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Comment by mato | Hacker News Reader

I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude.

I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux.

Oh, and it has a proper selection of ports, including wired LAN.

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I, meanwhile, have a Dell Precision 5570 and on the latest LTS Ubuntu it suffers from intermittent trackpad lag; crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended; the fans sometimes running when suspended; poor audio quality from the built-in microphone; it intermittently becomes unresponsive to mouse and keyboard; and it exclusively has USB C ports.

I very much do not feel like a first class citizen running Linux :(

The latest LTS is 22.04, right? Maybe you'd have more luck with a newer non-LTS version; might have more driver improvements.

I have a Dell Latitude at work and a Dell XPS at home, both running Windows and both have always and constantly had issues with docking stations and also sleep. I have to hibernate them instead of sleeping to avoid random crashes, and I power up each laptop and log in before connecting to the docking station. Kinda dumb that I have to deal with this in 2022 on flagship laptops running the vendor's chosen OS.

> crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended;

That is a thing? To be honest not sonething I'd expect to work reliably under any OS, the low-level complexities involved are mind-boggling.

The rest do seem like legit complaints, that's a shame.

Given the docking station is basically a USB peripheral that supplies power? Being able to unplug and replug USB peripherals while asleep seems like a reasonable expectation to me.

No it's not. Assuming the OP means something vaguely modern, it'll be a Thunderbolt dock that shares PCIe devices to the host. Try and work out the complexity of a PCIe device disappearing while you're "asleep" in your head. Trust me, you don't want to go there.

Update touchpad firmware to get rid of the intermittent lag.

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