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Comment by tarasmatsyk | Hacker News Reader

Ha-ha, reading this from the 2015 MPRO 13", exact same experience. I've tried to move to DELL XPS 13 2 years ago on Linux, did not work for me, however with a new line of Dell's I am starting to thinking about repeating this experiment.

Apple's 2016-2019 laptops were pretty unusable, hope they revert the touchbar too..

A question, has anybody tried System76 comparing to Dell/Apple?

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Wow, this is a common theme. I have a 2015 13" macbook which wasn't max specced out and I feel like I'm hurting these days RAM wise and HardDrive wise. I bought a super specced out 2020 XPS 13 2 in 1 because of reservations about the latest macbook pro 13 and I kind of hate it.

I think this is personal taste, but I just don't love the build as much, the trackpad, and ubuntu is acting pretty flaky. The camera and wireless chipsets are not immediately working right.

There just doesn't seem to be a perfect solution.

I have both the 2020 2-in-1 XPS 13 (32GB, core I-10) and I love it because it's a beautiful 2-in-1, but yes, camera and fingerprint scanner don't work at all, but only in the 2-in-1 version -- works great in the laptop version, which seems to have a different camera. Wireless works great, though, as does the trackpad. (Kubuntu 19.10, not LTS -- LTS didn't work very well at all for me.)

I also have a lower-spec'ed 2020 XPS 13 laptop (8GB, core I-10) that works perfectly across the board (except for the fingerprint scanner, which I wouldn't use anyway.)

I love the hardware on both. Absolutely love it -- more than my Macbook Air; no sharp edge where I rest my wrists, touch screen, phenomenal screen (4k, which is higher than Retina, or 1080p, which gives better battery life) etc. The 2-in-1 has a taller screen shape, so you can fit more lines in your coding windows.

If you care about camera, get the laptop. It's also a little bit cheaper -- I got it for about $950 from Costco. The only thing I don't like about the laptop is that the screen doesn't tilt all the way back. The keyboard is better on the laptop instead of the 2-in-1 as well -- more depth of travel, and the Delete key is in the right place instead of offset by the fingerprint/power sensor as on the 2-in-1.

I love the new Dell XPS 13 and think both the 2-in-1 and the laptop are better pieces of hardware than the Macbook Air, and I prefer the new Kubuntu 19.04 over Mac OSX as well. (I don't have a MBP so can't compare to the Pro.)

I felt the same way as you about my 2015 13” so I reformatted the drive with apfs and did a fresh install of Mojave. Got a ton of storage back and it runs like a new machine. One of the best things I’ve ever done.

I think System76, Lenovo, or Tuxedo is a better choice than Dell XPS for Linux from a reliability standpoint. Additionally, if you plan to do full disk encryption, the XPS line has all sorts of issues. https://www.dell.com/community/Linux-Developer-Systems/XPS-1...

I gave up on Lenove when they sold the company, maybe that was a mistake. Dell seems to be one of the best companies considering quality and support.

On the other hand, I've never tried System76, and never heard of Tuxedo, thank you for mentioning!

Tuxedos aren't cheap, but the coolest thing about them is they have a way to preinstall Linux and setup full disk encryption with LUKS and you just set the encryption key when you first turn on the machine. Never seen anyone else offer that.

Weird - I've got a newer Dell XPS and am making this post with WDE enabled and have had 0 problems. Anecdotal I know, but I've ran pretty much every major Linux distro (Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro) and am currently running Regolith linux.

I've not noticed any hiccups or problems at all around encryption.

Adding Purism to this list.

Slightly more pricey, but worth it. Typing this on one.

Been wondering about those. Did you use their distro or install another one on it?

Still using PureOS, just so I know any problems are caused by me and not some strange hardware/software issue. It's a perfectly serviceable Debian-based distro, haven't had an issue with it so far.

Good to know, thank you.

Once they offer a 4-core 13" option it will be a lot more compelling.

I've run Linux on my xps 13 since 2015. Issues at first when the hardware was brand new and not supported in the latest Ubuntu kernel but excellent ever since. Fully intend to buy another if it ever dies, no worries about reliability here.

I use a MacBook and a fully loaded (with GPU) System76 laptop. I really like both, for different purposes. The System76 is much faster for large builds and is obviously much better for deep learning training. The MacBook is light and portable. I like having two laptops, at extremes of the weight/portability vs. computational power spectrum.

I had a 2014. It is a great laptop, no doubt but I recall before several patches I had issues w/ USB 2.0 port connectivity. I had the screen replaced once. So it wasn't without its own set of bugs. Working beautifully now.

