New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up | Hacker News Reader

New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up

bartongeorge.io

192 pointsdacm70 comments

Ok, I didn't see that coming. Dell building a better Macbook Pro than Apple :-). I wonder how their high DPI support will compare with other Linux distros.

If the durability is up there with the Thinkpad series of old I could see replacing my current machine with one of these.

> I wonder how their high DPI support will compare with other Linux distros.

Unity is about on par with Windows, in my experience. So it's usable, but not great. You'll probably run into programs that don't scale well, but if you spend most of your time in an editor, terminal, and web browser you'll be OK.

Personally, the only issues I've had have been with some old GTK+2 software and Steam. That's been a little annoying as sometimes I'll spin up GVim to edit stuff, and the combination of GVim 8 + GTK+3 + Unity is still buggy last time I looked.

>I wonder how their high DPI support will compare with other Linux distros.

To the best of my knowledge and experience [0] the scaling isn't any different across any of the major GTK-centric DEs (GNOME, Unity, Cinnamon, Pantheon): You get integer scaling factors for the entire UI, and a separate text scaling setting, both which work as expected, with a possible exception of a few multiple-versions-old Qt applications that might respect neither setting. They are rare in my experience.

I find that on a 13-14" laptop at 1440p this is insufficient. No scaling (1x) is too small for my poor eyesight, but 2x scaling is too large and wastes screen space. I forget where and how long ago I encountered a Linux environment with 1.5x scaling. Maybe I dreamt it, but 1.5x was just about perfect.

My current strategy (14" Thinkpad, 1440p) is to keep UI scaling at 1x, font scaling at 1.5x. This works for most applications except for web browsers (where the font rendering size is not dependent on the system font settings). In browsers, I will use a plugin that sets the default zoom to 1.5x, basically bringing everything up to the same experience.

I can imagine that a 15" laptop with thin-bezeled 4K screen might have the same challenges as 14" at 1440p (i.e. a 1.5x scaling would be ideal, but does not exist). However, this is only a guess, based on my trying a full 2x scaling on a 13" 4K display. It was actually nice, at 15" 4K it might be sit in the awkward zone of 13" 1440p: too small at 1x, too large at 2x, with no single setting for a 1.5x sweet spot.

[0] I install new versions of GNOME, Unity and MATE at least once a year to see if one has surpassed the experience of my current preference (Cinnamon).

I forget the details of how it's implemented but Ubuntu 16.04 gives me a choice of 1.0,1.12,1.25,1.38,1.5 (plus many others outside that range). For my 1440 T460s' 14" screen the 1.5 setting is about right for me and I've been using it for a few months with no issues.

I believe that setting adjusts the same two scale factors mentioned above — integers for GTK+ and decimal font scaling — plus fractional scaling for the Compiz window decorations and the new QML Ubuntu toolkit apps.

Widgets do seem to get scaled as well at 1.5 not just font sizes. If I recall correctly it changes the dpi as well.

I should try it again. I mostly use (Ubuntu) MATE, and GNOME 3 before that, but the scaling settings was my favorite feature in Unity.

I have a 15" laptop with a 2880x1620 display, which I use at 2x but it is definitely in the awkward zone. I imagine 4K would be just about right.

I recently discovered that you can use xrandr to improve things quite nicely. Try something like:

    xrandr --display eDP-1 --scale 1.25x1.25

If you run into weirdness with your mouse cursor you might also need to run:

    xrandr --panning <new effective resolution>

This is explained better over on the arch wiki in the Gnome section of this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

Note that a few apps are still a bit weird with scaling factors. For example: Sublime Text, which scales the text correctly but not the tabs or side panel.

Nope. And I say that as someone who wants to switch away from the straightjacket that is MBP + macOS.

In broad strokes, yes, the XPS13 (and 15) are pretty close to the Macbook Pro's. However, since Apple has already been 'here' ( = great trackpad, solid body, great battery life) since 2012 they have had time to absolutely perfect the Macbooks. Just a small list of engineering stuff they did:

1. Battery life. They developed both terraced batteries and special non-standard sleeper modes on Thunderbolt chips. Also one of the few laptops left that has a 'muxed' dual-graphics solution. 2. Custom motherboards, in very weird shapes, to maximize spatial efficiency. 3. Fans. The fan blades are all at a different angle, thus producing a slightly different pitch and spreading fan noise across the audible spectrum 4. The hinge. Opening and closing a Macbook is an absolutely joy, because its sturdy enough to not wobble, but if you open it, it doesn't tilt the Macbook off the surface. [1] 5. Magsafe (sadly gone since 2016 models)

The XPS line not having these little things is not a show-stopper, but IMHO does elevate a laptop from 'great' to 'near-perfection'.

