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

Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

techradar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 319 posts

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#231

Post by jenscow »

pjmlp wrote: post #105
jenscow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDE vs CLI has nothing to do with it. Windows isn't the only OS that has a graphical IDE - likewise Bash is available on Windows. (all of my tools are available on both systems)

> 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.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#232

Post by cpburns2009 »

purrcat259 wrote: post #219
bitexploder wrote: post #187

Earlier 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…

What laptop make and model is this please? Sounds great. Is the keyboard backlit?

> 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.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#233

Post by baldfat »

jenscow wrote: post #223
Const-me wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a designer, I’m a programmer, I mostly use these to export to something else, and do some minor adjustments. But on input, I always getting .psd (raster) or .ai (vector) files, created by professionals. I’ve been developing software for 17 years, and this always was the case, regardless on the industry (desktop software, embedded, videogames), regardless on target platform (PC, mobile, embedded win or linux,…

Yet you're fine with others forcing you. I don't use anything Adobe, yet I don't remember having a problem opening such files (regardless of OS). If so, I'm not afraid to respond with "Hey, can you export/save as in ?". It's not like I, a developer, am going to be making changes to the file and send it back - let alone pay for a product with which to open it. I wouldn't give them a .c file.

The issue has nothing to do with file formats, but work flow. Use different tools to use with the file format. I would personally use every cli program I can get my hands on and just convert them on my machine.

Personally I just make scripts and view the output file to check for quality. I use ImageMagick mostly but Gimp and Inkscape also have command line interface.

Gimp - https://www.gimp.org/man/gimp.html

Inkscape - https://inkscape.org/sk/doc/inkscape-man.html

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#234

Post by mattmanser »

dm319 wrote: post #147
mattmanser wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to defend it, but on reflection, windows 10 is a real mixed bag. Pros: - It's fantastically fast, I dislike going back to win 7 - Some of the utilities are nicer Cons: - Random scheduled tasks fire in the background at really annoying times. I installed a completely clean install of win 10 and some fail and then constantly re-run as they've not been marked as completed (e.g. .net 32-bit optimization servi…

How did you find whether the update services were running or not? I was having trouble with a failing update, but I couldn't find any evidence of it running.

In "Windows Update Settings" there's a "Update History" link which lists all recent updates. For the one that was failing it was listed every day.

This had been going on for months too.

I think that's my biggest beef with Windows 10, you're not supposed to muck around with the scheduler running tasks when idle or the updates, but it's so brittle that when it fails it does really stupid things without telling you.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#235

Post by molteanu »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #228
bitexploder wrote: post #187

Earlier 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…

I have a similar Dell 7510 running Debian Sid and my experience is also mostly positive. I had to disable the built in graphics in the BIOS to get my 2 external monitors to work (some Nvidia Quadro mess), suspend doesn’t work properly (common Linux problem) and the headphone port does not work unless you toggle microphone mute on an off first (could be some pulseausio wierdness but I haven’t gotten to the bottom of i…

We're having similar problems at work regarding the headphones. You just have to remove them and plug them in (sometimes twice) before they work after a restart. This problem is present on both Lenovo and Dell laptops and in both cases with Windows 7.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#236

Post by baldfat »

_ea1k wrote: post #143
baldfat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fedora is not kinda beta branch of RHEL. I thought maybe Redhat changed their stance on Fedora and read from Redhat's page and well it is 100% a beta testing ground for RHEL. "The size and expertise of the Fedora community make Fedora an ideal incubator and proving ground for features that eventually get incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To meet the quality and reliability requirements that make Red Hat E…

I understand where you are coming from, but I think it is just a matter of framing. If you consider regular Ubuntu releases to be the "beta branch" of their LTS releases, then the comparison would be apt. I don't really see it that way. Each Fedora release is reliable, but the software does evolve quickly. The RHEL releases are taken from a point in time on that stream, pushed through an even more extensive QE proces…

But Ubuntu doesn't say that they use Ubuntu as "... an ideal incubator and proving ground for features."

I use to use Fedora Core and then up to Fedora 7. I got burned way to many times and view Fedora as a slight step up from Arch Linux as a working distro. Both Fedora and Arch are more "hobbyist" distros and I will not use them in a professional work flow. I use OpenSUSE and I find their model to be the best of Distros and haven't ever got burned by them. OUTSIDE of 2001 when I was installing SUSE and wiped my partitions because I didn't know what I was doing :)

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#237

Post by baldfat »

oblio wrote: post #197
baldfat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fedora is not kinda beta branch of RHEL. I thought maybe Redhat changed their stance on Fedora and read from Redhat's page and well it is 100% a beta testing ground for RHEL. "The size and expertise of the Fedora community make Fedora an ideal incubator and proving ground for features that eventually get incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To meet the quality and reliability requirements that make Red Hat E…

Based on your comment I assume you're an old timer. It's been 14 years since the bad blood days of Fedora Core 1. Fedora is way more polished than back in the day.

Yes, I am an old timer, but Fedora still isn't production ready like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or the paid for distros. I am certainly more of a pragmatic Linux user so the graphic card drivers are not proprietary blobs and must use the open source drivers. I might be wrong haven't installed Fedora since 14.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#238

Post by pjmlp »

beavis2 wrote: post #151
pjmlp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing good native UI/UX development is similar to games, specially when using WPF, UWP, Qt,...

I would love to see what you develop. My graphics card supports the native UI elements of Windows. My users don't want a "Save as" dialog with life-like water refraction and fog, rendered at higher FPS than their monitor.

Software that adheres to nice designs like Material and Fluent.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#239

Post by humblebee »

CamTin wrote: post #65
loeg wrote: post #36

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?

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 worked in as the IT there was not EMC or Dell, but our own internal that originated prior to our EMC acquisition many years ago.

I could see other organizations which were not so disconnected from Dell EMC being force further down Windows. Their solution is to run Linux in a VM, which is just unfortunate given the work and the product.

Re: Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

#240

Post by CaptSpify »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #208
jmkni wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has gotten a lot better, but the rules regarding new computers hasn't changed in the past 30 years, you still need to wipe the hard drive and install it yourself from scratch, and then spend a little time disabling the ads, bing crap, telemetry, etc. Once you do, it's rock solid, but it should be OOTB and it annoys me that it isn't. It leaves those not familiar with Windows with a bad first impression, and th…

> and those tech savvy enough to install Linux just don't come back. It isn't a matter of tech savvy, and pretending that it is is part of the problem with the Linux Desktop community, which is the worst part about using a Linux Desktop if you ask me. The system has a whole lot of issues, many of them somehow even worse that dealing with Windows 10's bullshit, or else I'd have switched myself by now. Even Linus calls…

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.
Post reply on HN