5 ms·

Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS

49 points by humility 8y ago

TomMarius 8y ago
This site doesn't work, it's showing a blank page.
- abrowne 8y ago
  Do you have an adblocker? Forbes often loads an interstitial ad page.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Definitely adblocker, or a later Firefox with the Tracking Disable set.
- el-patron 8y ago
  https://outline.com/JHybEX https://outline.com/JHybEX Outline'd it for you mate - it's safer and easier than removing the AdBlocker!
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    This is awesome service, thank you for showing me.
- striking 8y ago
  Try going back and visiting it again if your adblocker blocks the entire interstitial. Also, hopefully you're using uBlock Origin. Nothing else is really any good (except uMatrix, but it's almost the same).
- some_account 8y ago
  Forbes is well known to not work with ad blockers. You can't even visit the site without letting it store cookies on your machine. It requires being able to store cookies in order to "personalize your experience". Lol.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
I can’t ditch windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Linux. I have a separate device for each as I need something that one of those OS’s offer that another one won’t. “You need the right tool for the job” and there is no “one” tool.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  VM's a solution?
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
    No. Peripherals and proprietary hardware.
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      VT-d passthrough?
- nchudleigh 8y ago
  This is the closing comment on the article. Kind of sad that there really isn't an OS that does even a mediocre job of everything.
JorgeGT 8y ago
The lack of a "this is a serious machine" setting in Windows is baffling. I have Windows 10 Enterprise installed in a 20 core/128 GB RAM workstation that is used for lengthy numerical simulations. And yet it happily reboots randomly and it keeps filling the start menu with silly game icons (candy crush, etc.). Super fun for your boss to point out and say "so this is why you use this machine, for candy crush?"
- dhd415 8y ago
  Completely agree. I've taken to running Windows Server on my workstations for that reason though the price is much higher.
  - tajen 8y ago
    I’ve given a Mac to my interns. 2 months in, they say they’d never come back to Windows. Fun thing is, building a lean OS doesn’t require as much time as building an OS with IA embedded in the Start Menu trying to push you to play Candy Crush, and not as much work either as building all possible combinations of Unity-Xcfe-Cinnamon-Gnome-Wayland-initd-systemd distributions. MacOS could be an easily reproducible OS, yet never properly copied.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Isn't that exactly what LTSB is designed for?
  - megaman22 8y ago
    LTSB is fantastic, except there is no linux subsystem. If you can live without that, or use Cygwin instead, it's far and away the best Windows distribution.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Don't you need to be on volume licensing to get that? Which rules it out for most.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I had one of those stupid expensive macs for years before changing jobs and getting an XPS 15. I love the machine with Ubuntu except for one critical flaw: the stupid thing goes into this thermal safety mode so damn easily. I'll be compiling code for five minutes and suddenly my browser that I'm developing in becomes a choppy unusuable mess. No matter how long I wait nothing recovers until I reboot. Also gaming is nearly impossible because of the same issue. I suspect the xps15 is more powerful than its cooling can handle. I'm not sure how normal that is for laptops. Also: when installing Ubuntu on my XPS I had to toggle some bios option about drives. Maybe that's the issue he had with Mint and didn't report fixing Ubuntu.
- yulaow 8y ago
  It's a compromise for its super compact dimension, sadly throttling down the cpu defensively is becoming very common for a lot of models, even the last macbook iteration has that problem That's one of the reasons for which I still keep buying "thicker" laptops like the T series of lenovo.
- JamesMcMinn 8y ago
  Sounds like you got a lemon of a paste job. My XPS 15 is able to run with a full load on all cores for hours at a time. Similarly, gaming on it doesn't seem to cause any issues. It's possible that external factors are the issue (such as ambient temperatures), however I'd wager that a proper repaste of both the CPU and GPU would improve cooling. By default the XPS (and actually most Dell laptops) seem to come set to RAID rather than AHCI, which is likely the BIOS change you're referring to.
- some_account 8y ago
  The latest MacBook with i9 also throttles heavily to the degree that it's worse than the i7 model. When I was researching laptops, they all seem to have problems actually putting the CPU under load for extended periods of time. Loud fan noise, throttling etc. They all seem to be built for mostly idle CPU loads, with spiking only for a few secs at a time to load programs.
- pmontra 8y ago
kalekold 8y ago
'Linux' tends to have a reputation as being complicated to use or it's just for developers, etc. But nothing could be further from the truth. If you install one of the more modern distributions like Ubuntu, the OS runs faster, easier to use and much more friendly for just getting stuff done. I've now realised that I will never buy another Microsoft OS after using Windows 10. I had to download a separate program to switch off all the spyware and to disable crippling updates. This isn't even a problem with Ubuntu.
- orbifold 8y ago
  Video playback has still screen tearing in a default Ubuntu installation, something that has not been an issue in either Mac OSX or Windows for a long time.
- collyw 8y ago
