Minty Fresh on a Meerkat: My Latest Linux Setup

A trip to Denver and the System76 factory in 2018 afforded me a chance to meet their technology team and look at the products they were building. One of those was the mini computer they call the Meerkat. I said to the engineer that I spoke to, “That looks like an Intel NUC.” He said, “it is a NUC. We add our branding and software and remarket them.” Soon after my visit to their facillty I purchased a Darter Pro which I really liked. It had an i7 processor, sixteen gigabytes of RAM, and a 256 GB NVME drive. It was my first new Linux computer. Prior to that time I’d always used refurbished units and installed Ubuntu or Fedora.

This was a step up in life. The Darter Pro was a great unit and I used it for writing and wrote a review of my exprience with it. I came to understand and appreciate the new computer and the excellent support team that backed up the product. Whenever I had a question about the Darter Pro there was somebody at System76 who was there to answer my questions. In 2020 when we were all spending much more time on our screens it never occured to me to dock the Darter Pro.

Remembering my conversation with the System76 engineer I decided to try an Intel NUC8 connected to a twenty-seven inch display. I liked the system but around the same time I started exploring gaming on Linux and the decision to equip this unit with a 256 GB NVME drive began to have serious drawback. I decided to replace it with a new NUC10 barebones kit that I purchased from an internet retailer. The NUC10 had an i7 with 32 gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte NVME drive. Now I had plenty of room to explore Linux gaming. Then I decided to purchase a new Hewlett-Packard DevOne that came with Pop!_OS preinstalled and I donated the NUC10 to some friends and I purchased a dock and connected the DEV One to the twenty-seven inch display.

That’s when the AI revolution began and had downloaded Stable Diffusion for Linux and ran into some bottlenecks because the Ryzen 7 that was in the DevOne didn’t have a GPU and didn’t like docking and undocking the unit so I decided to go back to the small footprint NUC connected to the large display. This time I went with a NUC11 barebones kit that I got from an internet store and equipped with an i7, sixty-four gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte NVME drive. It was great for everything but AI tasks. In the interim I purchased an M2 MacBook Air and replaced it last fall with an M3 MacBook Air which is great for Ai tasks and I didn’t want to go through the docking experience again. I began to research how I could solve the problem and that led me back to System76 and the Meerkat.

The Meerkat had everything I wanted. Small footprint and a GPU and best of all I knew that if I didn’t like the unit I could send it back. Better than that I was supporting a business that is based on Linux and open source. My unit arrived on Monday afternoon and after backing up the system on my NUC11 with Cronopete. I unboxed the Meerkat and installed Linux Mint 22.2 on it along with Cronopete and restored my files.

Here’s a snapshot of my system:

System:
  Host: don-Meerkat Kernel: 6.14.0-29-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: Cinnamon v: 6.4.8 Distro: Linux Mint 22.2 Zara
Machine:
  Type: Mini-pc System: System76 product: Meerkat v: meer10
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: NUC15CRBU7 v: 60AS00K0-MBKA23
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI: ASUSTeK v: CRARL579.0023.2025.0319.1038
    date: 03/19/2025
CPU:
  Info: 16-core Intel Core Ultra 7 255H [MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 1033
    min/max: 400/5100:4400:2500
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Arrow Lake-P [Intel Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
  Device-2: AVerMedia Live Streamer CAM 313 driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo
    type: USB
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.11 with: Xwayland v: 23.2.6 driver: X:
    loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa
    v: 25.0.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.2 renderer: Mesa Intel Graphics (ARL)
Network:
  Device-1: Intel driver: iwlwifi
  Device-2: Intel Ethernet I226-V driver: igc
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 158.55 GiB (16.6%)
Info:
  Memory: total: 32 GiB note: est. available: 30.67 GiB used: 9.13 GiB (29.8%)
  Processes: 385 Uptime: 1h 25m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34

Good things come in small packages. System76’s Meerkat is one of them.