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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

If you want to buy one you should extend your analysis beyond the hardware specs because the software and operating systems are not ready yet. I can give the example of the latest XPS 13 2-1 where Office applications like Outlook cannot recognize a monitor with a different resolution and the fonts are blurred. Look for example at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-apps-appear-... high DPI is a whole issue.

I can give many other examples with drivers support. For example, if I unplug the notebook from the dock the audio playback doesn't work again if I don't reboot the computer or remove/reinstall the driver.

It would ve nice to hear about a critical analysis in Linux.

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XPS 13 on linux (ubuntu) here, the support is very good. The HiDPI screen need some configuration but most apps will run out of the box, some need to set a parameter for pixel density. Most issues can be solve by looking in the ArchWiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI). USB-C (even a dock with power, usb, sound, hdmi, display port, ethernet will run fine), WiFi, Graphic Card, touchpad, sound, event the touchscreen, all work without troubles. Really happy to finely find a nice linux-friendly laptop.

Agreed, I also bought an XPS 9360 and comparing it to Linux on my Macbook Pro, the difference is night and day. Everything is incredibly well supported on the XPS.

The xps 13 and 15 are very different machine, the xps 13 as good feedback, while le 15 not so much

They refuse to provide a XPS15 Developers Edition.

They have several 15" Developer Edition models, though it's true none carry the XPS branding. Full list here: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

They provide a 15" Precision developer edition which is the same form-factor as the XPS and better specs.

Kinda. The Precision 5520 can be configured with a Xeon E3-1505Mv6 ("better" CPU) but with a Quadro M1200 (Maxwell) instead of the new XPS 9960 with a Pascal GTX 1050 ("worse" graphics, quoted because it depends on workload, pro vs consumer GPUs but the pro stuff here is a generation older...they'll probably update it soon). The Precision 7720 can be had with an E3-1535Mv6 and a Quadro P5000 (similar to a GTX 1070, and Pascal), but it's a 17" and thicker. https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-P5000.191073.0.h...

I'm using XPS 13 with Debian Stretch.

Eveything except HDMI out from the USB-C dock works. I think that's a kernel patch merge away.

Very true, the previous XPS 15 had huge problems with the Killer NIC card because the drivers for it took months to stabilise and its only recently been that a driver update has made the Wifi somewhat stable and the machine has stopped crashing every few days.

What other people seem to have done is get Dell to swap the Killer NIC with an Intel one which has much better driver support.

Colleague recently bought one of these, has a Killer NIC, still not stable, machine hard crashes every time they boot a VM.

Intel card is the one recommended. Even Dell uses it in Linux pre-installed version of XPS.

I don't know what these guys are doing but even in Windows, I would get IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL after deep sleep.

FYI: Don't use the killer drivers, let windows install it's own driver.

I'll never buy a latest gen XPS ever again. I bought my wife the latest and greatest XPS last year (Cyber Monday) and it had the most ridiculous problems. For example, WiFi would randomly disconnect, Chrome couldn't play Netflix (what?), internet speeds were an order of magnitude slower than my Chromebook, etc.

I fixed the issues by swapping with an Intel card (didn't want to have to wait months for driver updates), but in my opinion that is unacceptable for a premium laptop. Why is Dell skimping on parts? I paid $1500 precisely because I didn't want to deal with crappy parts, but instead they took my $1500 and gave me a worse browsing experience than my $150 Chromebook...

If you don't want to bother with dealing with Dell, they do provide official repair guides on their site telling you exactly how to do it. I bought the prior generation of the XPS 13, and for $25, an Intel 7625 wifi card. Took me about 20 minutes to swap it out.

There are a lot of reports of killer drivers causing issues. My friend needed help with his Alienware 15 because it started instantly blue screening as the login screen came up at every boot. Dell's only solution was a factory reset. I dug into it and a release of the official killer wifi drivers was bugged. They had to be disabled to actually boot. They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode because they use the Windows installed doesn't run in safe mode.

>They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode //

Isn't this entirely broken, surely no one designed it so you couldn't fix applications in safe-mode?