  I think there is still a fundamental difference in the way you troubleshoot things between Linux and Windows. In Linux you can usually find something on Stack overflow or Ask Ubuntu, copy a few commands into the terminal and get things working. In Windows you can find some icons in the settings related to what you are doing and randomly click until things work again. While I prefer the first option I can understand why others (who are not IT professionals) prefer the second.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Except those things you find on SO often don't work because they're from 2010 and the way the internals are organized in your more modern distro are different, or they only ever applied to red hat based distros and you're on a debian based one, or the problem in question only looks very similar to a known bug in some old version of pulseaudio, etc. Personally, I'm in favor of discoverability, especially for troubleshooting. Sadly, Windows is becomming more and more like Linux in this regard as time goes on and they try to make it into a phablet OS.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    By the same token though, I find it much easier to fix remotely. I got tired of having to talk my father through tech support issues, since under windows it often required me walking him through all the steps. Far easier to email him a command string and tell him to paste it into the terminal. Sure, this doesn't help him learn how to fix things himself, but he has zero interest in learning to use the computer for anything more than a web browser anyway. And the lack of malware is a nice plus.
brightball 8y ago
I need to try that cpufreq for battery life...
dcdevito 8y ago
I switched to Chrome OS on a Pixelbook and run all the Linux and CLI programs I need for dev and photo editing. I am not going back to macOS or Windows. Those operating systems are too generic in nature and filled with bloat.
mohn 8y ago
I know I'm preaching to the choir here at HN, but I feel like there is a very important point that the author has skipped over: Part of why the install process and general use experience went so well is all the time and effort Dell put into explicitly developing Linux support for this exact model. They likely made hardware choices (e.g. Intel wifi chipset instead of Qualcomm/Atheros) based on existing Linux driver availability. And in cases where a driver wasn't available, or didn't work perfectly off the shelf, Dell probably put coders to work customizing that driver to suit the configuration of the XPS. In a way, this is a bit like buying a Microsoft Surface and then being thrilled at how Windows installs and runs on it. For the sake of people who read this article and try installing Ubuntu 18.04 on an arbitrary laptop, I think the author should mention that there was already a ton of bigco effort to make this configuration of HW/SW work smoothly. In my experience, Ubuntu gets more polished and newbie-friendly with every release, but I do think some readers might try to follow in the author's footsteps with their own miscellaneous laptop, get discouraged, and then be soured on Linux again for a while. I don't want that to happen. I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. If that means the population needs to homogenize a bit on the hardware front, so be it.
- webbrahmin 8y ago
  You have hit the nail on the head. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu many years back. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my windows machine in 2010 and by chance everything worked like magic. I purchased a new machine in 2015 without much thought and installed Ubuntu. To my horror it would not detect my Qualcomm wifi and AMD Radeon Graphics. Banged my head around to find a solution to Qualcomm wifi. But the 2gb graphics card is just a piece of silicon on my motherboard which does not work.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - greenhatman 8y ago
    Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't out in 2010.
NightlyDev 8y ago
I've bought a bunch of XPS 13 laptops because of project sputnik, and the only bad thing with them seems to be the extreme coil whine.
__sr__ 8y ago
I had a similar experience a few months ago. I run Windows 10 Professional on my iMac using Boot Camp for Windows specific stuff — hard to believe, but such things do still exist in 2018. I was facing some slowness while working on something urgent, so I decided to go with the old standby — a reboot. To my dismay, I was greeed with a “Windows is updating — don’t power off” message which stuck around for more than an hour. The work I was doing was on the local drive and quite urgent. I ended up having to pull out my laptop and do the whole work from scratch while Windows was “updating”. I am sure there is a setting which could have prevented the machine from updating my machine in the background, but that is not the point. Why can I not be allowed to update/reboot on my own schedule by default instead of being forced into it unless I opt out? Why is it opt out instead of opt in? The fact that it is an opt out tells me that Microsoft actually knows that no one will actually opt into this madness by choice. And why was I not at least warned that my machine is going into a self induced coma which would leave it unusable for more than an hour when I tried to reboot? And let us not even forget about the adware that gets installed with every major upgrade. I bought the Windows license for the full price — surely I deserve a break from this nonsense? Behaviour like this is the reason I prefer macOS for serious work — despite its problems. Linux, while good on server side, is just not polished enough to be my daily driver on the client. A few (~4-5) years ago, I used to run Linux on my main work a laptop - a Lenovo. But I ended up having to act the sysadmin way too frequently for my liking. Touchpad going dead randomly (won’t come back without reboots), battery life going from decent to horrible after certain updates, overheating at times for no obvious reason, not so great media playback, trouble with sound and Bluetooth etc were some of the common problems. I fixed many of them, but every update brought its own share of headaches until I decided it just wasn’t worth my time. And I am saying this as someone who makes a living working on Linux on the server side. I can’t imagine an average Joe going to the lengths I did to fix the boatload of issues that come bundled with Linux. Eventually, I ended up buying a Mac for my daily driver. While I can’t say everything has been completely smooth, it has been relatively headache free. I still run Linux on EC2 for my Linux needs, but I don’t see myself going back to it on the client side in the near future. With macOS, I get the UNIX like interface with a decent GUI and hardware support.

