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Comment by Wohlf | Hacker News Reader

You may be surprised how much equivalent laptops from other OEMs have caught up. The Dell XPS is very similar to the Macbook Pro, and Dell supports Ubuntu on it.

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The XPS line had some of the worst speakers I’ve ever heard on a laptop up until the 2020 revision- and some of the worst build quality issues I’ve ever experienced with a laptop.

My 2019 XPS 15 went through eight at-home repair visits after hardware failures within four months. Can honestly say I’ve never used a less reliable machine- and every unit I’ve ever touched has had some of the worst coil wine issues I’ve ever encountered in any computer.

“Very similar” doesn’t really count for much.

As someone who's returned their 2020 XPS 15, I can say that it hasn't gotten better. I can't speak for how well the hardware endures but it does have various flaws. Also didn't find the speakers to be good. Sounded worse than the SB2 I was replacing.

Running an MBP now, but if sticking with Windows was important I'd have chosen a ThinkPad.

My sown owns XPS 15 (2019) and had just one issue (no hibernation on "lid close" event), which was fixed (although it wasn't simple).

Build quality is amazing, keyboard is great, screen is awesome (4k, hdr, touch).

It has the exact amount of ports my son needs, it can run games and it's weight is good to take it to the school.

If we're sharing anecdotes I also have a XPS13 9650 which is now over 4 years old and I never had any issues whatsoever with it. Runs Linux since day one and I could not be happier.

I got a MacBook-air sized xps, and the hardware is fantastic, better than any MacBook imo - the bezel alone makes it so.

But I have never had a laptop that gave me as much trouble with Linux. I bought two of them over the course of a couple of years, and both the one that shipped with Windows and the one that shipped with Ubuntu had CONSTANT hardware compat issues.

This was a while ago (after the reboot of the line), so the build quality and compatibility may each have gotten better/worse.

I switched to a Dell XPS last year, then sold it on ebay 6 months later and bought a new Mac. WSL is a cool idea, but is still a bolt on solution, I was constantly fighting with it on windows with my unix-oriented workflow, trying to get apps and packages to work correctly.

The trackpad feels like it's from 2012. The speakers are very bad. The fans are constantly whirring. It misses on all the details, while also making it harder to do my job.

>The trackpad feels like it's from 2012. The speakers are very bad. The fans are constantly whirring.

It’s sad because the XPS is beautiful, but these same issues plague every Dell, HP, and basically non-Apple laptop. Even the most premium lineup (Envy, XPS, etc.)

How many years and fancy designs will it take before PC OEMs actually develop an excellent trackpad, not use tinfoil speakers, and use silent fans?

Apple has patents on their trackpad. Dell etc. are literally not allowed to make good trackpads.

Apple has so many patents that it’s impossible to design a good, or even decent trackpad?

>WSL is a cool idea, but is still a bolt on solution, I was constantly fighting with it on windows with my unix-oriented workflow

I wonder why not use Linux at that point tho?

Battery life and hardware support. You'd get better battery life and thermals running Linux in Virtualbox on a Windows/Mac laptop than on bare metal. I'm a Linux enthusiast but every time I use it on a laptop is pain. Laptops are like phones in that they need deep integration with the OS to be usable long-term. The best way to use Linux is on a desktop that you build and can control what hardware is used. (The desktop with multiple monitors is a superior form factor IMO for getting work done.)

My experience is that Ubuntu with tlp has better battery life than Windows though. (Granted, I last compared this in 2016).

How do the trackpad and battery life compare?

Battery on my recent Dell is over 10 hours with Firefox usage.

Leaps and bounds ahead of where things were at 4 years ago.

Libinput, while less fully featured than synaptics, seems to have a better physics model for the trackpad pointer translation. It still doesn't have fractional scrolling though, every scroll is still a discrete increment.

Have yet to see a non Mac track pad that has more than two gestures..

If you use Wayland (which... has its issues, but maybe they're better now?) on an XPS 13 Developer Edition... or even my junk Chromebook with MrChromebox's firmware installed so I can install Linux, you can get all sorts of gestures that are more than just "two gestures." Heck, even Windows supports gestures just fine. So...

I have yet to encounter any non-Mac trackpad gestures that don't feel cheap, laggy, and/or too unreliable to bother committing to muscle memory. Apple's trackpad haptics and OS-level gesture support are second to none.

then use keyboard combinations. they are faster and much more reliable. I am using a wayland window manager called sway, and while im pretty sure you can do everything with a mouse, you can configure it to do a lot of things with the keyboard. for example, I found the three-finger-tap which is used for copying and pasting was too difficult and slow, so i just bound it to mod+c and mod+v

I was gonna reply with this as well, but you just about nailed it. When my hands are almost 99% on the keyboard (especially when programming, or even while browsing the internet), why should I bother moving my hands back to the mouse when I can just use my comfortable and reliable keyboard?

Try fusuma (gem install fusuma, may need user adding to input group to run, or run it with sudo).

Gestures on trackpad for recent (libinput) Linux. It runs xdotool to stuff the keyboard buffer with keystrokes when it sees certain gestures. E.g. three finger swipe left and right do Alt-Left and Alt-Right, which have the effect of Back and Forward in the browser and some other browsing apps (e.g. IntelliJ). Four-finger swipe left and right switches desktop on my machine. It's one more finger than Mac but probably required not to conflict with two finger scroll.

Trackpad gestures are not the same as a keyboard shortcut. A shortcut runs one command as a discrete event, whereas a gesture is continuous e.g. what % zoom did your pinch gesture represent.

Eh. That's not what I understand by gestures. Mouse gestures - they're also a thing - generally use a sequence of orthogonal mouse movements for a single command. Most Mac gestures are discrete, not continuous. Pinch to zoom is in the minority, and is more like a multitouch input than a gesture per se. Phone gestures too are generally discrete; the exceptions are zooming and rotating, and rotating is sufficiently fiddly it isn't seen much outside map apps.

> Mac gestures are discrete, not continuous

Continuous: pinch zoom, rotate, swipe between pages, swipe between virtual desktops, swipe between fullscreen apps, show notification center, show all windows on current desktop ("Mission Control"), show all application windows ("App Exposé"), show Launchpad, show desktop

Discrete: browser back/forward I guess?

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