4 ms·

I've been really liking my XPS 13 since last year but Dell/Ubuntu really managed to fuck up something recently. My Dell dock works on occasion. Bluetooth random

I've been really liking my XPS 13 since last year but Dell/Ubuntu really managed to fuck up something recently. My Dell dock works on occasion. Bluetooth randomly disappears. And wifi is hit or miss. I reboot constantly which fixes the issues but that is annoying. On the plus side the click pad is phenomenal and beats the hell out of anything apple has.

gshulegaard 8y ago
AFAIK Canonical isn't involved the support process for the Dell Sputnik program. That said, when I first got my XPS 13 the best thing for me was to upgrade kernels and, if possible for you, swap the included Broadcom networking chip for an Intel one. I still had some graphics glitches when waking the screen but it was way better after those two things.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  This is completely unrelated but I have been annoyed by the screenlock...you can literally open the laptop and see things before it locks. That is crap security by gnome. There actually is a bug report but basically it ended with "meh".
  - muro 8y ago
    Same thing used to happen on other Linux laptops too. I think it's fixed now.
jon_richards 8y ago
My only issue with the touch pad is that ctrl switches scrolling into ctrl+scrolling mid-scroll-throw. To be clearer, if you 2-finger scroll quickly and lift off before stopping, the scroll continues as if it had been thrown. This is great. If you then press ctrl (in anticipation of making a new tab, for instance), suddenly you are zooming in/out instead of scrolling up/down. This is not great. I don't know enough about user-input to know if this is unavoidable or if it could be fixed driver or browser side.
- muro 8y ago
  Doh, that was the spurious zooming back when I had a xps15, I never figured out what the cause was. Thank you!
  - exikyut 8y ago
    My reply beside your comment may be interesting
- exikyut 8y ago
  This is because Synaptics is silently handling capacitative multitouch events from the trackpad and generating a synthetic stream of mouse button 4/5 (scroll wheel) events (with haptic decay and everything). As soon as CTRL accompanies the scroll wheel events... woops. This is primarily an input layer design failure: - scroll up/down is not its own event, built out in such a way that the "CTRL+" could be selectively ignored - Toolkits don't separate input sources sufficiently enough that '"CTRL+" from one device and mouse button 4/5 from another should be ignored' could be implemented. (X11 does expose everything distinctly/discretely, but pretty much nothing on top (Qt, especially GTK) really takes advantage of it. For example you can have unlimited mouse cursors on the screen, but beyond moving and resizing windows at the same time, nothing really does anything novel with this capability, and the input models (single window focused at one time, etc) don't really permit innovation either.) Hmm...... although... maybe if you took evdev apart at a very low level, and/or maybe the synaptics driv--wait. Hack synaptics to bits so it also _watches_ the keyboard, specifically CTRL keypresses, and stops sending its synthesized stream of buttonpress/releases. Maybe.

gshulegaard 8y ago

AFAIK Canonical isn't involved the support process for the Dell Sputnik program. That said, when I first got my XPS 13 the best thing for me was to upgrade kernels and, if possible for you, swap the included Broadcom networking chip for an Intel one. I still had some graphics glitches when waking the screen but it was way better after those two things.

paulie_a 8y ago
This is completely unrelated but I have been annoyed by the screenlock...you can literally open the laptop and see things before it locks. That is crap security by gnome. There actually is a bug report but basically it ended with "meh".
- muro 8y ago
  Same thing used to happen on other Linux laptops too. I think it's fixed now.

jon_richards 8y ago

My only issue with the touch pad is that ctrl switches scrolling into ctrl+scrolling mid-scroll-throw. To be clearer, if you 2-finger scroll quickly and lift off before stopping, the scroll continues as if it had been thrown. This is great. If you then press ctrl (in anticipation of making a new tab, for instance), suddenly you are zooming in/out instead of scrolling up/down. This is not great. I don't know enough about user-input to know if this is unavoidable or if it could be fixed driver or browser side.

muro 8y ago
Doh, that was the spurious zooming back when I had a xps15, I never figured out what the cause was. Thank you!
- exikyut 8y ago
  My reply beside your comment may be interesting
exikyut 8y ago
This is because Synaptics is silently handling capacitative multitouch events from the trackpad and generating a synthetic stream of mouse button 4/5 (scroll wheel) events (with haptic decay and everything). As soon as CTRL accompanies the scroll wheel events... woops. This is primarily an input layer design failure: - scroll up/down is not its own event, built out in such a way that the "CTRL+" could be selectively ignored - Toolkits don't separate input sources sufficiently enough that '"CTRL+" from one device and mouse button 4/5 from another should be ignored' could be implemented. (X11 does expose everything distinctly/discretely, but pretty much nothing on top (Qt, especially GTK) really takes advantage of it. For example you can have unlimited mouse cursors on the screen, but beyond moving and resizing windows at the same time, nothing really does anything novel with this capability, and the input models (single window focused at one time, etc) don't really permit innovation either.) Hmm...... although... maybe if you took evdev apart at a very low level, and/or maybe the synaptics driv--wait. Hack synaptics to bits so it also _watches_ the keyboard, specifically CTRL keypresses, and stops sending its synthesized stream of buttonpress/releases. Maybe.