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A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

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Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#121

Post by speed_spread »

izacus wrote: post #103
speed_spread wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swapping in any form always sucks, period. The machine starts behaving strangely and does not tell you why because it's trying it's hardest to hide the fact that it ran out of resources. Experience has shown me over and over that you just want to feel the limits of the machine hard and fast so you can change what you're asking of it rather than thinking that there is some perf issue or weird bug. It's the idea that s…

Swapping to zram is just fine and it will improve experience on many machines.

Yeah, I agree. The memory-to-memory + modern CPU power makes it transparent or at least gives it a soft roll-off that IO based swap never achieves. But it's still a hack which too often is used by manufacturers to cheapen on RAM in machines.

As the gas-powered engine people will say: "there's no replacement for displacement" (I wont push the analogy comparing zram to turbocharging but, you know, they both deal with "compression"...)

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#122

Post by vbezhenar »

vitorgrs wrote: post #18

About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora. In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year... Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject). Why fedora is problematic on low e…

Packagekit is not essential for Fedora. I always disable it (I think it uses systemd to run) and then using ordinary dnf to manage packets.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#123

Post by vel0city »

trelane wrote: post #106
m_st wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah! Standby is working fine too? I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down…

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

Standby works fine for me on Windows and has for a long time across dozens of different devices.

Chances are if the system keeps waking from sleep, they have some third-party app that keeps waking the system.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#124

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

bdcravens wrote: post #93
chrsw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu 20.04 was preinstalled on my machine. But I reinstalled when I moved to a larger SDD. I think I still used the OEM install image too.

I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.

I've had a Dell XPS 13 9343 (2017 model, non-Developer edition) running Fedora for years without problems. I suppose you might consider it cheating because I replaced the original Broadcom WiFi card with an Intel WiFi card, as that driver was a bit flaky in the early days (whereas the Intel driver has kernel support).

Other than the pitiful 4 hour battery life, the laptop still runs fine, and mostly does what I need it to do for a permanently-docked daily driver.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#126

Post by throwaway3306a »

vel0city wrote: post #123
trelane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

Standby works fine for me on Windows and has for a long time across dozens of different devices. Chances are if the system keeps waking from sleep, they have some third-party app that keeps waking the system.

Macbooks also wake from sleep while closed and yet it doesn't destroy the computer. How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#127

Post by tallmed »

I've been exclusively using linux on my tablets since 2007 with the thinkpad x61t and i've never had any of these problems. Although i use a completely different setup compared to the dude in the article. I would even say that on tablets gnu/linux actually provides a better experience.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#128

Post by speed_spread »

steveklabnik wrote: post #96
speed_spread wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole concept of "virtual memory" has tainted systems design for decades. Treating RAM as a cache relies on the OS making guesses about what will be needed and what can be passivated without it actually knowing the application requirements. Except that compared to CPU level caching, the cost of page faults is big enough that performance degradation is not linear and breaks the user experience. The idea that a 4GB…

> Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux kernel because of explicit allocation failure requirements. This is phrased in a way that’s a bit more extreme than in reality. Some new features are in the process of being added. > Why wasn't this possibility factored in from the beginning? So, there’s a few ways to talk about this. The first is… it was! Rust has three major layers to its standard library: co…

Oh hello, thanks for the clarification! Having enjoyed writing some embedded Rust, I'm familiar with the core/alloc/std split. IIUC you're saying that the user-space Linux malloc API itself does not provide a reliable way for the application to think about hard memory limits? Which would fuel my pet theory about "infinite virtual memory" being a significant factor in the ever growing software bloat.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#129

Post by rty32 »

chrsw wrote: post #80

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple. But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated w…

I assume it does not come with a touch screen or pen support?

Then it is really an apple to orange comparison.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#130

Post by rty32 »

treesknees wrote: post #2

I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11. Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery…

WSL still has a ton of issues, slow IO and CPU usage, just to name two of them. Search "WSL vmmem" and you'll see what I mean. It is nowhere near ready for serious use if you are spending 90% of time doing development in a Linux environment.
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