Unfortunately, from what I've been told by one of the guys in Dell's Sputnik program, they gauge interest on the Linux Dell laptops strictly by the number of people who buy Developer Edition laptops. So the author is not helping the cause by buying a Windows 10 laptop and loading Linux onto it.
Believe me, I get it. The Windows ones go on sale, while the Developer Editions pretty much never do. I'm guilty of buying a Win10 one myself before this was explained to me. Just passing that info on. If you want to support the future of Linux on Dell laptops, I strongly urge you to buy the ones with Linux pre-loaded, from Dell.
I'd have hoped Dell realizes this, and doesn't make the braindead assumption that only DE customers are interested in Linux. Most people I know who bought an XPS bought the vanilla (Windows) edition, and then installed Ubuntu - which is easy.
If Dell slips up and, say, introduces hardware not supported by Linux, it will lose all these customers.
Yes, let's all donate $100+ to Dell to help the cause. In the mean time Dell will continue with its flawed business strategy for Linux laptops by always pricing them above Windows laptops and never giving any discount.
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptops/xps-13-9370-lap...
This is probably a better plan than importing something without paying taxes. If Brexit happens, there's still Ireland for an English Dell website in the EU.
(Like most other European layouts, the British/Irish one will mean the ISO layout rather than the American (ANSI) layout. Other than the additional key giving space for £ and ¬, there's not much difference; so you might prefer that if you want to keep a vertical-shape enter key.)
EDIT. It would be 3% PayPal fee + Cost of shipping ($50 or so) is you asked a friend to do it.
I would also say that the newer ones with multi-core are probably not worth the premium, if you can get last year's model for a good price then go for it. I got mine for $850 brand new, a few months before the multi-cores were announced. I don't think I really missed anything.
Here is what I tried so far:
1) Dell XPS 9370 Developer edition: This comes preloaded with Ubuntu and it is actually amazing that everything works out of the box. It was too small for me though, and the fan made a rattling noise so I decided to return it. The 4K screen is probably overkill on such a small display. Based on the review people recommend taking the normal screen, it saves a lot of battery and there is not that much difference.
2) Lenovo X1: I didn't like the feel of the Keyboard, and the screen was not that good. Installing Linux (Arch) was easy, but decided to return it.
3) Dell XPS 9570: I have this one for the last two weeks and so far I love it on the hardware level. I would even put it as somehow superior to my MacBook Pro. The downside is that Linux is not well supported at all. I have installed Arch so far and spent all my evenings trying to fix all the drivers. So far: The Nvidia drivers are barely working, ACPI needs a lot of tweaks (but it seems I got it working and got my 7 hours of battery). I still need to work on the Touchpad, and couple other things.
So far, the Dell XPS 9570 is a good challenger to the MBP, but installing Linux is still going to be a small challenge
I'd been contemplating XPS vs X1 for a number of years, but this one came along with it's 3:2 display! and it seems to support linux out of the box according to everyone whos tried it so far[1]. It's obviously more of an XPS/macbook contender because it's in the ultrathin category not ultrafast, but the screen... the screeeeeen! I want vertical space.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/8l37ob/matebook_x_p...
Could you expound on that? I'm curious as to why OS X isn't satisfying for you as a developer.
Then there's MacOS itself... which is just getting more annoying, I quit after 10.6 (which was best version IMO), everytime I use a mac now I compare it to the relative simplicity and stability of this version, and it's just so much worse. I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this.
That said, for non developers I'd still recommend a mac over windows, although in recent years it's gone down hill, and personally I don't want to trade my freedom for closed source OS that have their own agenda - I understand that most users don't have the luxury of really being able to use anything not as friendly to basic users.
My Perspective on the OS:
MacOS philosophy is to hide/remove all or most settings and hope that the default ones will work for you out of the box. I love to tweak everything and MacOS feels too packaged for me. There is not enough freedom for the advanced user to change things. Also, The OS feels so commercial and made for the masses. this is a personal feeling but I cannot help it.
They do a very good job for the normal user that only wants to use a couple well defined apps though.
As a developper:
I mostly develop Linux infrastructure code (backend and low level). As such, using MacOS means that I'm constantly into a VirtualBox VM (which sucks compared to KVM or anything else) or trying to build stuff over SSH. I spend hours opening SSH tunnels, or mangling with port forwarding inside my VMs.
Then, I like to run containers. Docker support for Mac is pretty much basic (or I should call it horrible).
