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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

No.

I have a 5550 which is I assume what the author is referring to. It’s garbage. Overheats constantly, the touchpad is dire, the screen has bad vignette around the edges, it’s noisy, the thing hard freezes when you plug it into a dock, the webcam only works 50% of the time you power it up and if you pick it up by the base it flexes so badly the touchpad clicks. The keyboard is also soggy as hell and the battery lasts 3 hours if you’re really lucky.

It’s the worst laptop I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. I am just glad I didn’t pay for the thing.

But a Thinkpad or a MacBook and just give this a hard pass.

I’m using a 14” MacBook Pro which was much cheaper and it’s a far more productive machine without all of the above problems!

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I was going to write exactly this.

I don’t know about Linux support since I have to use Windows on it but oh boy it is crap. The fans are always on whatever you do, the left part of the keyboard is frequently burning hot. Touchpad is mostly really good … when it works, because as soon as I wash my hands, it stops detecting anything. The audio part, at least on Windows, is pure random. USB docks randomly works and once a USB-C device is plugged in you are good for overheating near the connector.

For me it’s total garbage and I’m just waiting for it to die and my employer to change it for something better.

Our newest Dell laptops looks good but I’m never trusting this company again.

I've been running Linux on a 5550 for about six months now, and the hardware is rock solid.

Everything works fine. I've experienced no overheating, network is stable, all the USB bits work, it docks and undocks without issue, the web cam works, audio works, it sleeps, hibernates and wakes up fine. Fans aren't very loud and I've only ever heard them spin up when compiling (I would say the full speed fans on the 5550 are about as loud as full speed fans on a 2016 Macbook Pro). The large touchpad works well enough. The 4k screen is OK, and matte, which I consider a bonus. The keyboard is average, certainly not the worst laptop keyboard I've ever used, but far from the best.

However, I wouldn't buy one for myself. Simply because of how flexible it is. It is nearly unusable when sat on anything but a hard flat surface. It's like the designers never even tested it as a LAPtop. Tiny, imperceptible flexes, or even just more pressure on one side than the other and the touchpad generates clicks.

Also, a USB-A port would have been way more useful than an SD-card slot.

This has been my experience with this hardware too. Agree 100% about the USB-A port, but Ethernet would have been nice too!

I use it as a portable workstation, so it is always on a desk with a keyboard and mouse. Definitely not suitable for lap use, but that's no problem for me.

Way nicer than the XPS13, that's for sure!

> I was going to write exactly this.

Same. I made the mistake of getting a Dell 2-in-1 without trying it first.

Whether on Windows or on Linux, it's a pain to use.

I found serious ACPI bugs (not just the kind that can be easily fixed with iasl) which made me conclude power management could not work reliably, whether on Windows or on Linux.

It's was usable at all on Windows 10 only thanks to Microsoft extremely careful approach: waking from suspend every now and then, checking the % of battery consumed, giving up on suspend and powering off should the hardware be caught lying about the power envelope while having been "sleeping".

No wonder why Dells risk catching fire if put in a backpack...

> No wonder why Dells risk catching fire if put in a backpack...

omg I also had this and forgot to add it to my rant ! One night I was going down to the kitchen to drink a glass of water and I heard a loud fan noise coming from somewhere. Sure enough it came from my backpack. I opened it and it was extremely hot inside. I wonder what could have happened if I had a good sleep that night.

> If you pick it up by the base it flexes so badly the touchpad clicks.

The XPS15 does the same. What's your USB vendor id / device id? I am working on a libinput patch that mitigates that [0].

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/merge_req...

Same. I bought an XPS 15 last year and the thing didn't work that well with _windows_, let alone linux. All the same thigns, the touchpad clicked (I even had them come try to repair), it got so hot I couldn't put it in my lap, and even with light usage, battery life was well less than 4h. Just garbage. It's too bad, the screen is lovely and I actually liked the keyboard, but I saw that I had a made a mistake and sold it while I could. Never again.

In comparison, I have a 2018 era XPS 13 9370 and it runs Linux pretty well. I think Dell is trying hard to come up with nice hardware but they don't have the chops to make it all come together including heat management, assembly, power usage, etc.

I'm sticking with my XPS 13 and interested to see what a MS Surface Laptop 5 looks like when they come out later this year.

