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Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

All their laptops are limited to 1920x1080 display resolution. Do you like sharp fonts when you're going to be reading and typing text all day? You can get a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu preinstalled and a 4K 3840x2160 display. Way higher DPI than a MacBook M1 "retina" display and noticeably sharper fonts. You can also get a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with a 4K display and Linux preinstalled.

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System76 has sold laptops with 4K displays before, though they're absent from their current lineup:

- https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/addw1/README.html

- https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/bonw14/README.html

> You can get a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu preinstalled and a 4K 3840x2160 display

I have the 4k XPS 15” from 3 years ago running Ubuntu, which I have been very happy with.

The biggest issue I have is poor support when using Linux for the 4k display. So many niggles and problems with the Retina display and I have tried a variety of different workarounds, and I still have quite a few unresolved issues. I personally wished I had bought the 1024p display. Currently I am fighting with trying to upscale Wine and there is no simple solution - meanwhile the fonts and everything for the application I am trying to run are so tiny as to be unusable (Aside: the Wine Display Configuration text size setting does not help).

Apart from that, the XPS has been a solid performer running Linux with no noticeable software issues. The firmware is still getting patches through Ubuntu which is impressive.

The one persistent niggle with the XPS range is that there is a “coil whine”, which sounds exactly like a tinny speaker tuned to the CPU usage. It isn’t loud but if a noticeable annoying noise drives you insane then be very careful before buying an XPS. I would hope they have fixed the problem, but it had been an ongoing problem with previous models for years, so caveat emptor.

My wife's XPS has that coil whine. She avoids using it because of it. It's pretty old, so we have to replace it. However, no more XPS in my house. I bought one for my son last year and the wifi card failed to initiate with the machine from the to time. The solution given by Dell was a BIOS reset. Luckily I bought from Costco and since Dell no offered a better solution before 90 days I returned the laptop.

Yea definitely an opportunity for improvement. 1920x1080 isn't a dealbreaker for me right now and I assume they'll improve it in future models.

Linux working out of the box is a must have for me, however. So far a few things here and there like configuring my mouse and "wake from sleep" while on an external monitor. Would prefer not to need to fiddle with these basics but so far I can deal with it.

1080p is perfectly sharp at 13” - and if you’re using the computer all day chances are you’ll just plug in a 4K external display anyway.

  1080p 13": 169 dpi
  4K 13": 338 dpi
  Laser printer: 600 dpi
  Photo printer: 1200 dpi

Laser printers use 600 dpi because most readers who appreciate typographic design and sharp fonts do not consider 169 dpi to be "perfectly sharp" even with all subpixel cleartype tricks enabled. Knuth's Computer Modern font that TeX/LaTeX use by default looks terrible below about 300dpi because its sharp serifs cannot be rendered correctly. I can't stand my 227 dpi MacBook Air M1 because the fonts on my Surface Pro (267 dpi) are so much sharper, especially because Big Sur eliminated subpixel cleartype tricks so fonts are now worse on Mac screens than they were when the 2012 Retina MBP came out. But a 338 dpi 4K display on a Dell XPS 13 is a noticeable improvement over the 267 dpi Surface Pro.

Coming from a retina display 1080p is a bit fuzzy. Definitely something I would need improved in future releases. But my biggest concern is whether Linux is ready for Mac users like me who expect things to "just work". If it just works, I can deal with 1080p. If it requires a mechanic, I don't care if it's an 8k display, I'm out.

My XPS, running at 4K in Ubuntu, lags. The machine was not strong enough to power it’s display. I run it at one step up from 1080p if I want it to run smoothly

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