So at the end of the day I am using MacOS as a glorified web browser and SSH terminal. I never took the time to learn the low level working of MacOS, and I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples)
Basically I want to get control back on My OS.
Most of my work is in embedded land, so I usually have at least one serial console running and often those go up/down as the device providing them goes up/down. MacOS would fairly regularly get something tangled up in its USB stack (I think they re-did a substantial amount of it for El Capitan), leading to me needing to move my desk USB hub's connection to a different port on the computer. Then, once the second port fell over, I had to restart the computer to get USB back.
I used to have an NFS mount between MacOS and the virtual Linux machine - that was an endless source of problems with MacOS losing track of file handles, then refusing to unmount or shut down cleanly. On average, I probably had to hold down the power button to hard-reboot once per day. And, NFS always seemed slower than it should've been.
There were silly little issues like my external monitor's HDMI not supporting some volume adjustment protocol for it's audio out, and MacOS refusing to just reduce the levels sent to that device. So, the volume keys didn't work at my desk, except for mute. The security around downloading executables from the net was a pain - way too many clicks to get MacOS to run random open-source programs via Finder.
Personally I just use a macbook and develop over ssh.
Price wise it's quite cheap (same specs as the Dell: i7, 16GB, 1TB SSD, 4k screen) as you can usually find a coupon online. For me it was about EUR300 cheaper than the XPS currently is. So far everything has worked out of the box with exception of the fingerprint reader on the side.
The 4K screen does look pretty, but I still haven't managed to get a workable dual-monitor setup with it alongside a not-4K monitor. I wish there had been an option to buy the not-4K screen, and the bigger CPU and battery, but at least in the NZ Dell store that wasn't available.
The touchpad in particular is driving me nuts - the heel of my typing hand will often cause the touchpad to jump the cursor off to the side mid-line. The surprise of seeing some chunk of code disappear has resulted in too much spilled martini. It often mistakenly detects middle-clicks. Apparently, there are two drivers that can work with this touchpad, and the other one has some settings that may help...
Lots of crashiness and sleep problems I was having turned out to be the nouveau driver being loaded by a systemd service called "nvidia-fallback" - disabling that helped a lot.
A lot of the peripheral experience isn't great coming from Apple-land; in particular the TB16 dock is way overpriced and awkward, especially including the '90s throwback power brick. I'd love to not spend hours getting audio to come out the right port between the computer's headphone jack, the dock's, or the computer's speakers (which, BTW, aren't great).
There is a mismatch on information about the 9570 with chunk of informations here and there if you Google a lot, but nothing definitely well written yet.
That Dell makes you scroll down 3-4 screenfuls to see what keyboard it has tells me a little about who their target market isn't.
-- with the latest kernel, even the webcam is working now (the only thing that didn't).
I am now using Windows 10 with the Linux Subsystem. O&O shutup takes care of the privacy concerns. I have a Lenovo Graphics Dock and docking and undocking is a nonevent. Do you want to be the one who gets an nVidia GPU hotplugging working on Linux -- and keeps it working through all the improvements the Linux desktop goes through? Worse, get IOMMU passthrough working with this setup because most of the games are still Windows only? I don't, that's for sure. I am 43 years old today and there is not enough time left to use a tamagotchi OS. The Linux Subsystem could have a better I/O performance but I will live. It's a surprisingly frustration free life. Some useful configuration tips https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...
Before you inevitably downvote this, please comment where I am wrong. If you feel all the above are trivial, give me an offer for maintaing my Linux, I would actually love to get back there but for the time being I do not feel I can. I yearned for someone to take over desktop sysadmin from me for many years but I absolutely couldn't find anyone so eventually I just gave up.
Erm... The old drivers stopped working with this particular device?
I had a very similar case with perfectly good HP laser printer, which doesn't work on Window 10 anymore because... dunno? No drivers from HP, though. I'm sure it would work just fine with generic PCL or PostScript driver under CUPS.
> Later, a HP MFC caused endless pain, seemingly every other Arch update broke one of Bluetooth / printer of MFC / scanner of MFC.
Well, that's probably self-inflicted because of your choice of Arch, not because Linux (e.g. Debian).
> Plain Wifi eventually worked more or less (but see the endless string of bugs with 5GHz) but enterprise wifi always has been a pain.
Enterprise Wi-Fi has always been a pain, also under Windows.
> The strange F5 VPN our company used was not particularly Linux friendly
VPNs are usually that way. Very few companies can write sensibly working software that would run under Linux.
> -- I could only get it to work by running Firefox as root (yuck!).
You get pretty much the same under Windows, though you don't see it as clearly.
