I recently decided to take a chance on a System76 Galaga Pro and test it with 4.2rc3 before making it my main. I have a few quick notes on the experience with so far and can make a proper HCL for it later when 4.2 is stable. Some of these issues may be caused by 4.2 still being experimental though.
Install is fine. No surprises here.
The default firmware is very minimal and there’s nothing to do besides turn TPM and Secure Boot off/on, or pick a boot device. It also seems to only be able to boot UEFI, so no way to use AEM. There’s also no way to set SMT off here either. Maybe the Coreboot firmware has more options.
Battery life seems poor. Lower than expected, even with the laptop idling. Still investigating this.
I enabled SMT as I believe the vulnerability that prompted that to be disabled in Qubes does not affect this CPU.
The laptop gets hot, though this is not a Qubes problem. Apparently System76 lets the chassis act as passive cooling until some certain temperature, which is quite high IMO. The fans can be forced on with Super+1, and if you want to flash the firmware, you can customize when they come on.
There’s no insert key on this model. This seems to be a trend with recent laptops. I’m hoping this isn’t a major problem.
Reboot sometimes hangs at the end of the shutdown process and power needs to be manually forced off. I don’t recall PopOS doing this, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on that. Probably a problem caused by Qubes.
Wireless and ethernet work out of the box.
The keyboard and trackpad work without sys-usb.
The CPU has performance and efficient cores. I’ve not made an attempt to alter which VMs run on which cores, but everything seems to work fine anyway. Unless this is what’s causing the poor battery life.