Six months of crashes in Ubuntu – Alan Pope's blog | Hacker News Reader

Six months of crashes in Ubuntu – Alan Pope's blog

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20 pointsrbanffy24 comments

I have the same Z13 laptop with the fancy OLED but (until recently) with the Fedora preload instead of Ubuntu. It had a lot of bugs---to the point where I think it could have had a defect (especially after half of the keyboard stopped accepting keypresses even in BIOS and even after full power down and restart; the solution was to plug in the USB charger. Epic WTF). More likely, Lenovo/Mark Pearson were put in a bad place of, "we're releasing for Windows whether you're ready or not!" I suspect the latter because the support forum would often have "we're waiting on the BIOS team", "Intel doesn't have a driver for that webcam", "the haptic thing will get a utility soon", "the temperature issue is known", "the higher resolution timer is unstable", and so on.

The XPS 9370, for me, had ZERO problems. To the point where I wondered often why there aren't more Linux users. It felt like all of my previous Linux pain (especially a life chapter of running Linux on a Chromebook) had gone away.

I looked into a recent XPS but for a variety of reasons (keyboard layout availability in Europe, Michael Dell's political beliefs, wanting to switch away from Ubuntu's snaps and UX, reports of hardware issues on Reddit) I decided to try out "the other" major laptop brand with Linux offerings. Maybe I just got lucky with the last laptop?

Forcing a BIOS reset and installing Windows made enough problems go away that I now just run Fedora Remix as a WSL distribution. Annoyingly, the thing gets hotter than the XPS and hurts my eyes at night. The Z13 with Linux looked so good on paper, now it's more of a paperweight than anything unless I'm traveling.

Also... I wonder to this day if I'm the only Z13 owner who has two separate onboard mic sensitivities (one stereo channel is much more sensitive to nearby sound than the other and has an unusually high DC offset, which simply shouldn't exist on ANY microphone) plus the microphone on my left shows up in Audacity as the right channel (and, of course, vice versa).

Interesting experience!

I mostly use the Z13 as a desktop replacement. It's on my desk always plugged into a USB C dock, with 2 or 3 displays attached. I use an external keyboard and mouse. So I haven't seen the problems you have with the keyboard.

Maybe I got lucky with my Z13, or I just have a different use pattern which doesn't trigger the same issues.

The Dell XPS laptop series (and older Latitudes) seem to be a solid hardware platform for running various Linux distros. I'm running Mint and Arch on some XPSes and Latitudes and they have been very stable. I think part of the reason Linux works so well with Dell machines OOTB was because they used to sell a line of dev-oriented computers to the public, and one of their options was to have Ubuntu pre-installed.

Running Mint on an old MSFT Surface Pro 4 has also worked out very well for me. I was pleasantly surprised when the touchscreen just worked after installation.

If I was looking for a new Intel-based laptop today, I would probably be looking at Framework or System 76. That said, I'm hoping to see more high-performance ARM platforms hit the market in the next 2-3 years, so I'm holding off for now.

Very much so. Re: Dell being good for linux.

Not a laptop, but I have an Optiplex 9020 All in one from 2011 or so. It's so good. Has all the ports you need, a good webcam, speakers, display, for home usage. It works flawlessly with basically every linux distro and bsd out there. Even the CD drive, memory card slot work great.

I switched out the HDD for an SSD, and installed 8gb extra ram in the empty dimm slot, for a total of 12gb.

My main strategy is avoiding any Clevo derivatives next time around, which unfortunately applies to many of the European manufacturers. I had one before; it had constant hardware issues. I thought it was just Linux being Linux until it was too late to submit warranty tickets.

> The XPS 9370, for me, had ZERO problems.

I ALWAYS recommend to optimise for boring. Get the boring Dell, the XPS, the Latitude, the Vostro. Get it with the Intel graphics. Get the config an old bank or insurance company would order.

I heard Nvidia has improved a lot, but I’ll let others test it to stability.

My old-ish Dell with Ubuntu and my Acer with Fedora are boring, but never fail to work. And never crash.

> I use Microsoft Edge as my primary browser. Sure, other browsers are available, but this is the one I use.

Yes, but why? If it is the app that crashes the most, maybe switch to a browser that is better supported for your os. I will not get into, why one uses Microsoft Edge on Linux lol.

I was moments away from RMA'ing the Z13 and wanted evidence of the many hardware and software shortcomings. Thus, I have a video recording of Firefox repeatably (and repeatedly) hanging and glitching (e.g. in the video, becoming totally unresponsive unless you switch to another graphical VT and log on; other times, needing to open a new firefox instance to continue working in the current instance) and another video of the Firefox context menu constantly flickering in Fedora.