I don't get why you bash Linux. Windows has the exact same problems.
Samsung simply stopped producing Linux drivers. Indeed if you look at https://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/index.html there is more than a few years gap here. Also, if you look at the newer drivers support page now that some models have maximum support versions https://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/supported.html where I persume you are ... if you update -- and "obviously" you can't not to update because eventually some API breaks the driver. My printer broke in 2010 with an Ubuntu update.
> Very few companies can write sensibly working software that would run under Linux.
Which is the problem itself. You got it in one.
> You get pretty much the same under Windows, though you don't see it as clearly.
It's possible I do not see it clearly but the only Bluetooth problem I had was the April Creators update mysteriously changing Chrome to use the internal soundcard which was solved in two clicks in Eartrumpet (which was new to me -- finding that software took a little time). I have yet to meet any of the problems listed: every wifi and VPN I have yet seen have Windows support (and IT is so much more prepared to help if there is a problem), the Bluetooth stack actually didn't break, nor have Windows upgrades haven't broken my MFC yet (although I guess I need to wait -- but how long? I have seen people install HP LaserJet 4 on Win 10 with some struggle). And as I mentioned, my Thunderbolt eGPU just works. Are you saying it would just work on Linux...? Come now.
I love Linux to pieces and I run it on servers and use the userspace components still but I am writing to warn people: it is still not the year of Linux on desktop and probably never will be. Or, if you so prefer, it finally is, it's just Linux on the Windows desktop.
> I have faced no problems w.r.t stability. ... Occasionally the Desktop compositor hits a snag freezing my machine and requiring a forced reboot
No problems with stability ... except sometimes the machine freezes to an extent where a forced reboot is necessary.
Thanks!
Also I read a lot of bad experiences here on HN with the XPS line every time it comes up. Personally I know at least two people who had a bad experience with it and ended up replacing the machine with something else. Is Dell improving on that part or has it stabilized?
On paper the machine looks really good but right now I just can't justify pulling the trigger to replace a Retina-MBP.
Haha, yes, I'm one of the unfortunate people that use XPS 13 9350 and have had a lot of issues with it. On the other hand I installed Arch recently and everything works out of the box, including touch screen, that really surprised me.
Personally I would blame Intel for their crappy hardware (all issues were with Intel peripherals), but that's me.
One nice feature of the touch pad is that the scrolling direction for the mouse is independent of that for the touch pad. This means I can set the mouse to work like mice always have, before Apple invented "natural" scrolling, but have the touch pad use "natural" mode. For some reason, this actually feels right to me. I wish my Macbook Pro could do this.
"Scroll Reverser is a free Mac app that reverses the direction of scrolling. It is available for macOS 10.4 through 10.13.
It has independent settings for trackpads, mice and Wacom tablets, and for horizontal and vertical scrolling. "
That said, I do consider it a ding against MacOs, because it's ridiculous that I'm forced to use third-party tools for such basic functionality. (Other examples: USB-tethering with non-Apple phones requires hunting down and installing third-party drivers. A feature that just works, out-of-the-box, on every other system I've ever used.)
What you describe is a feature of the OS, not the hardware, right?
Sure, they look pretty and the Linux support is good, but the build quality didn't satisfy my expectations.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Butt...
[2] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/mouse-touchpa...
Linux' "Select to copy + middle-click to paste" just saves a lot of time, and has the extra bonus of being a clipboard parallel to the one accessible via traditional copy-paste shortcuts and GUI menus.....
Many people select text using the mouse, then reposition the cursor using the mouse. It's convenient to then insert the selected text using the mouse — the entire operation is done without touching the keyboard.
But it's not 100% reliable.
When I'm not using a mouse, I mostly prefer shift-ins... since the hand is already on the keyboard...
It must have 15 inch Builtin 4K display, Ethernet, display port, multiple USB ports and No Nvidia GPU.
I usually don't move my laptop so I prefer 15 inch over 13 inch. But I like my primary computer ready to be carried anywhere so I don't want desktop.
I don't play video game or graphics on my primary computer so I don't need a dedicated GPU. Also Fuck you Nvidia.
There are 13 inch laptop which satisfy everything else or 15 inch with Nvidia GPU. I guess there is not much demand for my ideal.
from that angle it seems slightly ironic that all those great Linux laptops leave the 1000 usd mark way behind them.
thing is, I'm actually intending to buy a laptop and have Mint run on it.
any suggestions for a laptop cheaper than 1k?
I'm eyeing Dell latitude 5480.
