Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13 • Hacker News Board

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#231

Post by rospaya » Sat, Oct 27, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

emptyfile wrote: post #16

rospaya wrote: post #9

I'm writing this from my XPS 13 using the latest Ubuntu and once I've spent a few hours configuring everything, it works almost perfectly. There's still a few bugs, like Ubuntu not remembering the audio settings.

What? So XPS 13 which you can buy with Ubuntu preinstalled still has parts of the hardware not working after "a few hours configuring everything"? I can't understand how that's acceptable to anyone. Literally every laptop I've installed Linux on had a litany of driver problems.

It's not the developer edition but the regular one and I installed Ubuntu myself.

A vanilla install is good enough for regular use, but I've got a multi-display setup, unofficial dock and other tweaks because of my workflow.

The audio bug is Ubuntu's and it basically means that I have to select the output device after every reboot, a 5 second task. I can definitely live with that.

> Literally every laptop I've installed Linux on had a litany of driver problems.

I'd agree with you at one point, but various distros work fine on a whole range of hardware, this isn't the 90s anymore.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#232

Post by bhhaskin » Sat, Oct 27, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

dilatedmind wrote: post #84

bhhaskin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming the XPS is the developer edition. I am also running Ubuntu on my XPS, but it came with windows orginaly. I also don't have any hardware issues to speak of.

How is your battery life? I also installed ubuntu on my xps, and I'm only getting about 2 hours max, although I always keep it plugged in, so it's not a real issue for me. As for hardware issues, I had to download wireless drivers, which was a slight pain since there is no ethernet port. I was able to get my video card working with optimus, but that wasn't non trivial. I wound up disabling my track pad and using a mo…

My battery life is pretty fantastic. Around 8 hours or so with docker running and doing development. https://i.imgur.com/xYkGRdJ.png

I had zero hardware issues. it all just worked. I would say installing Ubuntu was a little tricky due to UEFI, but other than that no issues.

I have a XPS13 so no dedicated video card. No issues with the track pad other than the dumb middle mouse button past.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#233

Post by moocowtruck » Sat, Oct 27, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

dazzawazza wrote: post #64

moocowtruck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even with snaps or whatever that thing ubuntu has?

Not everyone is on Ubuntu. I currently have eight VMs each with different distros. Mostly it's for testing library compatability on install and input weirdness. That's a lot of testing.

i think people mentioned snaps work on non-ubuntu systems. can't you build everything statically that you need, and deploy as snap? is it a ton more difficult than that? not saying thats easy, but seems less of a burden and you can hit at least a large amount of users

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#234

Post by Shorel » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

mscasts wrote: post #189

bitwize wrote: post #88

I freakin' love Linux as a personal workstation OS. I got into it in 1995, back in the days when Linux was punk rawk and you had to dig around on tsx-11 and sunsite to find things to run on it. I still dual-booted Windows there for a few years. Then I noticed something: Windows would, suddenly and without warning, stop working. As in, blue screen on first boot. All the way up through Windows 2000 -- 9x, NT, didn't ma…

AFAIK, Slackware doesn't even have a package manager, does it? The only experience I had with Slackware was just that, I installed it, found out there is no package manager and installed Ubuntu. I have a hard time understanding why someone would use Slackware when there is distros that is literally better at every aspect.

I used Slackware about a decade before the first release of Ubuntu.

So that's the answer. Because it was the only thing that existed back then.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#235

Post by Lio » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 8:40 AM UTC

pzone wrote: post #210

bryars wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mutli-monitor is doable (not as good as macOS but as good as windows), " What's the gap between Linux/Windows and Mac OS ?

MacOS has had perfect crisp multi-monitor support including fractional scaling and mixed DPI with per-windiow/per-monitor application DPI awareness for years. Windows is finally introducing a diagnostic in the task manager to show which applications have high DPI support. The modern option, per-monitor awareness, isn't even possible on Linux with the X display server - it requires Wayland.

This is the issue in a nutshell for me. I wish I’d bought a FHD 1080 screen instead of 4K on my XPS 13 for this very issue.

Wayland isn’t an option for me yet because I need screensharing under Hangouts, etc.

You can’t mix the HiDPI internal screen with, say, a 1440 external monitor with Gnome on X11. Scaling is applied equally across both.

Also if you drop back to plain text e.g. during boot up the internal screen will show text at 100% scaling and the text is tiny.

I guess that might be something BIOS could take care of but it’s currently a problem.

Sorry, can’t offer comparisons to Windows, I just work with macOS and Linux.