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Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

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Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#171

Post by criddell »

lmm wrote: post #169
gargravarr wrote: post #108

At my company, most of the developers use Ubuntu end-user machines, all from Dell. Not only does this avoid us having to pay for Windows licenses we never use, but we know the hardware is actually going to work fine with it. There's some quirks, of course - Ubuntu doesn't much like the 4k screens in our 13" XPSen so there's a lot of tweaking involved, but we're getting some very good hardware at a good price, and stu…

> Ubuntu doesn't much like the 4k screens in our 13" XPSen so there's a lot of tweaking involved > stuff just works I can't reconcile these two statements.

Stuff just works, as long as you pick the right stuff.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#172

Post by [deleted] »

gargravarr wrote: post #108

At my company, most of the developers use Ubuntu end-user machines, all from Dell. Not only does this avoid us having to pay for Windows licenses we never use, but we know the hardware is actually going to work fine with it. There's some quirks, of course - Ubuntu doesn't much like the 4k screens in our 13" XPSen so there's a lot of tweaking involved, but we're getting some very good hardware at a good price, and stu…

[deleted]

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#173

Post by lmm »

swalsh wrote: post #135

I recently bought an XPS 13 developers edition from the website after my macbook's screen randomly died (it was old, and ready for an upgrade anyways) looking at new macbooks, I was unhappy with the lack of a USB slot, thought the fancy bar on the top was unnecessary, and generally you just seemed to get less for the same money. I NEEDED the laptop right away. The website said it would take 4 days or so. So I waited,…

> While I'm typing, every once in a while the cursor will skip around. It is infuriating. I'm not sure if it's a hardware or driver issue.

I've seen this happen when my palm was hitting the touchpad and I didn't have the right drivers for it - the default touchpad driver "works" but is missing the palm detection functionality in the "proper" touchpad drivers for that hardware. It might be worth looking up the specific touchpad (via lspci or similar) and seeing if there's a driver for touchpads from that manufacturer. You may have to edit the driver's list of PCI IDs.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#174

Post by pritambaral »

castle-bravo wrote: post #116
NiklasMort wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovo did the same in the early days at least, they were very aware of having to produce high compatibility laptops. Not so much for the point of open source but for business usage which sometimes required non-windows OS's. But sure I applaud Dell. The world should rid of Windows.

No longer, apparently. A colleague if mine has had some headaches with ubuntu on his legion Y520, including no wifi connectivity at work. My T430 has no problems though.

AFAIK, the Y-series line is not a ThinkPad line. What the parent said applied to the ThinkPad line, which is treated differently by Lenovo to their consumer lines.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#175

Post by criddell »

erikbye wrote: post #165
bunderbunder wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Windows has problems with 4K screens, too. Most apps work fine, some display at the size of a postage stamp.

Not Windows' fault, though. It's up to developers to update their apps to handle DPI scaling.

Windows is getting better at high DPI even for non-DPI aware applications.

It's weird though. Windows seems to do different things depending on the scaling factor and how you set the factor. 125% might look terrible but 150% is tack sharp. Setting 125% as a custom scale factor does something different than choosing 125% as a standard scale factor. Usually, you have to log out and log back in after changing the scale, but not always.

When you are working over remote desktop, it tries very hard to stop you from changing the scale factor. I'm not even sure if you can anymore.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#176

Post by erikbye »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #167
erikbye wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Windows' fault, though. It's up to developers to update their apps to handle DPI scaling.

Well, that's the same for Linux really, both GTK3 and Qt5 support 4K screens.

Absolutely it is. Such a simple fix too, at least in terms of avoiding things becoming too small. In terms of clarity and scaling up pixel-based GUI elements like icons you need to do a bit more work (new icons, double the res).

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#177

Post by bluedino »

luka-birsa wrote: post #6

As a 20 year Linux user I really appreciate Dells support in proving the market exists. This improved support across all manufacturers. I've recently acquired a HP Envy 13 2017 laptop with Windows preinstalled. I've really wanted to try Windows out, but after installing Google Chrome and Docker (1hr after starting it up) it stopped working - windows boot up into a blank black screen. In a hurry I've downloaded Ubuntu…

>> If you're a developer there's no UX reason to go Windows anymore.

If you weren't a Windows developer, was there ever?

We've been using Lenovo laptops for web development on Linux with no issues for the last 10 years, and I was using them personally for another 5+ years before that.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#178

Post by rlpb »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #111

Sorry, I'm gonna have to flame Dell out here. I own a Dell XPS 13 9365, a 2-in-1 laptop. Dell have decided, arbitrarily, not to support Linux on this machine, but you can still actually make it run by disabling Secure Boot and setting the SATA mode to AHCI. Even then, Ubuntu doesn't seem to detect when you've rotated the screen for tablet mode or stuff like that -- but that's probably Ubuntu's driver support. The mac…

I really wanted this same laptop, but I got the 9360 in the end because of the lack of Ubuntu support on the 9365.

> Dell have decided, arbitrarily, not to support Linux on this machine...Ubuntu doesn't seem to detect when you've rotated the screen for tablet mode or stuff like that

I suspect that this is exactly the reason why Dell decided not to ship with Ubuntu on this particular machine. I'm not sure that GNOME has support for tablet mode yet; Unity 7 (16.04 LTS) certainly doesn't.

> Maybe Ubuntu could have stopped this by detecting compatibility issues between the firmware package and the hardware.

Firmware updates come directly from https://fwupd.org/ I believe. Ubuntu (like other distributions) doesn't have anything to do with distribution and release management of the the firmware blobs themselves; that's done entirely by Dell I believe.

> Dell's BIOS definitely should have stopped this by detecting the compatibility issue between its own settings and the firmware package.

What exactly do you mean by "brick"? Dell explicitly don't support Ubuntu on this particular machine. If you had been running Windows, would you still be stuck? If not, I don't think you can reasonably blame Dell here. They don't QA with Ubuntu (or any Linux) on this hardware, and you knew this before you purchased.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#179

Post by lmm »

mnw21cam wrote: post #77
NiklasMort wrote: post #4

meanwhile in Thinkpad land... honestly I never understand why people go for Macbooks or XPS. X/T model user since 7 generations. I did look at the XPS but there are so many disadvantages with those modern one-body-all-closed-no-mods laptops. Before you down vote me, I still applaud Dells decision to get Ubuntu Laptops out there. But I don't really see what the big game changer is whether a laptop comes preinstalled w…

> I don't really see what the big game changer is whether a laptop comes preinstalled with Ubuntu or if I do it myself. I personally cannot fathom why anyone would ever use a factory-installed operating system of any kind. It's only your computer if you installed it yourself.

There are plenty of places a hostile manufacturer could hide malware, having installed the OS yourself doesn't guarantee anything.

Done right, a manufacturer-installed OS can have everything set up right for the specific hardware of that machine, which is a much nicer experience than having to check the details yourself. (A lot of manufacturers don't do it right of course).

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#180

Post by erikbye »

bunderbunder wrote: post #168
erikbye wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Windows' fault, though. It's up to developers to update their apps to handle DPI scaling.

True, and I'm pretty sure the reason's the same for Linux. Doesn't affect my opinion on the usability of the platform, though. For my part, I got my work to do, so I ultimately ended up back on a Mac (yet again, ugh) because, for all Apple's recent problems, none of them bother me as much as things like, "I just flat-out can't use this app that I need without a microscope."

Regarding usability, been a little while since I've used macOS now, so sincere question: Is it still true that you need third-party software to do keyboard-based window management? Even just something as simple as Windows' Win+arrow keys.
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