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Tell HN: System76 has critical firmware issues unresolved for over 3 years

6•jaime-ez•6h ago
I am system76 lemur pro (lemp13) owner since dec24.

At the time when looking for a new linux laptop I came to hacker news looking for information. The framework laptop was the most recommended one, but they don't ship to my country, and second to it was system76, mainly because of their hacker-centric vision, which I wanted to support.

Bought the best my money +shipping+taxes could afford. 56 GB ram.

On August 2025 started having problems with the fan, looking for help found this issue: https://github.com/system76/ec/issues/369. Several overheating episodes occurred.

On January 26 started having crashes, whenever plugin-unpliggin thunderbolt, hdmi, even usb sticks. On May the computer became unusable so I contacted support.

Support was good, the problem was the ram died. Never happened to me before so I didn't recognize the symptoms. And now I understand the most likely cause was due to overheating.

Bought a new ram, updated firmware, operating system to their cosmic OS (which I like), but the fan issues persisted.

Went back to the same issue looking for an update, nothing. Decided to look for a fan manager in the cosmic store, found one, installed, and realized the setup instructions resolved the fan issue.

I'm no expert and I am sure it is not a definitive solution but it works! So I went back to the issue and posted this comment if it was any help to others in distress: https://github.com/system76/ec/issues/369#issuecomment-5146109013

Yes, I did a snarky remark, but it comes from the frustration of not seeing this solved in over 3 years! When they know the consequences of overheating on system components. And turning the computer off every time I move is no solution.

Issues are sometimes where users find solutions to their problems, that's why I posted that workaround. However, in less than 30 minutes (more or less), my comment was flagged as off-topic and thus hidden from the thread.

This is what led me to post this. They are actively hiding useful information (from actual experience) to new users that will have the problem. Instead of focusing on solving it. Unacceptable.

I leave this as a warning to anyone who is looking to make a purchase decision.

Comments

naishoya•4h ago
hmm, I have a few questions. I cannot test as I don't have a system76 laptop to run any trial code against.

Have you identified the code changes which effect the solution?

Are those able to be integrated back with the firmware via a PR?

IFF those are possible, it would be most interesting to see what the maintainer(s) [Tim Ziegler (@tizcza), Jeremy Soller (@jackpot51)] responses are to a PR for fixing this.

Without trying to solve it via those channels, one probably cannot say whether this specific "snarky" post being hidden constitutes bad faith on the part of the company.

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