Ironically enough, inside Dell there is an initiative to push everyone onto Windows, no Mac or Linux. With no exception for engineering.
How did you hear this?
Directly from an employee.
Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
271–280 of 319 posts
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you hear this?
I can actually confirm this, through a third party. I use to work for EMC, and left in early 2017, but still have a lot of friends still working there. Going forward employees were no longer going to be able to connect to the VPN with anything other than the Dell official Windows img. This mostly just meant that any work laptop must run Windows. Developer workstations could still run Linux, at least in the office I w…
EMC acquisition — Isilon by any chance? :-)
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you are arguing the same side. The reason you have to be tech savvy is that the Linux Desktop isn't great (note: I currently operate only on linux at home and work). You have to know some tech just to get a decent amount of things working. This is getting better every year, but we are still dealing with issues that the average user has no idea how to diagnose or fix.
"Average User" is a strawman. We really need to stop using that term in software development, but Linux Desktop people especially need to stop using it because to them "Average User" is some drooling moron who uses the CD tray as a cup holder. To the extent that "Average User" ever existed, he has largely moved on to using a phone or tablet anyway. Also, I disagree that it is getting better every year. Individual pie…
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Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Precision 5520 is pretty much the same as the XPS 15 though, in dimensions. And largely allows the same options (Xeon, 4K, different speed SSDs, etc.).
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One laptop worth investigating that I haven't seen anyone discussing in this thread is the Precision 7520. He has a Dell Precision 7520. If you customize the model on the Dell website, there's a backlit keyboard option.
^^^^ See above :) Just make sure anyone seriously considers this takes a long hard look at hte physical dimensions and weight. It is not a sleek or light machine :)
The Precision 5520 has very close to the same options, in a sleeker body.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My admittedly anecdotal counter to that... With “begintermeditate” Linux experience, I spun up Arch on a machine with an AMD processor/mobo and dirt cheap graphics card to act as a server in February 2017. I system update when I remember (every 1-4 weeks). I haven’t had anything break. Admittedly, I containerize nearly everything (Plex, Calibre server, bittorrent clients, etc) out of pure laziness and do very little outside that on the machine. It has been incredily low maintenance, and has been wonderful. I’d highly recommend.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Did it break in an unrecoverable way, or was it just an inconvenience? Arch is a rolling release that many choose to update daily, or on a fixed schedule, like once a week. That updates sometimes can break a thing or two, out of hundreds of updates, is to be expected. If that sounds scary to you, Arch is certainly not for you. That said, it has rarely happened to me, and any breakage is usually minor and easily fixed…
I originally went Slackware when diving into Linux. Manual dependency resolution was just a step too far. Installing Calibre became a nightmare. I turned to Arch and have been very happy. I simply don’t have the time to properly maintain a Slackware box. I do really like it though.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have actually moved to vscode and I love it so far. I still can't move to Linux since I need visual studio for some older projects, but I hope I'll be able to make the switch in the future. In the mean time vscode + windows subsystem for Linux has been extremely usable for me, no more virtual machines
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#279At 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
This is not really Ubuntu's fault, but mainly a problem with GTK2. Everything based on GTK3 scales quite well nowadays, the same is true for QT. Unfortunately, the Gimp and Inkscape are two notable applications which have not yet been ported to GTK3.
Other than that, it's only the console which is not usable out-of-the-box.
Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, the hardware manufacturers could write drivers for their stuff.
They might do, if Linux wasn't so hostile to the concept of proprietary drivers and had a stable driver ABI. Not that I necessarily disagree with their position on the matter, but you can't escape the consequences.
Well, there would be another kind of consequences. See Android, where there are proprietary drivers and most of them are buggy crap thrown over the wall.
There is also a reason, why Apple won't ship hardware or drivers, that they don't have source for.