Enlarge / System76's Pangolin is a lightweight and relatively slender 15" design with a 1080p matte display and RGB-lit keyboard. (credit: System76 )

• 

  System76's Pangolin is a lightweight and relatively slender 15" design with a 1080p matte display and RGB-lit keyboard. [credit: System76 ]

This week, System76—probably the best-known Linux-only laptop vendor— announced the latest update to its lightweight 15-inch Pangolin laptop series. The newest models of Pangolin are available and shipping today; customers have a choice between a six-core Ryzen 5 5500U and an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700U processor.

Pangolin was already the first System76 laptop model to offer AMD Ryzen processors, with last-generation Ryzen 4500U and 4700U models announced last December . This year's model bumps up both the processor generation and asking price significantly—last year's Ryzen 4500U Pangolin started at $850, offering 8GiB of RAM and a 240GiB SSD in the entry-level trim. The new 5500U-powered Pangolin runs $1,200 for the same specs.

AMD Ryzen + Linux for the win

The increase in price likely reflects additional public awareness of mobile Ryzen's outstanding Linux kernel support as well as its significant raw performance advantage over most competing Intel CPUs. Although we didn't get the chance to test System76's Ryzen 7 4700U, Acer's 4700U-powered Swift 3—which isn't even designed as an OEM Linux laptop—remains one of our all-time favorite systems for dedicated Linux users.

Enlarge / Everything about this distribution—including the graphic-tee style default wallpaper—reassures users with a clear "simple, inviting, and friendly" brand messaging. (credit: Jim Salter)

The subject of today's Linux distro review is perhaps one-of-a-kind—as far as we know, Pop!_OS is the first Linux distribution to be created and maintained by a hardware OEM manufacturer. At the very least, it's the first one anyone has taken seriously.

That hardware manufacturer is System76 , probably the world's best-known Linux-only laptop manufacturer. Some larger OEMs offer Linux as an alternative operating system on a few models—but System76 sells Linux systems, and only Linux systems.

Until 2017, System76 sold its systems preinstalled with Ubuntu Linux. But Canonical left the company cold when it decided to stop development on its Unity desktop environment and move back to Gnome3—and, controversially, System76 decided that instead of merely adding its own private repository and a few packages to a stock Ubuntu install, it would create and manage its own Ubuntu-derived distribution.