I think Dell

Dell universal docking is hot garbage, and they don’t really support it unless to pay for a higher tier.

I understand why people would rather not use Apple, but to me going through the drama of dealing with Linux laptops and shitty OEMs, I’d rather go with a pleasant MacOS experience and use separate Linux VMs if needed for builds.

Indeed. At $currentJob with 1k employees we use Dell laptops (currently Latitude 74xx series, Precision 75xx and 55xx). The 55 series has been the most problematic by far. The earlier generations broke down so frequently that we had to have ~50% of mainboards replaced, being completely bricked or with having the CPU frequency locked to 800Mhz being the most common causes. This has improved, now we "only" have overheating and ballooned batteries as frequent problems. Other than that they have the downside of having few ports and no 4G/5G modem. Despite we (IT) warning our employees, many still pick the model because it looks sleeker and is lighter than the 75 series (which has been excellent).

> No.

Completely OT. Is the rhetoric of authority on the internet being fined tuned for superficial social media interaction? Vaguely reminds me by analogy the thumbnail engineering on youtube.

I rather prefer comments that telegraph agree or disagree. You can tell me all about how long you've had your laptop and what you do with it later, but start with the point.

For what it's worth, I bought a Precision 7200 Developer Edition and it's been great. I came from using Mac's for 10 years before the switch.

I can't speak for the 5500 and I haven't used it with a dock at all, but then I've never used docks in general. At this point I think a USB-C plugged into a monitor with several ports would be close enough.

A lot of it just has to do with you making a choice that you're happy with. I loved using Macs for a decade and I know plenty of people who HATE them because they have to use them at work and they simply didn't have a choice. Because they didn't have a choice, they focus on the things they don't like.

When I picked my Dell I looked a lot of options and eventually came down to Dell or System76. Ended up going with Dell mostly because of past good experiences with their support and that made me more comfortable. It took a little getting used to and there were things I had to figure out along the way but it was my choice so I saw it through.

My next laptop will probably be a System76 or a Framework, but this beast from Dell is doing great right now. It's a portable desktop for me.

I don't understand why Apple is the only company anywhere near their quality of laptop. I don't even care if it's MacBook expensive, I just want a laptop near as physically good as a MacBook, but with Linux and Windows support. Thinkpad doesn't really come close. Why is there no competition here?

I think everyone capable of pulling this off works at Apple.

I have a Precision 7510 running Linux and don't have any of these issues so I wonder how different those two series actually are.

We used to buy Precision 5500 series laptops (latest model: 5560), but they have issues with thermal management. Over time, the battery expands due to temperature to the point of moving the trackpad up. Now we are giving Dell a new chance using the 7500 series (now 7760).

The 5560 is between 7.7mm (0.30") (front) and 11.64mm (0.56") (rear) thick. The thickness of the 7560 is between 25 mm (0.98") and 27.36 mm (1.08"). The increased thickness should solve (or help solve) the overheating.

Hmmm, I have a 5540 currently and don't have the problems you had (and I actually replaced the factory Ubuntu with PopOS after a year or two).

Although battery life is not great, but I am not sure that is as much a hardware issue as it is a software one. Although I am waiting on baited breath for AMD based hardware.

I have 5560 and I don't have such issues also.

I don't like the touchpad because it is too big and lacks separate physical buttons.

And I don't like that TB ports don't work with WD19TB docking station (from Dell!).

The wifi range is poor and it is heavy when comparing to ThinkPad.

But besides those issue. I like it.

If you're OK with MacOS, you don't need Linux laptop. Linux laptop users (like me) have reasons to go into this constrained space :-(

That's said, I roughly agree with you. I have 5530. It's throttled quickly. The battery goes out in a few hours, and yeah, the fan noise.

I'm thinking about giving up Linux and switching to Windows/WSL. It's a bit too much to live with Linux over this mediocre laptop. I guess Dell laptops will work fine with Windows.

I tried that and after few months I'm going back to Linux or I'm bying mac. I'm using Win 11 with WSL. Sometimes WSL can't start and I need to restart. Sometimes it start taking too much of procesor and memmory and I need to restart... One day it will be probably alright but not yet unfortunatly.

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