49 points by humility 8y ago

TomMarius 8y ago

This site doesn't work, it's showing a blank page.

abrowne 8y ago
Do you have an adblocker? Forbes often loads an interstitial ad page.
sofaofthedamned 8y ago
Definitely adblocker, or a later Firefox with the Tracking Disable set.
el-patron 8y ago
https://outline.com/JHybEX https://outline.com/JHybEX Outline'd it for you mate - it's safer and easier than removing the AdBlocker!
- TomMarius 8y ago
  This is awesome service, thank you for showing me.
striking 8y ago
Try going back and visiting it again if your adblocker blocks the entire interstitial. Also, hopefully you're using uBlock Origin. Nothing else is really any good (except uMatrix, but it's almost the same).
some_account 8y ago
Forbes is well known to not work with ad blockers. You can't even visit the site without letting it store cookies on your machine. It requires being able to store cookies in order to "personalize your experience". Lol.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

I can’t ditch windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Linux. I have a separate device for each as I need something that one of those OS’s offer that another one won’t. “You need the right tool for the job” and there is no “one” tool.

jacquesm 8y ago
VM's a solution?
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
  No. Peripherals and proprietary hardware.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    VT-d passthrough?
nchudleigh 8y ago
This is the closing comment on the article. Kind of sad that there really isn't an OS that does even a mediocre job of everything.

JorgeGT 8y ago

The lack of a "this is a serious machine" setting in Windows is baffling. I have Windows 10 Enterprise installed in a 20 core/128 GB RAM workstation that is used for lengthy numerical simulations. And yet it happily reboots randomly and it keeps filling the start menu with silly game icons (candy crush, etc.). Super fun for your boss to point out and say "so this is why you use this machine, for candy crush?"