You can enable and disable drivers and startup functionality in safe mode. You can't install or uninstall any apps or drivers that utilize Windows Installer as the service isn't running, rendering the install/uninstall/modify abilities of those apps and drivers useless. You can still install and uninstall apps and drivers that use proper installers like NSIS, etc.

OK, so "Windows Installer" is a third party app? Why's it a service; surely it only needs to run when initiated as part of an install/upgrade/uninstall rather than perpetually?

It's not a third party app. It's the thing that Windows uses to install things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer

They're right though. It doesn't run in safe mode and it's a fucking pain in the ass. Makes fixing issues harder when you can't uninstall shit in safemode. Drivers especially.

My experience with a similar (fully maxed out 9560, but no touch display). Since updating the drivers, the killer card has been working without fail, though it was a little frustrating to deal with a brand new laptop that constantly blue screened and failed to connect to wireless when my 10year old macbook sitting at the same desk was fine. Reddit has a good guide for setting it up, though some of these are now out-of-date. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/5unlmb/got_my_brand_n...

I hate how prevalent Killer NIC chips have become. They seem to be racing to the bottom with cheap wireless and ethernet PHYs with crappy drivers, yet their reputation hasn't quite caught up. Their marketing brands them as premium and a lot of manufacturers still buy into it to target the "gaming" segment (which also hates them).

I refuse to buy any board which has these chips and will pay a small premium for an Intel or Realtek instead.

I don't recall anybody ever having a kind word to say about them. As I recall the product used to be the cheapest Atheros chips the vendor could find plus a proprietary driver that was snake oil and bugs. Not better than a Realtek and worse in a lot of cases. I suspect that they're actually cheaper than a Realtek, which is why they keep showing on consumer hardware.

HardOCP liked them at one point: https://m.hardocp.com/article/2011/09/08/gaming_killer_nic/2

I always thought of them as purveyors of snake oil and reached for Intel NICs with great results every time. I used to like Atheros for radios back in the good old bad days of WEP and MadWifi.

> Office applications like Outlook cannot recognize a monitor with a different resolution and the fonts are blurred

I just spent 30 minutes this morning dealing with this exact issue on my laptop that I've docked into two nice external monitors.

To fix it, open the display settings and set one of the external monitors to the primary display. Then log out, and log back in.

I have no idea why this works, but if it hadn't I'd have chucked the laptop out the window by now. Windows 10 is almost great, but for a dozen little stupid things like this.

It doesn't work with Microsoft Office, it is a known issue that Microsoft Office doesn't support that setting. With Google Chrome it will work because all the work is done by the browser.

Look also at this future update: https://www.google.com.ar/amp/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/artic...

It fixed Outlook for me.

high DPI in windows 10 is honestly such a shit show. Bugs, you have to Log Out and Log back in every time you change settings/monitors! Its honestly unacceptable given how seamlessly macOS and Linux (Fedora at least) handle this sort of thing.

Mine has a problem with stuck keys. If I press caps lock+w, the w stays pressed (in software) so I just get long strings of wwwwww. The spacebar also gets double-pressed around 5% of the time, which is extremely annoying.

Another issue is that audio to the headphones will sometimes just stop until I restart pulse. Not even a reboot will fix it, only a pulse restart.

It's a fantastic machine otherwise, but the drivers are pretty buggy.

Yeah, external monitors in a mixed DPI setting is very weird. If you change your primary monitor, you get to pick which screen it looks OK on!

Mine actually bricked itself so hard it couldn't boot at all. I had to send it back to dell. This was after installing a firmware update _distributed with their tool_.

No, it doesn't. I use two similar external monitors, same DPI, and Office fonts are blurred. Please check the link, it is a known issue. The monitors are not 4k or the exact resolution of the notebook display.

high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden.

> high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden.

Actual 4K resolution works way better on Linux than it does on OS X. By default, OS X will use 2560x1440, even on a display that's capable of 3840x2160. If you try to set it to the latter on OS X in your display settings, it looks really terrible.

