Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

binwang.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 229 posts

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#151

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

haspok wrote: post #149
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey there! I no longer use my 9343, but I remember I was not able to run Fedora without breaking the sound support for it (Ubuntu had some kernel option set on startup that put the sound card to some legacy mode, instead of the I2C that Windows used). And I never managed to setup palm rejection, it was a constant pain whenever I had to use the (otherwise excellent) trackpad. (The external "carbon-like" skin texture j…

If memory serves, the audio issue you're describing was fixed by a BIOS update:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dell_XPS_13_(9343)

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#152

Post by freeqaz »

vbezhenar wrote: post #115
bdcravens wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bought Dell 3410 once which was shipped with Ubuntu. I closely inspected that Ubuntu, compared it with vanilla Ubuntu install. All I've found are branding packages (desktop pictures, etc) and one package which blacklisted some module. No secret drivers, no secret kernels. Can't comment about XPS, but I feel that it'll be the same.

Dell does the work to upstream the hardware support into the kernel. It's pretty rad. I miss my old XPS 13!

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#153

Post by steveklabnik »

speed_spread wrote: post #128
steveklabnik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I'm familiar with the core/alloc/std split.

Ah, okay. So yeah, it's not a new standard library, it's "things like Vec are adding .push_within_capacity() that's like push except it returns a Result and errors instead of reallocating" more than "bespoke standard library."

> 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?

It's not the user-space malloc API, it's lower than that. See " /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory" in https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc_sys_vm.5.html

The default is "heuristic overcommit." This page does a better job of explaining what that means: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accou...

So, unless you've specifically configured this to 2, there are many circumstances where you simply will not get an error from the kernel, even if you've requested more memory than available.

What happens in this case is that your program will continue to run. At some point, it will access the bad allocation. The kernel will notice that there's not actually enough memory, and the "oom killer" will decide to kill a process to make space. It might be your process! It also might not be. Just depends. But this happens later, and asynchronously from your program. You cannot handle this error from inside your program.

So even if these APIs existed, they wouldn't change the behavior: they would faithfully report what the kernel reported to them: that the allocation succeeded.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#155

Post by nucleardog »

utf_8x wrote: post #24

Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu face Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning…

Don't know if it's "legitimate", but I've got 64GB of RAM.

Allocating 16/32/64/128GB of NVME storage to swap is mostly just a waste of disk space for me. When I had swap enabled, it was constantly showing 0 used. (Not "pretty much none", literally "0.0".)

Further, if I'm trying to use more than 64GB of RAM... I'm fine with things getting OOM killed. I don't know that I've ever had anything OOM-killed when something wasn't clearly misbehaving. (I count Chrome eating 50GB of RAM because I haven't closed any tabs all week as me clearly misbehaving for the purposes of this discussion.)

And as far as zram... I guess same sorta arguments. I'm not running out of RAM, so why use up CPU cycles (and presumably battery power)? why use up brain cycles setting that up?

Until I've maxed out my system's RAM, I'd rather just throw more RAM at it.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#156

Post by sbrother »

martzy13 wrote: post #118
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…

https://system76.com/laptops

Are they built better now? I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and while their support is great and their pre-built desktops are fantastic, their laptops were just rebranded Clevo trash.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#157

Post by yoyohello13 »

sbrother wrote: post #156
martzy13 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://system76.com/laptops

Are they built better now? I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and while their support is great and their pre-built desktops are fantastic, their laptops were just rebranded Clevo trash.

No, still Clevo. Although the CEO said they are currently designing a custom laptop chassis in house. Probably still a minimum 2 years away, but at least they are working on it.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#158

Post by vladvasiliu »

xtracto wrote: post #150
vladvasiliu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually rather fine with what WSL can do. Hell, many of the tools I use run fine on Windows itself. But for me, the biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is having to put up with Windows' UX. I hate every single second I have to interact with this steaming pile of crap.

This so much. I've run Linux in all my desktop machines for 10+ years. When I was younger it was mainly due to ideology, but now I really don't care. Although most linux distros still have quirks (bluetooth issues, sleep/resume issues, no hibernation out of the box, high battery consumption, among a plethora a of other papercuts) I am sticking with it mainly because windows ux just sux so much. Every new computer I b…

> Although most linux distros still have quirks (bluetooth issues, sleep/resume issues, no hibernation out of the box, high battery consumption, among a plethora a of other papercuts) I am sticking with it mainly because windows ux just sux so much.

Heh, as usual, YMMV. My bluetooth headphones actually work reliably on Linux (with LDAC support!), while on Windows I usually have to fiddle with them for a few minutes until they start working. For some reason, whenever I reconnect them, Windows thinks it's a different "sound card". I sometimes can't control the volume in video calls, and they start at the max which is painful.

Battery is much better on Linux (there not being anything doing god knows what with the cpu for no reason must help), and it actually stays asleep when I close it. Hibernation also worked well whenever I tried it, but I don't really have any use for it, so I can't tell for sure it's actually fully reliable.

I didn't jump through any hoops for this other than an almost standard Arch install ("almost" because I use a fully encrypted drive with TPM+PIN unlock and secure boot with my own keys).

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#159

Post by HumblyTossed »

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 have a cheap Ideapad Pro with an AMD proc that gives me the same experience using Pop_OS.

MacOS doesn't run on anything(1) but a Mac and people seem to be okay with that, but good grief, you tell them to pick a machine that is compatible with Linux and they lose their shit.

(1) Please don't be pedantic, I get it.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#160

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

gosub100 wrote: post #144
jasonjayr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones. It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that…

I really hope this doesn't become a contributing factor in a future plane crash from an onboard fire in the baggage compartment. I could see someone throwing their laptop in a suitcase with a bunch of clothes and having that heat building up into a thermal runaway. It's asinine to me that there isn't a hardware thermal sensor that just shuts off power if the heat is too high. In addition to the tragedy of an accident…

Oh, you haven't touched your laptop in 30 minutes and we just reached 35,000 feet? This must be a good time to run "Antimalware Service Executable"!
Post reply on HN