Meet the Meerkat: A compact Linux PC with surprising power for developers

How a pint-sized System76 Meerkat became my everyday workstation.

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.”

My first experience with a Darter Pro

Soon after my visit to their facility, 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 experience 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.

Read more: Trying the Cosmic Desktop from System76: A desktop paradigm change

The pivot to desktop: Experimenting with NUCs

In 2020, when we were all spending much more time on our screens, it never occurred 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 drawbacks.

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.

The DevOne experiment and AI challenges

Then I decided to purchase a new Hewlett-Packard DevOne that came with Pop!_OS preinstalled, and I donated the NUC10 to some friends. I purchased a dock and connected the DevOne to the twenty-seven inch display.

That’s when the AI revolution began. I 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. I also 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, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and a one terabyte NVMe drive. It was great for everything but AI tasks.

Read more: System76’s COSMIC desktop: A hands-on tour of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS

Finding the right balance with MacBook Air

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. But 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. After years of experimenting with laptops, NUCs, and MacBooks, I found what I was looking for in the same place I started: System76.

Back to the Meerkat: The perfect solution

The Meerkat had everything I wanted: small footprint and a GPU. 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.

After my unit arrived, I completed a back-up of 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.

System specifications

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: 1005
    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: 3.52 GiB (11.5%)
  Processes: 375 Uptime: 1h 12m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34

More from We Love Open Source

• System76’s COSMIC desktop: A hands-on tour of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS
• Pop!_OS 24.04 review: Was the two-year wait for COSMIC Desktop worth it?
• Trying the Cosmic Desktop from System76: A desktop paradigm change
• 6 must-read Linux and open source tutorials of the year
• How Linux Mint saved an eight-year-old PC

This article is adapted from “Tiny Footprint, Big Impact: Rediscovering the Meerkat“ by Don Watkins, and is republished with permission from the author.