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Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

I really do not understand the love the XPS 13 gets. We have several here at the office. We will never get them again. They break, the keyboard is not pleasant, the machine is not really fast, two handed openings are painful when you come from a different brand, charging it takes forever, we just leave them plugged in, switching wireless to wired in linux (several distros) takes too long, did I mention the keyboard makes me want to vomit?... I think my office neighbors has broken at least 7 times. I stopped using mine as I liked my ancient MBP better, and I really do not like apple that much.

Although I do not have an alternative that I have used, I know colleagues who love their new (last three or four years old) Lenovos, like the X series.

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I have 2 in the XPS line - a relatively old 15 inch and a new(ish) 13 inch.

They're perfectly fine machines.

Dell officially supports linux on them (admittedly, only Ubuntu), you can get 32gb of RAM, and they perform just as well as any other intel based laptop (which is to say - I wish they sucked less power, but they're fine on the performance scale).

I'm... not a clean person with my machines, and I've never noticed any issues with the keyboards.

I have zero issues swapping wireless to wired (Arch linux) - it's basically instant for me, but I don't actually know how you're testing that, since none of the newer 13 models include an ethernet port (I use an adapter). Have you considered that you have a bad usb-ethernet adapter? Every one I've used is fine. Alternatively - are you sure you're not thinking of the Latitude line? Those are very different machines, which I also avoid.

Basically - I'd take an XPS every time over anything Lenovo puts out. I don't even really care about the hardware, I just think Lenovo can't be trusted a god damn inch. Chinese company selling computers with rootkits/MITM pre-installed. It was a sad day when IBM sold their personal computing line to them. I know a lot of folks still like the Thinkpads - but it's not worth it, IMO.

I've had an eye on the Huawei Matebook X Pro on Swappa. My other eye is on the XPS, new from Amazon. The latter is certainly more expensive and yet, doesn't impress me as much as the Matebook. But as we all know, Huawei is not trusted much here lately in the U.S. Is this in fact another Chinese company that's best we avoid? I was considering starting an Ask HN just for Huawei given not much has been posted here on this topic for a couple of years now.

with all due respect - lol

there isn't a fire capable of burning hot enough, to throw every huawei device into

just google the company man, it's a track record that's genuinely hard to believe

20190409 backdoored laptops - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47800000

20190430 backdoored routers - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/30/alleged-h...

20210813 alleged widespread IP theft from a pakistani tech firm, repackaged with backdoors, and sold back to the pakistani gov - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/30/alleged-h...

Yes I remember the router situation where they accidentally left telnet listening on the WAN.

I worked at Vodafone and all the routers get a security review, so it is highly doubtful that they left it in on purpose because they would have known that it would have been found. It was test engineering firmware that got left on some routers, and makes spurious claims even though in the article it points out that Vodafone didn't believe it was a backdoor.

And your first link talks about how someone appears to have added an additional chip to the design, which is unlikely to have come from Huawei. Sounds suspiciously similar to this

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Do you want a list of everything that Cisco (replace with your preferred networking manufacturer) messed up and claim that it's all malicious?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...

Tampering with these things is allegedly pretty simple.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/plant...

Besides the Wireguard incident, where has Netgate been a joke like the two being discussed here?

Why "besides"?

I would say that the Wireguard issue is worse than the speculation that pre-production firmware on unreleased routers was backdooring as they actually shipped it.

Of the three links about Huawei, one is someone in India claiming IP theft, one where they made up a claim of backdooring which the original security researchers rejected that claim, and one where it appears that hardware may have been tampered at the manufacturing stage by Americans.

Not exactly smoking gun, Huawei are evil and want to steal your data. I don't trust them, but then I don't trust a lot of the networking providers to not be compromised by a state actor.

Otherwise, they are probably the best of the bunch, purely because of the stack being mostly BSD.

they (or their previous entity) also routinely stole/steal intellectual property from us firms

at one point they were just straight ripping off cisco asrs, lucent gear, etc and presenting it as their own

I mean the level of complaint being "Opening the lid is kinda hard" shows it must be a pretty good laptop. It's like complaining that the waiter asked one time too many if everything was satisfactory at a high-end restaurant.

Idk, I'm on my 3rd XPS and I've had none of these problems. Even the keyboard I consider to be above average. I will agree that opening the lid can bit a bit difficult/awkward, but it's hardly a problem.

Gotta agree. Also on #3 and all have been absolutely stellar, even after popping the lid on all of them to do some upgrades.

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