System76 Gazelle Pro: An Intel Haswell Laptop With Ubuntu Linux

Overall, the System76 Gazelle Professional laptop performance is very commendable as expected from an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" based system. The only Linux problem we've stumbled upon to so far has been the screen corruption issues covered earlier in this review, but that can be resolved by upgrading the Linux kernel. This problem isn't specific to System76 but newly enabled Intel graphics hardware support under Linux can be buggy from time to time but is now rather stable if using Mesa 9.2 and Linux 3.10/3.11. There are also some performance improvements that can be tapped by using this very latest code. The only other minor Linux issue to point out is that with the Linux kernel the current wattage/voltage via the sysfs ACPI interfaces isn't being properly exposed, so we don't have any performance-per-Watt or overall system power consumption results to show in this article.

Pricing on the Gazelle Professional starts out at $829 USD. The laptop with the configuration we sent carries a retail price of $1,437.00. As with the other System76 models, there is a cost-associated with purchasing Linux compatible hardware from a small Linux-focused vendor compared to a tier-one vendor, but if you want confidence in an Ubuntu Linux friendly laptop, look no further than System76. The Gazelle Professional hardware itself is of fine quality and the Linux performance is fantastic. Look forward to some additional Gazelle Pro Linux test results in the coming days; any other Linux test requests for this laptop can be directed to @MichaelLarabel on Twitter prior to returning the review sample to System76.