Hacker News Reader

Comment by quarantine | Hacker News Reader

If you do decide to go with Linux:

- Dell XPS (mac-like comes with Linux)

- Lenovo Thinkpad (excellent Linux support, as it is used by a lot of Linux devs)

- Any of the Linux CTO laptop builders (Librem, Tuxedo, ...) will have excellent support, but will not look as good as the Dell

- Anything else: YMMV, check the reviews.

View on HN

THe support is good on the XPS. Everything works out of the box (apart from the standard linux trackpad multi touch issues.)

a word of caution, the 2019 13" has a stupid[1] keyboard layout. They cram the pageup/down keys above the left right keys. This caused huge amounts of issues for me, making it unusable. If this were to be fixed, it would be a very compelling machine.

[1]subjective

If you get an XPS with windows. It’s a pain to install linux because of some weird Intel thing needing to be disabled first. Caused me a lot of headache. Runs great once you get past that tho.

Lenovo on the other hand. Just works.

Personally I'm on my 3rd XPS running Linux, and the install has mostly been smooth sailing.

The BIOS is configured for RAID rather than AHCI/SATA by default. Bumped into that with mine. It was fairly easy to modify Windows to not use the RAID version so I could boot into Linux on one drive and boot into Windows on the other. Suspect I could get Centos to go the RAID route, but did not want to mess with it.

I had one of the first XPSs, and it was a 'mare for the first few months - I'm kinda surprised it's still that much of an issue to be honest.

I love my Lenovo T4xx. Linux was a breeze to install.

I just wish the Fn and Ctrl keys were swapped. Although you can change it in the bios.

I did this and it was smooth sailing. All I had to do was set the hard drives from RAID to ACHI in the BIOS.

I should have mentioned I was trying to dual boot too. And Windows doesn’t like the flat out change. You need to change the settings in windows before changing the bios. Something I didn’t need to do on my Lenovo.

My XPS with Linux (installed by dell, no customization except for user space packages) will freeze/stall about twice a day and needs to be rebooted with the power button, losing all unsaved work.

Dell does not offer any support for this computer's software so there's not really a remedy except keeping drivers up to date and hoping it gets fixed someday.

Would not recommend it for anything but personal work right now.

Or stump up for the Precision 5540 if you have the cash. That running arch and i3 and you are cooking with gas!

I recently got a 'Build Your Own' Precision 7750. After-market RAM and SSDs were far cheaper than Dell's offering.

I'm a bit gutted though, no Ryzen CPUs were offered and considering how much I spent I won't be buying another laptop for at least 10 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com