excuse me i'm allergic to ShortCircuit system 76 is a
bit of an odd company i mean when you think about it they've got all of these products that
are relatively high end and yet it's all based on open
source software from the thelio to the server to
the oryx pro which is what we're looking at right now
honestly i haven't unboxed this yet i've opened the box to see what's inside
but this is the first time that it's actually going to be taken out
this is a big box for a very small
laptop this is a 15-inch laptop i got this kind of weird packaging method here
everything is bound up in this rather heavy duty cardboard and uh
plastic and what you're supposed to do
is unfold it and
it'll just slide right out
like so that way you can reuse it and it
cuts down on waste which is honestly quite awesome so let's
get the main event out here ah that's better
the inside of the box is pretty nice too actually when i stopped to look at it
all around it are these these nerdy kind of designs like you can see the
rocket ship there blasting off you've got uh some kind of crystal here
uh yeah all kinds of really cool stuff here
so that is definitely something you'd want to keep
which brings us to the laptop as far as the aesthetics go
it's a pretty standard design this is actually a clever unit that system 76
has customized for their own use so yeah
it feels really nice glass track pad all metal exterior
very thin bezels on the screen a little bit of wobble but it's not too bad but
you might be asking yourself what's so special about it then it's a
clever laptop that's running Linux and that is where things get very
interesting this aside from the fact that it just
runs Linux is running a custom firmware it's
running core boot that system 76 has specifically
engineered to allow it to not only use Thunderbolt
but also NVIDIA switchable graphics it's
kind of a first in that regard as far as i'm aware it may actually still be the
only one that's capable of doing that and what that essentially means is
you're going to be able to modify the firmware for yourself you can
go on github download the firmware modify it build it and flash it i'd like
to try to do that today that'd be nice but first our sponsor
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description below i didn't even notice this but the packaging here actually comes with
a nice little cleaning cloth and
what is this is this a thermal pad this looks like a thermal pad i guess they
expect you to open it up which is honestly kind of
neat it's also possible they expect thermal pads to degrade over time so
they want you to be able to keep this for a while i'm guessing this would be a thermal pad
for the chipset perhaps the embedded controller which if
i had to guess probably mates to the bottom shell here
so if you were to open it up to replace your RAM or upgrade your
storage then uh yeah you've got this this nice
little thermal pad here very nice nice standard but
decent feeling power adapter okay so the power plugs into the back and it
actually uh reminds me i've been so excited to just fire this
up and play with it that i haven't even gone over the i o so
on the back here we've got a Thunderbolt 3 port power HDMI displayport mini
displayport actually over on the other side we've got a
little expandable Ethernet port isn't that cute i remember
the first time i saw those like 10 years ago i mean you used to be
able to see them on pcmcia cards but whatever anyway we've got two usb 3.0
ports here and then around the other side we've got headphone jack microphone jack
usb 3.0 and a micro sd card reader
so this thing is pretty kitted out before i power it on
let's have a feel for how the keyboard is
it's got very striking lettering i'm not sure if that's a clever thing or a
system 76 thing uh the keys themselves feel pretty solid
they're they have a very um very stable throw actually
system 76 those guys are actually kind of keyboard nerds
in fact from what i understand uh i think it's
jeremy one of the lead programmers over there our lead product designers over
there actually flashed there are created and flashed their own
keyboard layout for this computer so yeah that all feels pretty good
a little bit of deck flex but i mean this is made of metal so you're
not really going to have to worry about that too much and when you're typing
there's nothing so let's go ahead and power it on
i've never used a core boot enabled machine before press escape for boot
options cool this trackpad feels amazing by the
way holy crap it is buttery smooth one of the things
that i love about popos is that it actually asks you right off the bat whether or not you want to
encrypt your hard drive or SSD as it were what that lets you do
is protect your machine say if it got
stolen that way they need your password in order to access all your files
so it's actually quite useful to have especially on a laptop but we're not
we're not going to do that for now there's not really a whole lot of settings that you can change in the BIOS
of this thing i guess that's the whole point of the core boot thing you can just change it
all and recompile it so one of the other things that pop west does really well is it has
all these integrations for online accounts so you've got google next cloud facebook
microsoft flickr foursquare and your traditional
enterprise imap and smtp and stuff what this lets you do is you can
configure your email your calendar your cloud storage all that kind of
stuff all at once from here you don't have to go through every single
application and log in each time so we don't want to
do any of that right now oh yes you can't really see this because
i don't have any screen capture right now but the oryx pro has switchable graphics and
it's saying that here that you can just switch it by going up to the menu here
and toggling it uh that's great that's something that like
i said i don't think has actually happened before now for a core boot enabled
device this is not running any kind of proprietary firmware whatsoever it's it's
mind-boggling because like this is a company again that is completely in the open ecosystem
