intel Haswell processor with the\u00a0Intel Iris Pro graphics chip, which means it’s fast, and it can drive a Dell 30″ monitor (using an Apple mini display port to dual-link DVI adapter<\/a>), an HDMI monitor, and the laptop screen at the same time.<\/li>\n
  3. Small and lightweight — easy to carry around.<\/li>\n
  4. USB 3.0<\/li>\n
  5. The keyboard layout and function keys are designed for Linux, and they work — no tweaking necessary.<\/li>\n
  6. The touch pad works well (although it’s not as awesome as Apple’s touchpad and gestures)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The bad:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The screen is too small to use at its high resolution unless it’s sitting on my lap. So I always use external monitors when I’m sitting at my desk.<\/li>\n
    2. No backlit keyboard.<\/li>\n
    3. No indicators\/lights for the caps lock, scroll lock and num lock keys — so you don’t know what state your keyboard is in. I hate this — it’s a huge omission.<\/li>\n
    4. The ethernet jack door flips down, and it breaks off easily. When that happens, the ethernet cable doesn’t stay plugged in very easily. Inexcusable. It’s possible to use a USB-to-Ethernet device, but who wants to do that?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The Galago UltraPro is a fantastic<\/em> Linux work<\/em>station, but it’s a poor laptop<\/em> compared to most other laptops (with the exception of being lightweight) because the screen is too small, the keyboard isn’t backlit, and the lock keys lack indicator lights. A MacBook Pro Retina is a better\u00a0laptop<\/em> in almost every way. The screen is oh-so-beautiful, the keys are backlit, and the caps lock key tells you when it’s on (but the function key is in the\u00a0wrong<\/em> place — the control key should go there — what was Apple thinking?).<\/p>\n

      Why can’t Apple ship Ubuntu as an option on the MacBook Pro? It would be awesome, because they’d support the hardware with Linux drivers.<\/p>\n

      I can dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I’ve had a Galago UltraPro laptop from System76 since August of 2013, and I use it every day at work (thank you, Vivint). Overall, I love it — but would have looked for another option had I known about the bad parts. The good: Ships with Ubuntu by default, including drivers for the hardware. Powerful: … <\/p>\n

      Continue reading “Galago UltraPro laptop: the good and the bad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}