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Comment by dcdevito | Hacker News Reader

there is, the XPS has the best Linux support on a high end laptop, maybe ever. But don't confuse driver support for overall experience. Linux DEs, to me, are a complete waste of my time. I need my machine to work in an instant, EVERY TIME I turn it on. I would rather spend my time developing an app or website for a client than dorking around with a Linux DE just to get it work the way I want. That's why it's simply Windows or macOS for me, and these days Apple's shenanigans have me comfy in Windows 10. The Windows bias here on this site is baffling. It's a great OS, by far the most stable OS I have ever used.

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That's not my experience at all. I use the vanilla Ubuntu 16.04/Unity, and it Just Works. Never had to worry about drivers or setting up anything, it just works out of the box.

I'm sure it is possible to start fiddling around and configure stuff if you need/want to, but so far the XPS 13 (well, Precison 5510 in my case but it is the same line of product) with Ubuntu works as I expect it to

I use ZenBook UX303 with Ubuntu 16.04/Unity and I have same experience. Except for setting up the dedicated nVidia, it Just Works.

Setting up CUDA along with Bumblebee is real pain though. In the beginning sometimes the lightdm just crash on start, but it has been stable after the first week.

I need my machine to work in an instant, EVERY TIME I turn it on.

Strangely, this is exactly my experience of running Linux on my Thinkpad. It just works: Every time. No fuss, no messing about with drivers, no dorking about with DEs. Open it up, get down to work.

Admittedly, when I worked full time with a Mac Pro as my desktop, OSX was perfectly OK. I honestly can’t say that I felt it was any better than my Linux experience on a day to day basis though.

Thinkpads do have outstanding Linux (driver) support out of the box, indeed. But again, my issue isn't with driver support, it's with Linux desktop itself.

There isn't a "Linux desktop" as such, it would be helpful if you specified a DE and some specific issues you had.

Honestly, my Linux DE experience has been just fine too: Everything just works, it gets out of my way & lets me get to an editor to write code or fire up a web browser & has a ton of productivity apps a mouse click away if I need them.

I just don’t spend any time fiddling with Gnome; sure, it’s a bit opinionated about how it wants you to work with it, but so was macOS. I don’t spend any mental cycles worrying about the DE on either macOS or Gnome & that’s exactly the way it should be.

I’ll freely admit that the possibility of going down the rabbit hole of fiddling with your DE until you’ve got it just so is always there under Linux, whilst you have to to be a lot more committed to customisation on macOS if you want to mess around with that kind of stuff. But I decided long ago that so long as the DE got out of my way & let me get on with doing stuff then I wasn’t going to care about it.

It’s possible that I’m missing out on some amazing experience that would transform my computing life, but having tried both I’m really just not seeing it personally.

Specifically what issues do you have?

>there is, the XPS has the best Linux support on a high end laptop, maybe ever.

That's hyperbole if I've ever seen it. You can look at how many problems plagued Fedora on the XPS13 as recently as a year ago:

https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...

The tl;dr version is that the guy spent so long trying to get it working properly that he ditched the laptop for a Thinkpad. And FWIW, Fedora usually has better support for recent hardware than other distros due to the up-to-date kernel.

From what I gather, Thinkpads are the crown jewel of Linux-supported laptops. This is more of a dogfooding thing than anything else: kernel developers, Redhat employees, and other Linux users tend to use Thinkpads, which means they then spend more time getting support for Thinkpads into the kernel.

That was 2 years ago actually.

The community sorted out most of the issues, so about 6 months later the experience was actually quite good.

Dell released the Linux version of the laptop too early, I guess they wanted to get some traction but it backfired.

>6 months later Who thinks this is acceptable though?

Any specifics?

I find GNOME 3.22 to be at least as, if not more usable than macOS.

> Linux DEs, to me, are a complete waste of my time.

Would you like to describe your experience? My use of the DE is mostly for staring browsers/terminals and jumping workspaces (not as smooth as a Mac w/ trackpad).

> It's a great OS, by far the most stable OS I have ever used.

Windows 10 is reasonable, but I wouldn't say it's the most stable OS I've ever used and updates are usually a pain, specially compared to Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora.

Have you tried elementary OS? It has a similar design philosophy to Apple. https://elementary.io

I found eOS to be the WORST distro I have tried in years. It's more limited than macOS, and only half as stable. It only gets attention because it tries to hard to be the most aesthetically pleasing Linux distro ever, I applaud their efforts but it's such a beta product. No thanks.

HiDPI support across the Windows ecosystem is still horrible.

In fairness it's handled quite well by Windows I feel, a lot of third party apps let it down.

It's a bigger challenge on Windows than OSX. On OSX devs only have to target a small number of High DPI resolutions.

But the challenge has nothing to do with the resolution, it's entirely in the UI scaling, which is separate from resolution.

Macs cover a pretty wide range of DPIs, and windows can be any size. I'm not sure what you mean.

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