The experience is less consistent on Linux in 3840x2160, but overall it's much better, and it's well-supported by the common applications that Linux users would use (Firefox/Chrome, terminal emulators, any GTK+ 3 or Qt 5 applications, and more).

On Fedora 26 with Wayland, high-DPI works pretty well in my experience.

It does not. If you have e.g. QHD on a 13" laptop, then it's cool because 2x scaling works. On my 32" 4K display, it's bad because I'd need 125% or 150% scaling, not 100% or 200%.

Fractional scaling is in the works for the next Gnome release. I've been using the former case, so that's why I said it works well for me.

OSX will happily use 3840x2160. Are you sure your limitation is not somewhere else? Maybe you ran out of available crts on the graphics card, or the display cable has it's limits, or whatever.

That said, the 4K support in Fedora is nice. The only problem is with Qt4, Gtk2 and other apps using legacy toolkits.

> OSX will happily use 3840x2160. Are you sure your limitation is not somewhere else?

Yes, it will use it, but it looks terrible. Even the native system UI isn't designed for it, let alone Cocoa-based third-party applications or third-party applications that don't use Cocoa.

Right now I'm sitting behind 4K (Dell P2715Q) monitor connected to rMBP (13", 2015). What I'm supposed to miss? What exactly is not displaying correctly and I didn't notice?

Also, exactly what applications do not use Cocoa? Apple had made extremely difficult to talk directly do display server, the two non-private-frameworks-without-stable-abi ways were Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is already dead.

> Right now I'm sitting behind 4K (Dell P2715Q) monitor connected to rMBP (13", 2015). What I'm supposed to miss? What exactly is not displaying correctly and I didn't notice?

I use the same monitor as well. Until recently, I had the 15" version of that laptop, and now I have the latest 15" Macbook Pro. Both use 2560x1440 on the external monitor even though it's capable of 3840x2160, because that's what OS X defaults to, and every time I try increasing the resolution, I only make it a few minutes before I can't stand how terrible the experience is and end up switching back.

> Also, exactly what applications do not use Cocoa?

I'm saying that native Mac applications look really bad on OS X when set to 3840x2160. The UI and text don't scale consistently, and that's true both of the system-level UI and of application UI. The situation gets even worse when you're talking about applications designed for X11[0], which I could forgive, but on the other hand, those applications scale just fine on Linux.

By contrast, all of this works out-of-the-box in (for example) Unity. I don't have to deal with dialog boxes that are out of proportion with the system bar, or text that's impossible to read unless I squint on some applications but perfectly readable on others.

[0] We could get into a debate about whether XQuartz really counts as "cocoa" or not, but I'd rather not.

> I use the same monitor as well. Until recently, I had the 15" version of that laptop, and now I have the latest 15" Macbook Pro. Both use 2560x1440 on the external monitor even though it's capable of 3840x2160, because that's what OS X defaults to, and every time I try increasing the resolution, I only make it a few minutes before I can't stand how terrible the experience is and end up switching back.

I would suggest to try using different DisplayPort cable.

OSX defaults to "best" resolution for the given display. In case of this monitor, it is 3840x2160, but - it will tell you is 1920x1080 and use it in HiDPI mode. Like this: http://imgur.com/a/infej

Once you change resolution, it will remember, what you changed it to on that specific display, and will use it next time you connect to it.

> I'm saying that native Mac applications look really bad on OS X when set to 3840x2160. The UI and text don't scale consistently, and that's true both of the system-level UI and of application UI.

In my experience, they scale perfectly. The ones that are non-HiDPI aware, are scaled by the system to the proper size (and thus are pixelated).

XQuartz is another matter. It should be taken behind the barn and shot long time ago. Running X11 apps is better done using a linux vm.

However, what I don't understand, why you have wrong scale. XQuartz is a not DPI-aware app, thus it is scaled by the system.

> I would suggest to try using different DisplayPort cable.

