Hacker News Reader

Comment by wildmindwriting | Hacker News Reader

I have a 2017 13" XPS running Solus Linux. I have come to abhor this machine. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had to reboot the computer due to frozen or halting apps. I only have 8GB of RAM so that might be it but I can't run Slack app or the Google Play app at the same time without definitely causing problems.

I have a desktop with Solus and 16GB at home and never run into any issues with it.

I don't recommend this laptop anymore to anyone.

View on HN

Do you have a swap partition? If you don't have a swap partition enabled, then your computer will freeze when your RAM fills up.

I have the XPS 16" and this happens to me under Arch Linux, but thankfully not very often because I have 16GB of RAM. If you really have to break out of the freeze, then you can try switching to another terminal window (eg. ctrl-alt-F3 or some other function key), then try to kill the offending process. It might take a minute for your keyboard inputs to take effect, but it generally can be done.

Tip: I have the exact same setup, and I use earlyoom (https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom) to prevent this. Previously, I was frequently unable to break out of the freeze no matter how long I waited, forcing a hard reboot, but with earlyoom just a single memory-heavy app gets killed instead.

I am guessing here but Solus Linux isn't probably officially supported by Dell on the Developer Edition of this laptop (you have the Developer Edition, don't you?)

I do have the Developer Edition. It may not be officially supported but everything works out of the box. I've got a personal IdeaPad laptop from years ago that has a worse configuration but doesn't freeze like this Dell.

It sounds like not everything works out of the box.

I had a (first version?) XPS 13 running first Gentoo and then later Linux Mint and I never had problems with it. Once I even let it run for 2 months without rebooting and making it go into suspend-to-RAM from time to time and it never crashed.

But then I still sold it because I could never get used to its cursor keys and absolutely hated the impossible-to-deactivate-embedded-automatic-brightness-control.

I have a 2017 13" XPS running Ubuntu. It's a 9360 and I made sure to order one that actually shipped Ubuntu. It works perfectly and I'm very happy with it. I also have 8GB of RAM. I recommend this laptop to everyone, though of course I haven't tried the newer ones that are available today.

Perhaps OS support is your problem? Did you order it with Ubuntu or with Windows?

> I don't recommend this laptop anymore to anyone.

Wouldn't this happen with any 8 GB laptop? Not sure what you blame the XPS 13 for that.

No, not all. My IdeaPad works just fine with similar specs and it's older than the XPS.

I was recently affected by my an aftermarket NVMe SSD: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1678184

tl;dr -- add `nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0` to /etc/default/grub in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter, run `update-grub`, reboot. Verify with `sudo nvme get-feature -f 0x0c -H /dev/nvme0`.

Totally agreed that this shouldn't happen. I hope that's your issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com