dhd415 8y ago
Completely agree. I've taken to running Windows Server on my workstations for that reason though the price is much higher.
- tajen 8y ago
  I’ve given a Mac to my interns. 2 months in, they say they’d never come back to Windows. Fun thing is, building a lean OS doesn’t require as much time as building an OS with IA embedded in the Start Menu trying to push you to play Candy Crush, and not as much work either as building all possible combinations of Unity-Xcfe-Cinnamon-Gnome-Wayland-initd-systemd distributions. MacOS could be an easily reproducible OS, yet never properly copied.
Someone1234 8y ago
Isn't that exactly what LTSB is designed for?
- megaman22 8y ago
  LTSB is fantastic, except there is no linux subsystem. If you can live without that, or use Cygwin instead, it's far and away the best Windows distribution.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Don't you need to be on volume licensing to get that? Which rules it out for most.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I had one of those stupid expensive macs for years before changing jobs and getting an XPS 15. I love the machine with Ubuntu except for one critical flaw: the stupid thing goes into this thermal safety mode so damn easily. I'll be compiling code for five minutes and suddenly my browser that I'm developing in becomes a choppy unusuable mess. No matter how long I wait nothing recovers until I reboot. Also gaming is nearly impossible because of the same issue. I suspect the xps15 is more powerful than its cooling can handle. I'm not sure how normal that is for laptops. Also: when installing Ubuntu on my XPS I had to toggle some bios option about drives. Maybe that's the issue he had with Mint and didn't report fixing Ubuntu.

yulaow 8y ago
It's a compromise for its super compact dimension, sadly throttling down the cpu defensively is becoming very common for a lot of models, even the last macbook iteration has that problem That's one of the reasons for which I still keep buying "thicker" laptops like the T series of lenovo.
JamesMcMinn 8y ago
Sounds like you got a lemon of a paste job. My XPS 15 is able to run with a full load on all cores for hours at a time. Similarly, gaming on it doesn't seem to cause any issues. It's possible that external factors are the issue (such as ambient temperatures), however I'd wager that a proper repaste of both the CPU and GPU would improve cooling. By default the XPS (and actually most Dell laptops) seem to come set to RAID rather than AHCI, which is likely the BIOS change you're referring to.
some_account 8y ago
The latest MacBook with i9 also throttles heavily to the degree that it's worse than the i7 model. When I was researching laptops, they all seem to have problems actually putting the CPU under load for extended periods of time. Loud fan noise, throttling etc. They all seem to be built for mostly idle CPU loads, with spiking only for a few secs at a time to load programs.
pmontra 8y ago

kalekold 8y ago

'Linux' tends to have a reputation as being complicated to use or it's just for developers, etc. But nothing could be further from the truth. If you install one of the more modern distributions like Ubuntu, the OS runs faster, easier to use and much more friendly for just getting stuff done. I've now realised that I will never buy another Microsoft OS after using Windows 10. I had to download a separate program to switch off all the spyware and to disable crippling updates. This isn't even a problem with Ubuntu.

orbifold 8y ago
Video playback has still screen tearing in a default Ubuntu installation, something that has not been an issue in either Mac OSX or Windows for a long time.
collyw 8y ago
I think there is still a fundamental difference in the way you troubleshoot things between Linux and Windows. In Linux you can usually find something on Stack overflow or Ask Ubuntu, copy a few commands into the terminal and get things working. In Windows you can find some icons in the settings related to what you are doing and randomly click until things work again. While I prefer the first option I can understand why others (who are not IT professionals) prefer the second.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Except those things you find on SO often don't work because they're from 2010 and the way the internals are organized in your more modern distro are different, or they only ever applied to red hat based distros and you're on a debian based one, or the problem in question only looks very similar to a known bug in some old version of pulseaudio, etc. Personally, I'm in favor of discoverability, especially for troubleshooting. Sadly, Windows is becomming more and more like Linux in this regard as time goes on and they try to make it into a phablet OS.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  By the same token though, I find it much easier to fix remotely. I got tired of having to talk my father through tech support issues, since under windows it often required me walking him through all the steps. Far easier to email him a command string and tell him to paste it into the terminal. Sure, this doesn't help him learn how to fix things himself, but he has zero interest in learning to use the computer for anything more than a web browser anyway. And the lack of malware is a nice plus.

brightball 8y ago

I need to try that cpufreq for battery life...

