I just entered "linux" on Dell's german site and "nothing found". Great!
Same in Ireland. You can't buy Dell Linux laptops anymore.
Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
241–250 of 319 posts
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
Are Mono and .Net Core on Linux as good as on Windows? If they are, as a developer, there isn't much reason to go with Windows
It depends on how much you like VS.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can search Arch Isn't Arch specifically for users who don't mind things breaking and going deep into internals to fix it?
I think it's well-suited to anyone who despises bloat. To anyone who wants to run a resource-efficient and performant system with just the parts they need. And honestly, most users will never need to dig deep. Most users will only, occasionally, need to follow a few steps on the well-explained Wiki. More of my thoughts on Arch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524678…
I tried arch out in 2016. Over a period of two weeks, 3 separate updates broke one thing or another.
In my 4 years using mint / ubuntu, an update broke my machine once, and that was when the power went out during an update.
Arch apparently works great for a lot of people, but I'd urge caution.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IDE vs CLI has nothing to do with it. Sure it has, because it springs from the developer culture on each OS, and the main reason why good UI/UX research is so hard on GNU/Linux systems. It is always an uphill battle, as GNOME and KDE devs know about. Also note that I pair macOS with Windows on my list.
Same could be said against Windows. Ever used Windows 8? "Everyone" hated it. Windows 10 has gone for the hybrid UI; both "modern" and traditional. At the same time. I'm not sure why you say it's hard for UI/UX research on Linux, when there are so many different desktop environments and toolkits - all(?) of which are theme-able. On Windows, you're stuck with one. Well, both.
Which is exactly the point of lack of good polished UI/UX on GNU/Linux.
Hence ChromeOS and Android in what concerns consumer devices, where Linux just happens to be the chosen kernel but nothing prevents Google changing it for something else.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#245What's the holdup on DE/WM getting hidpi support? It seems like it would be possible to handle it as Macs do, but Linux support for it is just awful. Inconsistencies all over the place. Using multiple monitors can be another pain point. It works for the most part, but full-screen a video on one monitor and you get flashing and artifacts on the others, you'll "lose" a screen, all kinds of weird stuff. And that's Fedor…
It's largely better with Wayland because the apps can receive a previously impossible signal that they are being moved between displays with different HiDPI scaling. In GNOME 3.26, today, for example, a lot of the HiDPI pain is gone in the form of per-display, integer scaling. GNOME 3.28 (coming soon) should have the "handle it as Macs do" in the form of fractional, per-display scaling. 3.28 will be in Fedora 28 and Ubuntu 18.10. NVIDIA cards will be supported through a proxy layer even though NVIDIA is actively fighting the community's effort to standardize.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#246As 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…
Agreed. One laptop worth investigating that I haven't seen anyone discussing in this thread is the Precision 7520. It is the same chassis as the XPS 15" laptop, but you can configure it with some more adult options. It is 2017 and I finally own a laptop with 32GiB of ECC(!) RAM. That is pretty damn cool. Allow me to roll out my specs, just cause I love this laptop: * Quad Core Xeon (1505M) * Discrete GPU with accepta…
It's a lot bigger and heavier than an XPS 15 though. That said, I am a big fan of Dell's business lines. The Latitude 7000 series are great machines.
I have a Latitude e7470 which I highly recommend, provided you don't need dedicated GPUs. It supports up to 32GB (non-ECC), has a wide array of ports, and is much closer to the XPS in terms of size and weight.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#247Earlier 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."
Your argument is insidious.
You chose to use a Mac to avoid HiDPI problems, I chose to use a normal DPI laptop.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#248Got the XPS 9560 from Costco, which they sell at the max configuration (32gb ram, 1tb SSD, 4k touch screen, nvidia 1050) for a few hundred dollars cheaper than Dell, and it's a beast. Got Ubuntu running on it without too much trouble, though it required a bit of tweaking. Only thing that doesn't have a driver is the fingerprint scanner. I'm extremely happy with it so far. Have had no stability issues at all. Only rea…
Do you have some tips for the HiDPI? I have the same machine, and same problem.
First I had to go into the unity settings to set scaling on gnome apps to 2. Then it was a per-app thing after that.
Chromium scales on its own, but some sites are too small, like hacker news. But it does remember zoom settings and 125% works here.
For Steam I found a skin that makes it slightly larger but still too small, so I just run it in big picture mode.
I run xmonad + gnome fallback so I get easy notification icons and media button support. The panel needs to be set to 48 pixels in height, but haven't figured out how to get all the icons to be full size. I set the xmonad border width to 3px.
Gimp has a hidpi skin but it doesn't work very well.
This script will scale things up and it works in a pinch but isn't very elegant:
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#249Sorry, 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…
Did you check for Linux support before you purchased it? If not, you can't blame Dell for your choice. (I'm the type of person to buy the car before choosing the tyres)
It's a computer. No firmware update supplied by the manufacturer should ever brick it, no matter what operating system I put on it, which I can put on because it's my computer, not Dell's. That's the whole point of having a separate BIOS and operating system.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#250Great read, here is some wishful thinking to hoping they get a X1 Yoga-style convertible added to that list!
My current dream computer is an X1 Yoga convertible.