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Comment by algismo | Hacker News Reader

I own XPS 13 9380 with Windows 10. Same mess with the sleep. I have to carry the laptop in the bag when commuting. You never know what it is doing when lid is closed. There is no lights on the laptop to indicate its state so I just usually put it to my ear and listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid. Then it is semi safe to put it into the bag. Feels like stone age.

Things are just getting worse with Windows and those standard PCs. I never understood why they moved to that S1 idle when S3 was fulfilling basic needs. This family Intel+Windows starts to irritate me. I am seriously considering either fully moving to Linux or to Apple Silicon and Mac OS.

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Writing this from my 2019 XPS 15 7590 i9 with (extended) 64 GB RAM. The OLED display quality is still the best any laptop can offer, but that's where it ends. Had countless issues with sleep, reboots after being "killed in sleep" for going over Windows sleep "battery drain limit" (can be increased in registry but hey), wifi/bt issues after wake-up, short battery endurance, fan noise (mitigated by undervolting w/ ThrottleStop). (In case I may sound too dramatic, check their forums: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/bd-p/XPS)

Then there's the classic Windows Laptop "goodness" like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface), necessity to emulate Linux/Git/Wsl/Cygwin for any real dev work, having elaborate install.txt procedures for setting up a new laptop.

I wanted to have a "beefy" machine but since I can now do my play things on Google Colab (and my work on company's Macbook), I just ordered the last year's M1 Macbook Air and I'm done with this Dante's Inferno of Windows Laptop ecosystem. Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

I'll chime in as well from my 2020 XPS 17. This issue is incredibly frustrating. It's worth switching over, however I don't really know where to go for a premium laptop. I'm not very interested in a Mac. HP and Lenovo have given me tons of problems in the past (which is why I switched to Dell). From this thread it seems like several other vendors have similar problems to this Dell one. What options are there?

I'll be frank, the MacBooks are overpriced, and do have some of their own issues, but they're actually still the best choice.

At the very least based on my own experience you should avoid HP Elitebooks, and Microsoft Surfaces, also Asus Zenbooks, and Dell Inspirons.

...As you can tell from that list I've tried very hard to avoid paying the premium for a MacBook before giving in. They're still not perfect, but they're good enough that I am never going back to a Windows laptop.

"Overpriced" and "the best choice" can not be used in a single line. Looks like this premium goes not for nothing.

I really like the Lenovo X1s with Linux, no issues, great luck with hardware so far (on my second one). I also have a MacBook Pro, and I gotta say I like the Lenovo with fedora better.

Same, use a macbook and carbon X1.

Only thing the Macbook does noticeably better is speaker quality which isn't surprising given the size difference.

How about sleep, trackpad support/configurability, battery endurance, 4k display support, external monitor support? I've seen complaints about all of these wrt Linux on X1.

Macbook now has the M1 going for it.

I run WSL2 on my X1, everything works perfectly.

apt-get is much nicer than brew and all its stupid cask/taps stuff that takes forever for packages to install.

With wslutils installed I have "open" and "pbcopy" equivalents configured which were the only 2 things missing from osx that I use a lot.

Have you considered Framework? They're laptops are almost completely modular. The problem with laptops is that they don't have a dedicated GPU yet. But they're otherwise interesting.

These days the Microsoft laptops (v4) are surprisingly fantastic machines. Great screen, battery life, trackpad, etc. I've owned so many laptops, but MS seems to have surpassed even Dell is net build quality imho.

I've been buying Dell Vostro laptops and they certainly feel premium and have decent battery life. This years model removed the SATA port where you could expand storage with a cheap HDD, but it does have an extra M.2 drive and expandable memory.

> like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface)

Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).

Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.

Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).

My son has the same model. The keyboard is not that bad, I even like it. But issues with the sleep mode and with the trackpad - they overweight everything and I’ve bought an M1 Air for him.

My 7590's keyboard is the polar opposite of the new Macbook butterfly keyboard which is considered too slim/tight/short-key-travel -- the Dell's keyboard is harder to press, they keys wiggle (this is exacerbated on the big keys like the Spacebar) -- a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard. (And even much more so after getting used to the Macbook's short travel keyboard (2018 mbp pro)).

Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)

> a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard

Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.

> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.

Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.

Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.

> Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

You may be right; I can't believe it's been 13 years since Microsoft's last go at writing the kernel for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)). So sad they gave up :(

I absolutely agree that microsoft could and should make this work better. But the pragmatic workaround is the setting to force hibernation when you close the lid. You can resume from SSD in 10 seconds. No middle of the night wakeups. Much improved battery life.

TFA says that hibernation is problematic for putting your computer into your bag. I understand what you mean by hibernation, and while it should not cause a problem... that's what the link says

When windows is hibernated, if a scheduled task is set for a specific time, it will use the hardware wake-up feature to turn on the machine and run the scheduled task.

Windows has a lot of 3am scheduled tasks for all kinds of random stuff (disk defrag, various update checks, etc). Any of those can cause the system to reawaken.

My dell xps hibernation doesn't work.

20% of the time it works.

40% of the time it won't wake and I have to kill it (screen stays dark even though keyboard indicates it is awake)

30% of the time it just immediately wakes

10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

In my case it also messes with many internal devices like webcam, USB etc.

Half the time i have to reboot to make those work again.

I'll back you up on this. I tried the trick to switch to hibernate, but it actually got worse for me than my problems with sleep.

>> 10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

My thinkpad does the same. Wtf is up with that?

My Mac did that too but I tracked it to Wake on LAN, some random probes from other equipment were walking it up sometimes.