dcdevito 8y ago

I switched to Chrome OS on a Pixelbook and run all the Linux and CLI programs I need for dev and photo editing. I am not going back to macOS or Windows. Those operating systems are too generic in nature and filled with bloat.

mohn 8y ago

I know I'm preaching to the choir here at HN, but I feel like there is a very important point that the author has skipped over: Part of why the install process and general use experience went so well is all the time and effort Dell put into explicitly developing Linux support for this exact model. They likely made hardware choices (e.g. Intel wifi chipset instead of Qualcomm/Atheros) based on existing Linux driver availability. And in cases where a driver wasn't available, or didn't work perfectly off the shelf, Dell probably put coders to work customizing that driver to suit the configuration of the XPS. In a way, this is a bit like buying a Microsoft Surface and then being thrilled at how Windows installs and runs on it. For the sake of people who read this article and try installing Ubuntu 18.04 on an arbitrary laptop, I think the author should mention that there was already a ton of bigco effort to make this configuration of HW/SW work smoothly. In my experience, Ubuntu gets more polished and newbie-friendly with every release, but I do think some readers might try to follow in the author's footsteps with their own miscellaneous laptop, get discouraged, and then be soured on Linux again for a while. I don't want that to happen. I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. If that means the population needs to homogenize a bit on the hardware front, so be it.

webbrahmin 8y ago
You have hit the nail on the head. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu many years back. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my windows machine in 2010 and by chance everything worked like magic. I purchased a new machine in 2015 without much thought and installed Ubuntu. To my horror it would not detect my Qualcomm wifi and AMD Radeon Graphics. Banged my head around to find a solution to Qualcomm wifi. But the 2gb graphics card is just a piece of silicon on my motherboard which does not work.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- greenhatman 8y ago
  Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't out in 2010.

NightlyDev 8y ago

I've bought a bunch of XPS 13 laptops because of project sputnik, and the only bad thing with them seems to be the extreme coil whine.

__sr__ 8y ago

I had a similar experience a few months ago. I run Windows 10 Professional on my iMac using Boot Camp for Windows specific stuff — hard to believe, but such things do still exist in 2018. I was facing some slowness while working on something urgent, so I decided to go with the old standby — a reboot. To my dismay, I was greeed with a “Windows is updating — don’t power off” message which stuck around for more than an hour. The work I was doing was on the local drive and quite urgent. I ended up having to pull out my laptop and do the whole work from scratch while Windows was “updating”. I am sure there is a setting which could have prevented the machine from updating my machine in the background, but that is not the point. Why can I not be allowed to update/reboot on my own schedule by default instead of being forced into it unless I opt out? Why is it opt out instead of opt in? The fact that it is an opt out tells me that Microsoft actually knows that no one will actually opt into this madness by choice. And why was I not at least warned that my machine is going into a self induced coma which would leave it unusable for more than an hour when I tried to reboot? And let us not even forget about the adware that gets installed with every major upgrade. I bought the Windows license for the full price — surely I deserve a break from this nonsense? Behaviour like this is the reason I prefer macOS for serious work — despite its problems. Linux, while good on server side, is just not polished enough to be my daily driver on the client. A few (~4-5) years ago, I used to run Linux on my main work a laptop - a Lenovo. But I ended up having to act the sysadmin way too frequently for my liking. Touchpad going dead randomly (won’t come back without reboots), battery life going from decent to horrible after certain updates, overheating at times for no obvious reason, not so great media playback, trouble with sound and Bluetooth etc were some of the common problems. I fixed many of them, but every update brought its own share of headaches until I decided it just wasn’t worth my time. And I am saying this as someone who makes a living working on Linux on the server side. I can’t imagine an average Joe going to the lengths I did to fix the boatload of issues that come bundled with Linux. Eventually, I ended up buying a Mac for my daily driver. While I can’t say everything has been completely smooth, it has been relatively headache free. I still run Linux on EC2 for my Linux needs, but I don’t see myself going back to it on the client side in the near future. With macOS, I get the UNIX like interface with a decent GUI and hardware support.