[1] They test this painstankingly, so it feels perfect from the 11" Air all the way up to the 15" Pro. Even my dad's brand new 2016 XPS 15 still has the tilting problem.

My experience in a few months of using a laptop with a high resolution display is that its fine when you're just using the built in display, but once you add external monitors things get a bit messy. Scaling is globally applied across all displays, so I've ended up setting things up so that the internal display is at 1920x1080 when plugged in, and 2560x[whatever] when it isn't.

Interesting to see this here, I was actually looking at the Dell website for the last few months considering a Precision 5510 to replace my macbook pro (2011) and my now bricked Thinkpad X201s (coreboot fail).. when recently I saw the 5520 appear, sadly no option to buy direct. (I'm calling in favours with friends to get me a price)

I hope they continue the tradition of building insanely good hardware (look at the insides of a 7510[0].. holy crap) and allowing expandable batteries as an option.

The 5510 for instance can be specced without a SATA drive and that space can be used for a 6 cell (rather than a 3cell) battery.

The fact that these machines can be shipped with Linux is really the icing on the cake for me, even if there was no price drop I would purchase them because I have some confidence that the hardware will be supported.

[0] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Precision-7510-4K-IGZO-Mob...

I absolutely love my Dell Rugged Extreme 12.. it's insanely expensive but literally bomb-proof (designed to handle the pressures from an exploding bomb.. even if my frail human form won't). It runs Linux almost perfectly -- better than Windows. Windows 10 had issues coming back from suspend (the screen would stay black.. dead), and losing all mouse tracking at random times. Linux only has issues coming back from suspend and they're not even as bad (sometimes you can't get a network connection).

And the hardware is fantastic. No sharp edges for your wrists. I used to be a thinkpad fan, but this thing is insanely great. (However, I do miss the old-style thinkpad keyboards and the modular batteries.. but battery life on this thing is great anyway.)

It's also good to chock the wheels with if you have to change a tire or heaving at someone who insults your laptop. I do like multi-purpose devices.

Two thumbs up from me as far as the 5510 goes: I've had mine for ages, and aside from some bumps early on (WiFi driver issues solved once I moved to Ubuntu 16.04.1), it's been great!

My boss seems unusually sensitive to high-frequency noise, and said if I got a Dell laptop for work he'd refuse to sit next to me (which would be a bad thing because I like him!)

I'd not heard of the "coil whine" or "CPU whine" thing before but Google seemed to show a lot of anecdotal evidence and discussion, especially for the XPS 13 but also for other models.

Does anyone know why Dell seems so prone to this, and if the problem has been solved in newer models?

Otherwise if I want to ditch the work Macbook for a Linux system (which I'd love to do ... I have not grown to enjoy OSX) then my only real choice would be Lenovo.

They obviously use cheaper components than others, keeping their costs low and profits high! That's business, and people keep buying their stuff anyway, so they made the right decision not to fix this issue (no, it's not been solved).

From what I've read the coil whine issue is still there, and it's still a hit or miss thing. Some of them suffer from very audible coil whine, some have none at all.

It's a very unfortunate quality issue that will prevent a lot of people from buying the XPS 13.

I have an XPS 15 and have had no coil whine issues so far, fingers crossed.

The E6400 series had it, but so did the T400/T500 ThinkPad line.

This is more of a processor family issue, not laptop manufacturer problem.

> Otherwise if I want to ditch the work Macbook for a Linux system

Year-old MacBook Pros typically make fairly nice Ubuntu machines. The hardware is standard enough that you can find step-by-step installation instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro The biggest limitations in recent years have been (1) no webcam, and (2) somewhat flaky (but still usable) wifi.

It's not as nice as a supported Ubuntu preload directly from your hardware vendor, but you get the nice physical build quality of Apple's hardware.

There is an open source webcam driver now [1], although it has some problems.

[1] https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

I may not be able to go with a Linux system at all since company policy is Mac only, but if I ever do manage to do it, I know that they will want me to use (1) not a Mac and (2) not old hardware. Kind of a shame since my research suggested the same: that year or two old Mac was a good hardware platform for Linux. The same to an extent applies to Lenovo hardware and everything else designed primarily for Windows. If it were for personal use, I'd go for an old Thinkpad or old Macbook.

I'm confused, if your company is Mac only, how would you end up sitting next to your boss with a Dell anyway?

I'm not sure why Dell is particularly prone to it, but it makes Dell machines unusable for me. I had an Inspiron 8200 through college (14 years ago!) that had very annoying coil whine. Surprised to see it's still a problem.

joining in on the OT discussion:

You can try to fix high frequency coil vibrations by dousing the responsible component in hot glue or something comparable (the denser the material, the better).

