3 ms·

I got tired of it and looked up the best Linux laptop available, which seemed to be the Dell XPS 13 developer edition, with a handful of contenders. The trackp

by mbrock 11y ago

I got tired of it and looked up the best Linux laptop available, which seemed to be the Dell XPS 13 developer edition, with a handful of contenders. The trackpad is laughably horrible. I wonder if anyone at Dell ever tried using it. Or maybe my fingers are weird or whatever, but I just cannot for the life of me make the goddamn cursor go where I want. I feel like I'm arthritic. And I haven't managed to get suspend to work properly. Amazingly, the side effects of the brokenness is that some random subset of font characters become garbled or replaced with other characters. I truly have no idea how that happens but I'm very curious! Maybe there is some obscure kernel patch somewhere, but whatever, I just shutdown and reboot... I also haven't found the right Xorg settings to make smooth scrolling look actually smooth, which is psychically distressing. The sound quality is kind of crappy, since the whole chassis resonates, like the equalization isn't set properly and/or again nobody tried using the damn thing. I still appreciate the laptop. Aside from these inevitable quirks, I love having a fast Linux machine with me. But every time I get out my MacBook, I feel relieved. I don't buy into any magical notion of Apple, but I'm pretty grateful that the basic components of their hardware feel like someone tried them for at least a whole day and incremented until it was usable enough. There are complex reasons for all of this and so on... but I really just wish some person with a bunch of capital would just make a simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel. I'd pay a month's paycheck for that.

glogla 11y ago
Which edition of XPS 13 was that? The silver one or the thin bezel one? I was told that the new one is pretty good, but it doesn't sound like that. That's sad, because if Apple replaces rMBP with some new MacBook-like nonsense, there won't be any reasonable laptop at all.
- mbrock 11y ago
  It's black and the bezel is maybe 0.8cm or something... retina display (which had its own problems, but with some DPI configuration works well, especially after a recent Chromium update). For full disclosure I'm not using the stock Ubuntu -- which I as a Linux nerd found to be really pumped full of bullshit that I don't want ever. It's possible that their special distro has magic patches that they haven't managed to get into the mainline Linux kernel, but that doesn't impress me much since they advertise it as a "Linux developer machine," not as a "Dell Custom Ubuntu machine." It also requires a proprietary WiFi driver, although I'm told some configurations have an Intel chip that works out of the box with Linux. I strongly believe that a developer machine advertised to work with Linux should not require any proprietary extensions. Probably Dell doesn't care about this very much though. But they should, since I'm now tarnishing the reputation of their flagship dev product in a forum full of semi-influential hackers... That all said, I use the thing everyday and, whatever, I'm used to stuff being broken, and I can get used to most things. That trackpad though... so infuriating. On the plus side I'm using more keyboard navigation than ever. (And noticing how terribly the web works if your mouse sucks.)
massysett 11y ago
"simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel." Pick up an old Thinkpad, like an X220 or X230. The key is "old". For something old, even the conservative distros like Debian will have a kernel and Xorg that support your hardware. Thinkpads are built well. For years I used old Thinkpads. The hardware and kernels worked fine. But the desktop environments became a disaster area with KDE 4 and GNOME 3. I hand-rolled setups with FVWM and then i3, but after getting tired of futzing with that and the lack of decent compositing window managers I switched to the Mac and haven't looked back.

by mbrock 11y ago

glogla 11y ago

Which edition of XPS 13 was that? The silver one or the thin bezel one? I was told that the new one is pretty good, but it doesn't sound like that. That's sad, because if Apple replaces rMBP with some new MacBook-like nonsense, there won't be any reasonable laptop at all.

mbrock 11y ago
It's black and the bezel is maybe 0.8cm or something... retina display (which had its own problems, but with some DPI configuration works well, especially after a recent Chromium update). For full disclosure I'm not using the stock Ubuntu -- which I as a Linux nerd found to be really pumped full of bullshit that I don't want ever. It's possible that their special distro has magic patches that they haven't managed to get into the mainline Linux kernel, but that doesn't impress me much since they advertise it as a "Linux developer machine," not as a "Dell Custom Ubuntu machine." It also requires a proprietary WiFi driver, although I'm told some configurations have an Intel chip that works out of the box with Linux. I strongly believe that a developer machine advertised to work with Linux should not require any proprietary extensions. Probably Dell doesn't care about this very much though. But they should, since I'm now tarnishing the reputation of their flagship dev product in a forum full of semi-influential hackers... That all said, I use the thing everyday and, whatever, I'm used to stuff being broken, and I can get used to most things. That trackpad though... so infuriating. On the plus side I'm using more keyboard navigation than ever. (And noticing how terribly the web works if your mouse sucks.)

massysett 11y ago

"simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel." Pick up an old Thinkpad, like an X220 or X230. The key is "old". For something old, even the conservative distros like Debian will have a kernel and Xorg that support your hardware. Thinkpads are built well. For years I used old Thinkpads. The hardware and kernels worked fine. But the desktop environments became a disaster area with KDE 4 and GNOME 3. I hand-rolled setups with FVWM and then i3, but after getting tired of futzing with that and the lack of decent compositing window managers I switched to the Mac and haven't looked back.