so firmware software even their
custom designed chassis the thelio is open source
and yet they're selling it and they seem to be doing pretty well
this is popos you guys have maybe seen it before
i've used it in a couple of videos now in our
gaming on Linux updates and also in
uh the pc build challenge that uh
Linus and i went through uh it was a bit of a race
and unfortunately pop os i'm gonna say
it was half and half papa west let me down and i let papaws
down because there were some configuration changes i could have made
that would have made things a lot better suffice it to say popos is actually a
pretty nice operating system it's a more or less stock uh gnome
or gunno interface here so we've got our notification area up here
we've got our um system tray up here which includes
our wi-fi control sound control uh display brightness
we got bluetooth our power settings the fan just kicked in for some reason
it's getting warm yeah a little bit okay that's to be expected when running
primarily on the dedicated graphics card and we have a quick access to our
settings control panel here i won't go through all the different details of popos but
yeah let's let's explore a little deeper for one
looking at it it all really matches well like the the dark
theme for popo s really matches with the theme of the theming of the machine
don't you just love it when you download steam and then you launch steam for the first time
and it's like updating steam what version of the NVIDIA driver we use in
here 440.100 so it looks like this screen is
not a freesync compatible screen otherwise we'd have the g-sync compatible button here
which is fine but it is a 144hz panel
and it is silky smooth it doesn't say what technology the display is
that's a little unfortunate uh actually while i'm here
what GPU is this it's an rtx 2080 super
max q so that is the top of the line i believe
they have them available in the rtx 2060 and 2070 as well
so that's cool looks like 64 gigs of RAM so this thing is kitted out
NVMe boot drive 512 gig
i think steam is having trouble looks like there were some major
maintenance run on it yesterday all right i'm going to give steam one more
shot i'll switch to the us server nope
wrecked all right gaming's not all this laptop
has to offer anyway part of the whole appeal here is
unleashing your potential if we want to
build something i'm gonna have to install some build tools
we're looking at a key map so there are two layers on a typical laptop keyboard
your standard you know keyboard and then also the keys
that you know happen when you press the function key so you can press function
and plus and minus for example to change the backlight brightness
of the keyboard you can press function and
let's see f9 to increase the brightness of the monitor or f8 to decrease it
uh f6 to enable the sound to go up and
down those are all handled here this block
here this upper block is our regular keys you
can see we've got escape f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 blah blah blah
and it's all laid out in the order you see them in your keyboard
similarly we've got the same thing down here
i'm not entirely sure why
but there's not a whole lot assigned to function and
you know the regular keys so let's just say
for giggles let's let's change the uh let's change function t
to something else well i mean let's just change it to l
so we can just do function l and then tt
or function t and then tt and we've got LTT
now i need to close all running applications unplug
everything from the computer aside from the power adapter meaning
you'll lose screen cap sorry and run make flash internal
i'm more excited than i should be for my stupid little custom
key map because it really is truly stupid
alright we're back let's open up our uh text editor and let's see what happens
function t that looks like an l
shift t that is capital l t
t l l t t l l t t l l t
t this is way more amusing than it should be but basically i can make any
key on the keyboard any other key on the keyboard you can change the layout of the
keyboard at your own whim and that's just the start of it you can
change the the fan profiles you can change all kinds of
stuff in the in the embedded controller here and that's all built into the
the oryx pro like it's it's pretty amazing
so what you're getting is basically complete control over the computer like
the embedded controller handles like power delivery it handles
the fan curves like i said the voltage curves the frequency curves all of that
stuff is handled in the embedded controller and it is completely open for
you the only problem is that there is a price to all of this
which is 16.99 and that's for
a 15.6 inch panel GeForce rtx
2060 and a 250 Gigabyte SSD
which is SATA on the base model so you've got some upgrades to do but the
good news is you can do them what is the price of freedom really
you've got a completely open source operating system you can do whatever you
want with you've got a completely open source firmware you can do whatever you want
with you can adjust the internal
specs of the computer as much as you want you can
expand it with Thunderbolt you can choose to run it with or without the
NVIDIA graphics card it's a cliche and i already used it in
this video but it's basically the apple of the Linux world
you're paying a premium but i mean you are getting a pretty premium machine
i think it feels fantastic i think the philosophy behind it is fantastic
the company behind it is pretty great the um the ceo i met him a little while
ago at the um superfan three event he kind of gives
me a hank scorpio vibe and like i want to support that again
it's just how much are you willing to pay for it that's the question you have to ask
these guys are premium you get a premium product is that what you want
for Linux that's what i want but it's a question you're gonna have to ask
yourself thanks for watching make sure to get subscribed so you can see more short
circuits like this one or unlike this one this is kind of different
and i'll see you later