It has nothing to do with the cable. I've had this issue on every single 4K monitor I've used with these laptops - which is at least three different monitors, with different cables - and it even manifests with HDMI 4K output (at 30Hz). All of these setups work perfectly fine with my XPS 13 running at 4K on Linux. I don't understand why you think that the OS's inability to scale the system UI or applications in a reasonable way would have anything to do with the cable.

Try it with a Linux laptop running Unity, and you'll see the difference.

> I don't understand why you think that the OS's inability to scale the system UI or applications in a reasonable way would have anything to do with the cable.

Because that's not the experience everyone else is having. That leaves possibility, that something is broken on your end.

> Try it with a Linux laptop running Unity, and you'll see the difference.

I know how Linux handles HiDPI. See my comment about Fedora elsewhere in the thread.

Okay I have no idea what you're talking about either, and I've used OS X on a 4K monitor. It scales to a virtual 1920x1080p by default; everything just looks sharper. What did you expect to happen?

> Okay I have no idea what you're talking about either, and I've used OS X on a 4K monitor. It scales to a virtual 1920x1080p by default; everything just looks sharper. What did you expect to happen?

If it's scaling to 1080p for you, that's because either your monitor or your cable doesn't support 2560x1440 at 60Hz. If it does, it should default to 1440, assuming you're on an rMBP.

In terms of "what I expected to happen" - well, I expected an actual 4K resolution (like 3840x2160) to work. Maybe not by default, but at least when I enable it, it should be able to auto-scale the appropriate parts of the system and application UI in a consistent manner. That means that I'd be able to actually view a 3840x2160 image at its full intended resolution (not 1080p or 1440p) without scrolling, while also not having to squint in order to read the system bar or do anything else on the OS.

That works pretty much out-of-the-box on Linux with Unity. Even with tweaking configuration everywhere, I can't find any way to do that on OS X and have it look halfway decent.

> In terms of "what I expected to happen" - well, I expected an actual 4K resolution (like 3840x2160) to work. Maybe not by default, but at least when I enable it, it should be able to auto-scale the appropriate parts of the system and application UI in a consistent manner.

That's what it does. OS X will by default render at the panel's native resolution. But it scales everything to a lower effective resolution. Say you're running a 5K monitor at "2560x1440" (as in the iMac 5K). And the app displays a 32x32 icon at (0,0). The OS will see that you're running in 2x mode (real resolution = 2x effective resolution). So it'll pull a 64x64 version of the icon from the app's art assets. It'll take up 32x32 on the virtual 2560x1440 display, but a 64x64 image will be what's copied to the frame buffer. Text glyphs, and images, likewise, will be rendered at full resolution.

When you bypass the default setup and tell the OS to run at 3840x2160, you're not telling it to render at that resolution. You're telling it to size things as if you're running on a standard definition monitor of that size. So when the app displays a 32x32 icon, the OS will see you're running at 1x mode, and pull a 32x32 icon from the art assets. The result will be a tiny icon.

I have a 4K laptop running Linux mint and it's great. Mint has a high dpi setting that makes it look good. There are a few programs that have trouble, but most work just fine. I think Ubuntu will be coming out with support soon as well.

This does not accord with my experience. I have last year's 15" Dell Precision with a 4k panel, and Sway works brilliantly. I went with Intel graphics for compatibility, and because it saves money and battery life compared to NVidia. Text looks great, and I can make it really tiny if I want.

Ubuntu 16.04 handles it really nicely, but it requires a few hacks to get things like Chrome + Thunderbird to scale properly.

Chrome is still using an old version of GTK isn't it?

I have a load of problems with the virtual keyboard on my Tablet, I've had to work around it with a chrome extension that manually lets me pop the keyboard up.

The https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI is a wonderful resource to solve practically every troubles.

It is a wonderful resource, but doesn't solve all trouble. It specifically says that the only modern DE that supports hidpi scaling well is KDE. Gnome hidpi support is crap (no fractional scaling), Unity is going away. Sway and the rest are of course cool, but most people use some kind of GUI toolkit like GTK that either supports hidpi or not (mostly not well).

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