System76 Meerkat Mini-Linux PC - Now with Up to Intel Core i7-1260P - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

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  It's just a NUC with System76 branding on it. Everything works great on them with Fedora or Ubuntu, no fiddling. I guess I'm not sure what the value add is in getting this from system76.

  That said, NUCs are cool little boxes. The built in VESA pass through is handy as anything and they're pretty quiet. I've got a few of them scattered around.

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    I can see them as decent Linux desktops, and rebranded because they were tested and pass, and work with S76's operating systems.

    I can see a company which mainly uses Linux for their development OS buying these en masse as desktops or even light development workstations. Toss a decent SSD in and 64 gigs of RAM, and it would definitely do decently as a basic desktop for 3-5 years.

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    A few years ago I bought a Meerkat, mainly because I was new to NUCs and wanted one-stop-shopping. That's the value added. Also the cool "system76" engraved on top of the case. Still using it every day.

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    I love my little NUCs; I have two for home servers running a PVE cluster and a third as a desktop. While everybody's needs are different, I'm happy I went the NUC route rather than re-purposing an old machine that would have been louder and use more energy.

    There is still room for improvement on the NUC platform, but just adding a USB-C hub can address many of the shortfalls I have with cabling setup.

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    If you don't need a 10th gen Intel CPU then have a look at used thin clients on eBay. You can get some pretty powerful ones, similar form factor to these, and very cheap as companies are replacing them. They are very low power too, actually rivalling a Raspberry Pi for some heavier applications like big Home Assistant set-ups or media libraries with transcoding.

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    > I guess I'm not sure what the value add is in getting this from system76

    Can you call System76 for help if you're not a linux expert and you have trouble?

• It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC

  An Intel NUC was one of the first and only things I've ever purchased using Bitcoin, way back when real companies were experimenting with accepting it as payments. I spent approximately half a Bitcoin on a DN2820FYK, which was a pretty slow machine even in its heyday. After the warranty ran out, the damn thing developed an odd glitch where it would throw a "processor thermal trip" error at POST, but still otherwise worked fine. However, the error prevented it from rebooting from a power failure without user intervention (as Homer Simpson would say: "To start, press any key. Where's the any key?"). Seemed to be a common problem with that model [intel.com], and Intel never properly addressed it (not that it matters anymore, the computer now just collects dust with the rest of the obsolete stuff that I've packratted over the years).

  That glitch, plus knowing that the Bitcoin I spent on it would now be worth about $13.5k today, has kind of soured me on Intel NUCs.

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    Which is one of many reasons I will not consider anything with Intel Inside anymore.

  • Bad thermals

    My experience with the NUCs is that they all have thermal issues. Maybe not enough cooling or easily blocked vents. There may be just too much stuffed into a small box. Also, the fan seemed pretty cheap and I've replaced a few.

    I managed to keep an old i7 model running by changing the fan curves and turning off overclocking.

    I've switched to a slightly larger model from Dell that seems to be more reliable.

• Love my System76 Meerkats. I got two of them (many years ago) as over-powered systems to hook up to my TVs. Before Fire Sticks and Raspberry Pis were viable options.

  A nice bonus was that they have built-in IR receivers.

  Would certainly buy again.

• I am using a quite popular mini PC, bee-link SER5, it has a AMD 5600H 6c12t 4.2GHz, iGPU Vega7, 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, triple display 4k, wifi6/BT, etc all in all for $459 and this thing is basically 4"x4"x2". It's really impressive, I'm using MX Linux AHS for 6+ months now.

  I had Intel "U" processor, they are quite slow...AMD 15/35/45W CPU are more powerful.

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    How loud is that little guy with a 45w tdp processor in there? The Intel U's are slow, but they can run at 15W all day. I'd hate to give up the near-silence of the NUCs...

• If I see this rather ugly box, starting at $499; well the Mac mini M2 starts at $599 with more SSD space (difference reduces to $65 when matched), and I read that there are $99 vouchers for the new Mac mini. If you are happy with OSX (or install linux on it though I don't know how mature the apple silicon Linux is now) then the M2 Mini looks like a much nicer deal to me.

  • > I don't know how mature the apple silicon Linux is now

    Linux can't even boot a full system under M2.

    Apple doesn't want this business.

• Sadly no x86 cpu makes any sense after u try Apple's M1 or M2

  Am much better off running Win11 on parallels 18 on a 8gb ram macbook air m1 (bought 2 yr old for like $600) than my office i5-1135UG7

  See links below.
  Even with i5 13th gen or i7 12th gen which sorta have equal scores in various benchmarks like geekbench5 etc, the problem is that using your laptop on battery just throttles down the scores by 30%:(

  On battery (which is how laptops might be used mostly) Intel amd are still few years behind.

  Though they have caught up with apple if they are connected to power.
  But its sad they did not make much progress from 6th - 7th gen to 10th gen and we kept hearing arm can never have the performance of x86. Then apple decided to show them and they woke up.
  Sadly even snapdragon 8 gen 2 is nowhere near M1 or even A16.

  Kept hating apple my entire life and now i have to carry a macbook air to actually get work done quickly & without worrying about chargers.
  My windows laptops are pretty much kept like desktops in office/home to do stuff like download torrents or provide a machine i can rdp into to access local networks etc.

  https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-... [nanoreview.net]

  https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-... [nanoreview.net]

  Incidentally the latest macbooks are always way out of my budgets at $2000+ but after M1 the market is flooded with pristine condition used macbooks for $600 or so, some even with warranty remaining. So it's quite difficult to buy a win machine. Except when u need a convertible type stylus/pen & touchscreen laptop.

  Even that gets blown away with ipad pro M1 which does run Win11 (in virtualization mode - ie at full speed) using trollstore to install UTM (to have virtualization mode rather than normal install which gives u emulation ie v slow)
  (With the magic keyboard TouchPad or clones)
  But trollstore etc means jailbreak is required which works only on few versions old IOS so it's yet to be as convenient or dependable as parallels.