Firefox still---after years in the bug tracker---does not attempt to offer HDR support on Linux or Windows. Edge's HDR implementation might be buggy but it exists. (The Z13 OLED has an HDR calibration available.)

Chromium seemed to always have codec issues when I was using it. (not a hypochondriac, there are countless threads online with the same complaint)

So... It's either Firefox (poorly supported on this platform), something Chrome-based, or something simply poorly supported like the GNOME browser. (Aside, "Web" is possible THE worst name for an application.)

Good question. I have previously used Firefox, Chrome and Chromium. I make heavy use of multiple profiles in the browser. Firefox has never been very good at managing and profiles in the browser. With all the Chrom{e|ium} based browsers, it's a click away.

Firefox also doesn't do webapps (at all?). I like to have a bunch of web "Apps" which I put on my launcher for easy access. I like being able to alt-tab between websites, rather than switch to a browser than have to switch tabs.

I've had multiple occasions where Chrome and Chromium have completely eaten my profile losing all pinned tabs, cookies, extensions and any session information.

With Firefox it's broken in weird ways for me. Most recently it would just load white blank pages for every tab I had open.

I've also had poor performance from Firefox and Chrome, in terms of eating RAM and CPU inexplicably, constantly.

Having tried Firefox and Chrome extensively, and had bad experiences, I thought I'd give Edge a try.

Edge has the same easy profile management of Chrome. It has never died and eaten the session, nor decided to render all my tabs in white.

Edge also has vertical tabs built in, which I use. It also has an effective tab sleep tool which means idle tabs aren't eating resources.

> I like being able to alt-tab between websites, rather than switch to a browser than have to switch tabs.

You can open them in separate windows then alt-tab to them.

Still not as pleasant has having a little icon for each webapp showing up my alt-tab list, and an icon in my launcher I can click on.

Me using Edge on Linux, browser profile syncs faster and better. Effiency mode and tab suspense. But I'm actually using both Chrome and Edge simultaneously.

To be honest I'm already switching back to for Firefox.

I've been using Dell laptops exclusively for many years, but the last purchase was Lenovo Thinkbook 16inch with decent Ryzen. I just liked the specs. The machine works pretty well (Windows) but has some issues I never had with Dell, for example suspend/resume doesn't work reliably, laptop is often unresponsive for some time after wake up, sometimes it doesn't detect a second monitor and I need to unplug it and connect again. And maybe one or two more quirks. So Im not sure what to choose for next laptop. Would be great if Dell offered professional line of laptops with recent AMD processors, but for some reason they don't

The downside to running Linux on Dell laptops is that the speakers are not fully functional and will only output a narrow band of frequencies. Compare the same laptop running windows and the difference in sound quality is night and day. Otherwise the laptops work quite well. I’m currently running Fedora on an XPS 9520 with no issues other than subpar sound quality.

Linux distros and open source as a whole could benefit from contributions from two types of wizards: - QA - UX

Also edge on linux should be illegal. Right there with zoom.

QA needs to be paid. Largely nobody is doing QA as a passion. As for UX, if these are the same wizards working around Windows/mobile/web, then please keep them away by all means necessary.

QA needs to be paid as does programming. I imagine some people have a passion for it and could build automated qa tools around open source products. Say a gui tool that automates clicks on kde or gnome widgets. That would be quite a challenge in itself.

As for ux, open source is not a job. Ux folks are told my product managers to enshitify things on daily basis.

I imagine open source can provide a safe haven form all that and let people run wild beautiful ux and uis. Imagine someone working on the ux of a linux distro aimed at making onboarding of casual users easier.

Imagine a group of people putting together a nice set of guidelines for ui and ux similar to how apple has guidelines.

I think these are two areas where linux (distros) have gaps.

The simple part is UX people working with UX stuff, such as GTK or QT themes. The hard to impossible part is getting a typical open source UNIX desktop to look and behave as cohesive as Windows or Mac. It's a technology issue and not an asset issue.

As for beautiful UIs QT has made a step forward with the Qt Quick and Qt Designer which allow a more UX workflow for the UI as opposed to old school dialog/form design.

TIL: Microsoft make a web browser for linux!

We're a long way from the Halloween paper days.

PowerShell is (allegedly) cross-platform too, would you believe it?

I see PowerShell as a tool for Microsoft not to cede space to Unix tools as it would end up doing if PS scripts were ported to less Windows-friendly tools. There are very few PowerShell users that don’t run mostly Windows.

Alan Pope says that he sees fewer Zoom crashes these days because he's doing more work in Slack. Weirdly, most of the crashes I see are in Slack.

I guess you should do more work in Zoom then.

I've used slack on ubuntu for years, it occasionally eats CPU, but I've never seen it crash.

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