System76's Newest Laptop Comes With COSMIC

• System76 ships Oryx Pro with COSMIC beta on Pop!_OS—fast, tweakable desktop still labeled beta.

• Oryx Pro packs AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (50 TOPS NPU) and NVIDIA RTX 5070, up to 96GB RAM, 8TB storage.

• Wayland enables per-app NVIDIA GPU switching: GPU off by default, launches on demand with an indicator.

System76's COSMIC desktop environment has been hugely popular lately. It's highly customizable in ways very few Linux distros are, and it's also extremely fast and tweakable. It's not fully stable yet, but that's not stopping System76 from shipping a computer with it.

System76 has just announced a revision to its flagship Oryx Pro laptop. It has a bunch of internal changes. At its core is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, which System76 notes is the fastest CPU it has put in one of its laptops to date. It has an NPU capable of delivering 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second), though you probably won't be able to do much with it right now on Linux. It is paired with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 graphics card. The laptop is also equipped with a 16-inch 2K (1600p) display that features a 240Hz refresh rate. You can configure the machine with up to 96GB of DDR5 memory and up to 8TB of storage. As far as connectivity goes, we have a vast selection of ports, including USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a microSD card slot, and a headset jack.

Perhaps the biggest improvement is the fact that this laptop runs the new Pop!_OS beta with the COSMIC desktop environment. It's still a beta, but many have used it as their daily driver because it's a lot better than the regular Pop!_OS desktop interface, so System76 is rushing a COSMIC-equipped PC out of the door even as it's not quite "finished" yet. I'm not sure if this means that COSMIC is nearing a stable state just yet, but it's still cool. And if you're still worried about that, System76 CEO and Founder Carl Richell said that "the COSMIC Beta is the smoothest release I've ever seen. And we've done tons of releases." He went on to add that "I've polled the Support Team and tracked social networks I'm in, and this is eerily smooth." So there's that.

This version also utilizes the Wayland display server. In previous systems, users often had to manually switch between graphics modes and reboot the computer to engage the more powerful GPU. With Wayland, though, the discrete NVIDIA GPU remains powered off by default to conserve battery life. When a user wants to run a graphically intensive application, they can opt to launch it using the dedicated GPU. An indicator appears in the system's battery applet to show that the GPU is active. Once the application is closed, the GPU automatically powers down.

The laptop starts at a cool $2600, but seeing the hardware you're getting here, it's a bit more palatable. Still way too expensive, don't get me wrong. Check it out on System76's website now.

Source: System76