The Antisocial Laptop

When you write software at any level on top of the OS the number of possible causes for bugs starts out at unmanageable. If you allow for unreliable hardware, the possible cause count rises to unthinkable. As a result, I prefer to pretend that hardware doesn't exist when at all possible.

I used to work in firmware, and spending hours chasing down a software bug only to find that it was a hardware issue, and vice versa is a maddening process.

I was thinking about getting an XPS, but I could not understand if this is resolved in the latest editions of XPS/precision or not.

> my mental model of causality was limited to the design of the machine - software interfaces and physical connections - and was completely missing the possibility of non-intentional interactions via the physical world.

I love hearing of stories like this. Similar line of thought to my personal favorite interview question: ""What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?" (Answer in as much depth as you like.)"

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

I have a precision 5520 (although the 5530 is out)

I was going to do like a "sysadmin review" of the thing but I think there's not much appetite for 1.5y+ old laptops.

Anyway, I can give you my take as I've been collecting notes.

The laptop itself is great, the model I have is 32G DDR4 with a Xeon 1505Mv6 (Kaby Lake)

I use it with Archlinux (I also used fedora) and everything "just works", the laptop itself gets quite hot under load and the fans are loud but operationally it's basically perfect with no wifi/audio/$other quirks or bugs that I've had to work around.

I've used pretty much every feature of the laptop under Linux with the exception of the webcam. (which, I physically turned off VIA the BIOS).

I opted for the 9c battery and still get 8hrs of battery, the battery is currently at 91% of it's max design capacity. I use it on battery twice a week and it depletes to 20%. (to give you an estimation on wear).

The keyboard is shallower than I like (coming from a Thinkpad X201s), but it's definitely not cramped and relatively easy to get used to, touchpad performs well, multitouch works out of the box.

I have the Dell Thunderbolt "TB16" dock at home, and on first use it works /relatively/ flawlessly. If you use the docks ethernet then you have to disable offloading of checksumming[0].

The dock also doesn't love when it's disconnected and reconnected. I assumed this was because the TB16 is basically a PCI 4x bridge, but manually forcing linux to remove the PCI devices (and bridge), removing, connecting and performing a rescan of the PCI bus did not make it available again. For now if I need to remove my laptop from the docking cable I do it once with the knowledge that I will have to reboot if I want to be docked again. Which I consider to be a large inconvenience.

The BIOS is great, it has a very wide array of features which are not gimmicks, the UI is a bit painful but it has features such as 'office hours' where the battery will charge fast, but only trickle charge outside of office hours so that you don't wear your battery out too much. Or even capping the full capacity of the battery (since li-ion batteries are stressed when they are at full capacity) -- I haven't found a way to edit these values live yet, but I'm sure it's possible to edit the BIOS from the userland in linux.

I miss having an Ethernet jack, but not much you can do these days to get one. The compliment of ports is healthy and overall I'm very happy with the machine. I just wish the dock wasn't so fickle.

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dell-sputnik/+bug/1729674

I was wondering if this would be about how having your laptop open in a meeting is bad form on a few different levels (distracting, signaling, body language)