Identifying the part is pretty easy: use a good microphone, put it in a paper tube to make it more directional and move it around the mainboard while observing the spectrum with the audio software of your choice.

I fixed my CRT this way, a looong time ago. I strapped it down with cable ties too, IIRC. Worked like a charm.

I just returned my XPS 13 developer edition due to the extremly bad "coil whine". It was so bad that I could heare it even with headphones on (different audio source). Also the anounced revision of the mainboard was yet again posponed. Baought a HP specter x360 and I'm very happy with it. Everything worked out of the box with Ubuntu 16.10.

Since Thunderbolt 3 is prominently advertised in this announcement, can I safely assume that Thunderbolt 3 support has stabilized in Ubuntu at this point? And if so, are we able to use external GPUs over this interface in Linux now?

Thunderbolt 3 somewhat works for me, although I'm not sure if that's down to the OS or the adapter I'm using. Using the latest Ubuntu its fine once its working, but it will take me two or three attempts plugging the adapter in for the HDMI output to actually work, between which the machine will crash hard with a garbled internal display.

That Precision 5520 looks pretty tasty, will be a nice upgrade from current M4700, which, while solid and performant, is a bit of a tank and power hungry to boot (180W power adapter rarely works on planes; combine that with the 2 hour max battery life...).

Shed some weight (4lbs vs 7lbs), high res screen, 32GB, 2 X SSD, and get a probably modest performance boost for cpu intensive tasks (like compiling Scala projects) -- think I'll pull the trigger when it launches.

The Precision 7xxx series are recommended if weight is no object and you need a beast of a laptop to crunch through video editing, signal processing, or Crysis. The fact that it comes with Ubuntu is a boon to top-end mobile Linuxing. A vast improvement over the M3800, which is a capable machine in a frustrating enclosure that doesn't even come with the basics like Ethernet, and doesn't supply a docking port.

For gaming too? From what I read Quadro cards are pretty weak when it comes to games. I wish Dell would offer GeForce as an option; not everyone interested in a workstation wants Quadro.

I wonder if it supports vfio...

Dell should buy Ubuntu. That might be interesting.

Interesting suggestion. I dream of the same things. It's pretty obvious the fate of Dell is currently capped by the features of Linux. Their effort on the hardware is currently enough to convince, but the OS is still what makes people afraid of switching away from Mac.

I'll suggest something crazily ambitious: Dell should acquire and staff creativity/professional suites for Linux. If the de facto stack for photographers or architects were a stunning Ubuntu + Affinity + AffinityCAD (inventing a stack here), it would be the year of Linux. Plus Linux-based stacks are much more powerful than Apple/Windows.

As a photographer and videographer I can't wait for the day I can switch to Linux fully. Until then it's OSX for me, but I'm patiently waiting.

Now if only they'd offer 16:10 screens I'd almost immediately switch.

Last wish is for Linux driver support for the Quadro card to render to the integrated GPU (or whatever is necessary to display on the LCD) with KVM PCI pass through from Windows. Then I'd be able to run the few remaining Windows apps (Altium, Solidworks, etc) from Linux at near native speed.

Dell.com says the new Precision 5520 has "NVIDIA Quadro M1200"[1], which may be a typo of P1200.

Is the NVIDIA Quadro M1200 included in the Precision 5520 based on GP107-400 (GTX 1050 Ti) or GP107-300 (GTX 1050)?

[1]: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-15-5520-laptop/p...

No, it's Maxwell. There's not a mobile Pascal Quadro that'd work at that form factor and thermal capacity at this time. The Kaby Lake Dell XPS 15 (Precision 5520's sibling) uses a Pascal GTX, though.

Maxwell Quadro mobile parts end in "M" (in addition to starting with "M"), which leads me to believe that this is just a typo'd Pascal part.

I work on Linux at Dell. I'm the guy in the hammock in that blog post by Barton. It's a Maxwell Quadro for the reasons I stated.

I've used my Project Sputnik machine for years and loved it.

32GB ECC in a thin and light laptop.

> ECC

Only explicitly called out on the 3520, wonder if it's in the others?

Does anyone know the power consumption hit of ECC in mobile devices? The power hit of DDR self-refresh of 32GB compared to 8GB was about 1.5W on my Dell Precision 5510.

Interestingly enough, thew new product page from the Precision 5520[0] shows the Xeon E3 as the same E3-1505M in my 5510, I guess I'd be shocked to see ECC added as it wasn't present in the 5510.

[0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-15-5520-laptop/p...

The E3-1505M does support ECC, not particularly hard to believe that it's a supported feature now.

