It’s not any battery. They just didn’t do the original manufacturing, so you can find compatible replacements elsewhere.
I bought the System76 Kudu laptop back in 2016, but it is actually a W670RZ model laptop manufactured by Clevo Co. in China (unlike my previous laptop which was a MacBook Pro manufactured by Apple in China). System76 wasn’t the only company selling the W670RZ, so they’re not the only ones you can go to for replacement parts.
The main thing I like is the hardware support. I knew before purchasing that everything would work, and that helped me feel okay dropping a pretty penny on a new laptop. Besides that, I’d say they’re fine. They aren’t designing and manufacturing their own hardware (at least not back when I bought one); the laptops are pretty standard off-the-shelf stuff. System76 just promises that it’ll all work out-of-the-box. I’ve never used Pop!_OS, so I can’t speak to that. Arch and Debian work great, though.
The only negative I can think of is: once the battery started to go after several years, they didn’t have a replacement in their store, but because it’s a generic laptop, there were new ones available on Amazon. It just would’ve been nice to get it from System76.
All-in-all, I’m a happy customer. I’m keeping my eye on Framework, though. The MNT Reform is also interesting. I don’t like how thick it is, but that’s because it uses 18650s for the battery, which would solve the problem of buying a new battery just to find that all the batteries were manufactured at the same time, so there are no working replacements.
Yeah, I have a couple T420 ThinkPads, and for $100 they’re pretty sweet, but they show their age.
I’m relatively happy with my System76, but based on your needs you could get a lot of value from a $500 used ThinkPad on Ebay.
I fully support this. You do you. It’s your computer; you can do what you want with it. Whether you’re using it for work or play, if it’s the way you like it, then it’s not wrong.
I tend to do everything locally on bare metal. I never liked putting stuff in containers or running a vm.
VS Code is a great editor, though. It actually feels a bit like Emacs.