What kind of evil IoT crapware is sending WoL packets to random devices on the network?

It wasn't actual WoL. It was broadcasts. For some reason it woke the Mac up when WoL was switched on. We're taking 2015 or so so I don't have the packet logs anymore but I was able to replicate it by resending them.

So the fault is really the Mac's. It should only accept real well formed WoL packets with its own Mac address.

OK, from the comments I read so far I realize that I may have been lucky with an older laptop. And I did not mention that I also turned off wake timers, realized that now. If this does not work on modern hardware that’s a real bummer.

I had to do this with my ASUS Zephyrus G14 because it's an AMD-based machine and doesn't support a true Standby mode anyway. It's not the greatest coming from the Mac ecosystem where Sleep basically just works (well, most of the time, High Sierra screwed up a lot of things around that).

To my knowledge, it hasn't woken up without my input and Hibernate doesn't eat the battery alive while it's asleep.

The funny thing is that the "modern standby" was supposed to improve the wakeup time from a couple of seconds to a faction of a second. But effectively it turned the wakeup into 10 seconds because you have to disable the modern standby and use hibernate instead.

The whole idea of modern standby is brain dead.

My laptop isn't a cellphone, I don't need it periodically waking up to check emails or whatever, it can do it when I open the lid.

Thankfully my laptop has an option to force S3 only in the bios.

The problem with this is, you can force the laptop to use other sleep modes, but either a) dell disables those modes entirely in the BIOS b) windows update resets the sleep mode

That won't always save you, there have definitely been bugs where it tries to hibernate but gets stuck

Recently bought a 7390 latitude (2-3 years old). amazing machine for basic remote desktop and basic office work etc. Battery lasts 10+ hrs on light work.

Had the sleep states turned on and would randomly die at 60% battery while sleeping. Found out its a long standing bug in dells. Sometimes it just restarts the machine so if its in a bag it will just keep running.

Turned of sleep states in firmware and instead now it goes to hibernate on sleep. No random behavior or shutdown.

Its mind boggling this shit used to work totally fine on older laptops, no idea what changed.

The laptops can enter a special standby mode that keeps the network alive, so they will immediately resume when the lid opens. This means, of course, that the laptops never actually shut down and run constantly.

true, but i actually turn that explicitly off on physical network settings in windows.

My guess is windows will apparently not let u control such things, as the advertising data pipe has to be alive no matter what. Microsft seems to be both google and apple at the same time, selling ads and hardware.

I'm really sorry that didn't work for you.

Had the same with Apple. An update made it quit sleeping correctly when using a microsd card to expand storage (it worked fine at first).

Me too.

The Yubikey nano -- the little one meant to be permanently left in a usb slot your laptop -- absolutely nukes the battery in my mac, draining it on "sleep" to zero within a day or so. Infuriating incompetence.

Huh. What version Mac/OSX are you using? I've had a Yubikey Nano plugged into various iterations of a MacBook Pro for years and haven't noticed this. The worst battery killer for me is Firefox.

10.14, late 2019 16 inch mbp

I thought I was being crazy and that maybe something was brushing it, so I let it sit in a moat on my desk immediately after booting. Full battery discharge in sleep in under 30 hours.

Without the yubikey, a full weekend sitting on my desk from a full charge leaves a reported 100% of battery.

That’s not quite possible. I wish 10.14 supported the 2019 rMBP 16 but alas..

How did you get macOS 10.14 running on that MacBook Pro?

Same with Linux honestly. I suspended a Linux laptop, shoved it in the bag, got on the train, little did I know that it didn't actually go into suspend.

Like WTF, if the lid is closed, the hardware should force it to suspend, not get stuck in some software. If the software doesn't respond in time then force the damn thing off.

It heated up like mad, even too hot to touch. Was worried about the possibility of a Lithium battery explosion. If that happened who do you sue, Canonical or the laptop manufacturer?

FYI, these computers may lack proper firmware support to deep sleep on Linux as well, and will use s2idle sleep.

I believe ARM Macs use the same type of sleep, only with more polished firmware and better vertical integration with the OS.

Can confirm, 9310 (Late 2020, non-2-in-1), only has s2idle. Still "Ubuntu Certified" which, after this laptop, I've learn doesn't mean much.

I got a new laptop earlier this year and I was eyeing this exact one. I was going to wipe out windows and put linux on it(as is tradition with me) but I ended up settling for an Asus once again. It seems like you can get a lot more bang for the buck with Asus in Europe. Can't say it has been an entirely smooth ride for one or two reasons(running a patched kernel driver for the screen backlight) but after reading your comment, I am glad I made that call.

> listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid

I knew I wasn't the only one who does it!

I had a dell laptop around 2012 that had this same problem, on Windows 7. I also remember holding it up to my ear to confirm it shut down haha. And it did wake itself up and overheat in my bag a couple times. I've just avoided Dell ever since when I can. My current work laptop is some sort of Dell XPS, but at least I didn't pay for it.

Im currently in the process of getting a framework laptop setup using arch+wayland+sway and I'm not convinced it's any better on this side. Something as simple as a screensaver requires xwayland which is frustrating.

FWIW my (Intel) MacBook does the same. Sometimes it just doesn't go to sleep when I close the lid and it's not clear why, so I have to listen for the fans. So dumb.

My sample size is 1, but so far I am not impressed that my wife's M1 MBP didn't last more than 4 months before needing a full mainboard replacement. She's not a power-user and I would expect a "pro" laptop to be more resilient than this (even in the exceptional cases).

I can recommend the M1 air which has surprised me the other direction in hardly using any battery while sleeping. The prior Intel macbook used a lot more.

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