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Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

zdnet.com

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Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#71

Post by gerdesj »

Darmody wrote: post #56
smallerfish wrote: post #38

The camera doesn't work on the current XPS13 if you upgrade to a 6.X kernel (which, to be fair, means moving outside of Dell's packaging.) Technically this is Intel's fault, as they haven't released firmware for it yet. Still, hopefully the Dell team avoid similar issues in future configs by ensuring better driver support. It's a nice laptop otherwise.

My cam doesn't work on my 5 year old Inspiron either. It's one of the reasons I'm not buying the Inspiron 16 plus in this moment.

Whichever distro you use, there will be a selection of kernels to choose from. Even Arch has an elderly LTS option. Gentoo obviously offers all kernels since 0.97 (dig out egcs) including several that haven't been released and a couple that will never exist outside of a parallel reality!

I've owned several Inspirons and have no issues but then I use Arch (actually). Have a look into what kernels are on offer and consider a different one. However you may have another issue because I seem to recall that cams are now all basically standards based.

Try grabbing a couple of live "CDs" of other distros and boot them. See if your camera works. Try something like OpenSuSE "tumbleweed".

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#72

Post by [deleted] »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #25
Freak_NL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell is definitely weird about this; I had the same experience. Perfectly satisfied with my laptop (an XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it bought a few years ago), but Dell's online store is just bonkers.

I Googled XPS 13 and go to configure it but can’t find an option to choose Ubuntu, only downgrade to Windows 11 Home. It is weird.

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#73

Post by Koshkin »

> Otherwise a fine device.

> It's a nice laptop otherwise.

These have always reminded me of:

Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,

Tout va très bien, tout va très bien,

Pourtant, il faut, il faut que l’on vous dise,

On déplore un tout petit rien:

Un incident, une bêtise,

La mort de votre jument grise,

Mais, à part ça, Madame la Marquise,

Tout va très bien, tout va très bien!

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#74

Post by bartvk »

AvImd wrote: post #70

Not a high end device (Dell Vostro 15 3515), but it comes with preinstalled Ubuntu as well. It has some serious problems with wireless (10ec:c821). The default driver frequently loses connection on some wifi networks (it has issue with many networks though surprisingly not all of them). Sometimes reloading the driver helps, sometimes it just hangs my system. https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw88 seems to work a bit bette…

Have you tried a USB based WiFi adapter? Last time I checked (unfortunately many years ago), these were quite small.

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#75

Post by queuebert »

kleiba wrote: post #14
acover wrote: post #11

Why does it cost more if I select Ubuntu versus windows? Edit: It looks like just a Canadian thing. 1899 for windows home and 1984 for Ubuntu. https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/laptops/xps-13-plus/spd/xps-...

For me, it's the opposite: Windows is preselected, but when I switch to Linux, the price goes down.

Same here. Linux was $100 cheaper. Which makes me wonder ... why is an OEM Windows license still ~$100? And not only that, you'd think Dell could negotiate a lower rate.

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#76

Post by dcminter »

molly0 wrote: post #34

I’ve been running Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude for about two years. Works good and is cheaper.

Same on a 7490. My favourite thing about it is that I was able to cheaply upgrade it to 64G memory! Plus it's fairly sturdy and cheap to replace if it ever does die on me. Very happy with it.

I have had a couple of minor Linux specific (I assume) issues, but nothing too hard to resolve.

Edit: this was one of the minor issues: https://paperstack.com/fixing_the_freeze/

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#77

Post by AvImd »

bartvk wrote: post #74
AvImd wrote: post #70

Not a high end device (Dell Vostro 15 3515), but it comes with preinstalled Ubuntu as well. It has some serious problems with wireless (10ec:c821). The default driver frequently loses connection on some wifi networks (it has issue with many networks though surprisingly not all of them). Sometimes reloading the driver helps, sometimes it just hangs my system. https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw88 seems to work a bit bette…

Have you tried a USB based WiFi adapter? Last time I checked (unfortunately many years ago), these were quite small.

I am considering doing that. I also considered replacing the wireless card though I was unable to find reliable information if the BIOS has some kind of whitelist that would prevent me from doing that.

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#78

Post by pja »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #25
Freak_NL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell is definitely weird about this; I had the same experience. Perfectly satisfied with my laptop (an XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it bought a few years ago), but Dell's online store is just bonkers.

I Googled XPS 13 and go to configure it but can’t find an option to choose Ubuntu, only downgrade to Windows 11 Home. It is weird.

IIRC with the current XPS range only the "pro" variants offer you the choice of a Linux install.

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#79

Post by jauntywundrkind »

jadbox wrote: post #58
smallerfish wrote: post #38

The camera doesn't work on the current XPS13 if you upgrade to a 6.X kernel (which, to be fair, means moving outside of Dell's packaging.) Technically this is Intel's fault, as they haven't released firmware for it yet. Still, hopefully the Dell team avoid similar issues in future configs by ensuring better driver support. It's a nice laptop otherwise.

Why did the new kernel break the drivers when every release is supposed to be (usually) non-backward's breaking?

The kernel promises not to break any drivers in the kernel.

But right now there's just some hacky out of kernel drivers for the no-longer-even-recent Intel IPU6 camera controller, which is on a lot of laptops.

Intel's been slowly working on this. Here's an update from May: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Progressing . Fedora has this out of kernel tree in driver. But it's been like this for a long time. Here's a well known kernel maintainer warning people off last August: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop

Honestly I'm shocked Intel has been this dodgy for this long. I feel like overall Intel today huegly gets it. They have enormous dedication to getting drivers out there & making systems work well, in a way very few companies compare against. But they are hit or miss across different divisions. I'm not sure what the IPU6 folks see as their path to getting upstreamed, or whether they intend to keep just floating along out of kernel for a bit.

It does look like there is support for pretty modern kernels out-of-tree, & there is a repo with binary firmware, so I wouldn't be shocked to hear that XPS13s and most IPU6 systems work pretty ok.

Re: Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops

#80

Post by jauntywundrkind »

smallerfish wrote: post #38

The camera doesn't work on the current XPS13 if you upgrade to a 6.X kernel (which, to be fair, means moving outside of Dell's packaging.) Technically this is Intel's fault, as they haven't released firmware for it yet. Still, hopefully the Dell team avoid similar issues in future configs by ensuring better driver support. It's a nice laptop otherwise.

It to me like support landed August 29th, according to https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers/pull/174
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