My only beef is no NVME and it stutters a tad. If I could find a 2015 w/ 16gb/1 tb spec w/ NVME...

I'm hoping the glitches in the 16" can be worked out, eager to see how the 14.1 will look...

and I know Apple kremlinology is never the most accurate way to look at things, but boy were the Mansfield/Forstall years great...

Is yours the retina 2014? Those can take standard NVMe M.2s with this adapter: https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-201...

I've done this on a '14 13" MBP so I can help if you have any questions.

I have the very first-gen Retina Macbook Pro 15-inch back in 2012. Still work almost perfectly to this date.

The only problem is battery degradation (70%) and in reality it lasts <2 hours. But since I use it at home as a desktop, not a problem at all!

I am thinking of going to Dell from an 2014 MBP, what did not work with Dell on your last experiment?

The latest XPSs look very nice.

I tried dual-booting an XPS15, which did not go well [0]. I understand the 13's are more Linux-compatible, but I got so badly annoyed by Dell Support I'm never buying Dell again.

[0] the drive management software didn't like GRUB, and would complain that there was no drive if GRUB was installed. Repeated reboots later, it would suddenly say "oh look, a hard drive!" and boot into Windows, removing GRUB in the process. Dell Support were worse than useless at diagnosing the problem, let alone fixing it (still unfixed, the machine is now a rather shitty games machine)

I suspect this would be due to mixing legacy and UEFI booting, where grub-legacy would interfere with whatever the disk management was doing and fixing it would involve removing grub.

For grub-uefi, it is just another file on a EFI system partition.

possibly. I couldn't get a clear answer from Dell on what their disk management system was doing, so it got really hard to work out what was going on and where the problem was. I tried everything I could think of and the internet could suggest.

Typing this from Fedora 31 running on a dual-boot, 4-month old XPS 15 (LCD screen, not 4K OLED). The only configuration change that has to be made on a new XPS is switching the SATA mode to AHCI. Fedora signs the kernel correctly--you don't even have to disable secure boot.

Signing 3rd party kernel modules under secure boot isn't difficult, but documentation on it is sparse. So I've kept my notes for next time: https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/

The Arch guys have a great compendium on the XPS and Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590

I don't know if that changed recently. I gave up on it a year ago. I went through all this (though with Ubuntu not Fedora), switched modes, disabled secure boot, read every web page I could find. Nothing worked. I'm kinda tempted to see if I can get it working now, but honestly, also kinda traumatised by the whole experience and never want to touch it again.

I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu's installer capabilities, but Fedora's has made huge advances in the past 5 years. I went in to the setup fearing the worst (that is, the struggle that was doing a secure boot, UEFI Windows 8 + Fedora 20 setup in 2014), but was shocked at how good Fedora 31's install routine was.

I shrank the 1TB SSD partition in Windows, disabled the proprietary fake-RAID, then booted Fedora's XFCE spin from a USB key. The installer handled everything else--no having to manually tinker with the UEFI partition. Post-install, the XPS's UEFI correctly booted to GRUB, which had successfully detected the Windows bootloader (again, no tinkering like with FC20) and can boot either OS.

Disabling hibernate in Windows and figuring out how to mount the encrypted Windows partition in Fedora was all that remained.

The Linux Kernel 5.5 has a bunch of improvements for the i7-9750H (and other Coffee Lake processors), which is another reason to consider giving Fedora 31 a spin. :)

I had this pleasant experience the same time I was trying to figure out how to dual-boot FC31 on a touch bar MacBook Pro. The short answer is: 80% of the MBP's hardware doesn't work in Linux. Broadcom won't release drivers that are compatible with Linux and blame FCC rules for their reason. Insane. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

dammit, now I'm tempted to try again. Thanks, I think ;)

oddly enough I have a system76 ibex pro and a 2015 macbook pro 13". I'm almost a year into switching over. (Everything except lightroom). The system76 is much bigger, clunkier and not as well built. But honestly its fine, the software is updated frequently and besides a couple of times where the keyboard didn't come back after sleep the systm76 has been a trooper (sleep awake cycle brought it back).

I enjoy this machine and would buy another.

I'm actually thinking of doing the same thing. Why didn't it work for you the first time around?

Meh, the camera was on the left bottom side of the screen. On every online meeting, I was looking like a parent talking to kids from the corner :D

Also, I had a windows edition which works pretty bad with linux. A friend of mine got a new Linux edition with fixed camera and I think perfect XPS is 15" 32Gb for linux. That's my alternative #1

Aren't all XPS 15 models nvidia-only? That would an extra roadblock on the way to just-works linux experence.

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