I believe ECC overhead is around 12.5% (9 bits instead of 8) for the memory system. However I don't know what percent of power the memory system usually takes.

Seems like about half the power is required for a 3200x1800 display + touchscreen. The XPS 13 goes from 22 hours to 12 hours when you switch from 3200x1800 touch to 1080 non-touch. Of course 1080P screens are lower power, but not zero. Of the rest the CPU takes a fair amount. As a guess I'd say a 15% increase in memory power might decrease the runtime by 20 minutes.

>I don't know what percent of power the memory system usually takes.

usually about 1.5w for each SODIMM on DDR4.

ECC is overrated. It's almost never necessary (outside of servers) and other types of errors are orders of magnitude more likely to occur on a developer laptop.

I just built a ECC desktop, the math I saw implied I'd say 1 or 2 random crashes a year. Additionally to true random bitflips it seems MUCH better at identifying bad dimms, or bad dimm slots. I'd much rather have an ECC error than start randomly replacing CPUs, dimms, and motherboards.

Seemed pretty cheap to me. How much is a few less crashes a year worth it to you?

Keep in mind the error rate is per GB, so 32GB crashes 2-4x more often than the more common consumer sizes of 8-16GB.

VGA port? In 2017?

There may still be conference rooms and auditoriums with VGA-only projectors in 2027.

And audio/video conferencing still won't work most of the time.

I've had good experiences with https://appear.in, it's based on WebRTC (no installation of anything, no accounts necessary). It might not be suitable for corporate use, but for private use it's great.

May? What kind of crazy optimist are you?

Personally, I'd bet on will.

I've run into problems with my ultrabook in rooms with vga-only projectors. they're definitely still a thing.

mini-displayport to VGA adapters are also still a thing :-P

yes, but I'd have to have known in time to have one (:

No office which uses VGA is going to have an adapter handy which isn't already lost in a random drawer somewhere with dead batteries and random keys.

I've worked for shit tons of media and design companies who couldn't even keep track of the regular cables to charge their mobile devices (used for testing).

People would "borrow them, just for a minute", then leave it on their desk, where someone else would take it, then not know where it came from and sweep it into a pile of other bits and bobs somewhere.

You have to be a proper strict to keep this sort of thing in check - it makes you unpopular in the office, badgering after people.

I've got a laptop with both VGA and DisplayPort (and Thunderbolt.) I used both of them in different conference rooms last year. And believe it or not, 1280 or 800 px wide projectors are still a thing.

This is a message to Microsoft protesting the Surface.

Don't know why you're getting down voted. A lot of hardware manufacturers would be very nervous about MS extending the production of their own hardware.

With the tiny marketshare of Surface, that seems unlikely to me.

Last time I tried a Dell over a year ago I could only install its approved Linux's on it - Ubuntu (and maybe Red Hat or CentOS, don't recall exactly). Likely due to the custom motherboard, but it felt very locked down. Whereas if I spec and build my own workstation or laptop from XoticPC or similar, any distro will work with it. Anyone else familiar with this issue? Is it still a thing?

This isn't a thing. You'll need to provide more information than you have.

While Dell does sell "certified" hardware, they have never (AFAIK) locked down a system to only allow Ubuntu installs. I don't even see how this is possible, provided Canonical doesn't supply Dell with Secure Boot keys locked in the BIOS/UEFI -- what you're describing has never been a thing, and was most likely an issue with storage controller or lacking support for a chipset generation.

For the past 17 years, our policy has been to push vendors to open source drivers and push those drivers upstream. Red Hat and Canonical rarely ever take hardware vendor patches otherwise anyway.

When you're shipping brand new hardware, not all distributions necessarily are caught up even if upstream projects (kernel, X, etc) are.

Ubuntu still has spotty supoort for installing to UEFI with the newer NVME ssd.

Which is why my office switched over to Redhat Fedora 25 and never looked back.

The entire install and out of the box experience is unbeatable.

Why is Apple the only company able to ship a 5K display (5120x2880 native resolution) at a reasonable price? Who wants to develop on the equivalent of a 1080p resolution?

For desktops you can buy 5K from LG (they make the panel anyway) and the Surface Studio has 4.5K.

Most laptops have wrong DPI but Razer and the X1 Carbon have reasonable resolution.

Apple doesn't ship a 5k display. They ship a 5k panel in an all-in-one. Apple doesn't sell any monitors anymore.

The 4K 27" All-in-One will indeed be awkward at both @1x and @2x, which is all that Ubuntu supports (plus changing some font sizes). And who needs touch on a 27" screen? Apple gets it right: 2K/4K for 24" screens, 2.5K/5K for 27" screens.

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