4 ms·

I am thinking of going to Dell from an 2014 MBP, what did not work with Dell on your last experiment? The latest XPSs look very nice.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
I tried dual-booting an XPS15, which did not go well [0]. I understand the 13's are more Linux-compatible, but I got so badly annoyed by Dell Support I'm never buying Dell again. [0] the drive management software didn't like GRUB, and would complain that there was no drive if GRUB was installed. Repeated reboots later, it would suddenly say "oh look, a hard drive!" and boot into Windows, removing GRUB in the process. Dell Support were worse than useless at diagnosing the problem, let alone fixing it (still unfixed, the machine is now a rather shitty games machine)
- vetinari 7y ago
  I suspect this would be due to mixing legacy and UEFI booting, where grub-legacy would interfere with whatever the disk management was doing and fixing it would involve removing grub. For grub-uefi, it is just another file on a EFI system partition.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    possibly. I couldn't get a clear answer from Dell on what their disk management system was doing, so it got really hard to work out what was going on and where the problem was. I tried everything I could think of and the internet could suggest.
- Eiriksmal 7y ago
  Typing this from Fedora 31 running on a dual-boot, 4-month old XPS 15 (LCD screen, not 4K OLED). The only configuration change that has to be made on a new XPS is switching the SATA mode to AHCI. Fedora signs the kernel correctly--you don't even have to disable secure boot. Signing 3rd party kernel modules under secure boot isn't difficult, but documentation on it is sparse. So I've kept my notes for next time: https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/ https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/ The Arch guys have a great compendium on the XPS and Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    I don't know if that changed recently. I gave up on it a year ago. I went through all this (though with Ubuntu not Fedora), switched modes, disabled secure boot, read every web page I could find. Nothing worked. I'm kinda tempted to see if I can get it working now, but honestly, also kinda traumatised by the whole experience and never want to touch it again.
    - Eiriksmal 7y ago
      I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu's installer capabilities, but Fedora's has made huge advances in the past 5 years. I went in to the setup fearing the worst (that is, the struggle that was doing a secure boot, UEFI Windows 8 + Fedora 20 setup in 2014), but was shocked at how good Fedora 31's install routine was. I shrank the 1TB SSD partition in Windows, disabled the proprietary fake-RAID, then booted Fedora's XFCE spin from a USB key. The installer handled everything else--no having to manually tinker with the UEFI partition. Post-install, the XPS's UEFI correctly booted to GRUB, which had successfully detected the Windows bootloader (again, no tinkering like with FC20) and can boot either OS. Disabling hibernate in Windows and figuring out how to mount the encrypted Windows partition in Fedora was all that remained. The Linux Kernel 5.5 has a bunch of improvements for the i7-9750H (and other Coffee Lake processors), which is another reason to consider giving Fedora 31 a spin. :) I had this pleasant experience the same time I was trying to figure out how to dual-boot FC31 on a touch bar MacBook Pro. The short answer is: 80% of the MBP's hardware doesn't work in Linux. Broadcom won't release drivers that are compatible with Linux and blame FCC rules for their reason. Insane. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
      - marcus_holmes 7y ago
        dammit, now I'm tempted to try again. Thanks, I think ;)

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I tried dual-booting an XPS15, which did not go well [0]. I understand the 13's are more Linux-compatible, but I got so badly annoyed by Dell Support I'm never buying Dell again. [0] the drive management software didn't like GRUB, and would complain that there was no drive if GRUB was installed. Repeated reboots later, it would suddenly say "oh look, a hard drive!" and boot into Windows, removing GRUB in the process. Dell Support were worse than useless at diagnosing the problem, let alone fixing it (still unfixed, the machine is now a rather shitty games machine)

vetinari 7y ago
I suspect this would be due to mixing legacy and UEFI booting, where grub-legacy would interfere with whatever the disk management was doing and fixing it would involve removing grub. For grub-uefi, it is just another file on a EFI system partition.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  possibly. I couldn't get a clear answer from Dell on what their disk management system was doing, so it got really hard to work out what was going on and where the problem was. I tried everything I could think of and the internet could suggest.
Eiriksmal 7y ago
Typing this from Fedora 31 running on a dual-boot, 4-month old XPS 15 (LCD screen, not 4K OLED). The only configuration change that has to be made on a new XPS is switching the SATA mode to AHCI. Fedora signs the kernel correctly--you don't even have to disable secure boot. Signing 3rd party kernel modules under secure boot isn't difficult, but documentation on it is sparse. So I've kept my notes for next time: https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/ https://lawler.io/scrivings/linux-cookbooks/ The Arch guys have a great compendium on the XPS and Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_7590
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  I don't know if that changed recently. I gave up on it a year ago. I went through all this (though with Ubuntu not Fedora), switched modes, disabled secure boot, read every web page I could find. Nothing worked. I'm kinda tempted to see if I can get it working now, but honestly, also kinda traumatised by the whole experience and never want to touch it again.
  - Eiriksmal 7y ago
    I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu's installer capabilities, but Fedora's has made huge advances in the past 5 years. I went in to the setup fearing the worst (that is, the struggle that was doing a secure boot, UEFI Windows 8 + Fedora 20 setup in 2014), but was shocked at how good Fedora 31's install routine was. I shrank the 1TB SSD partition in Windows, disabled the proprietary fake-RAID, then booted Fedora's XFCE spin from a USB key. The installer handled everything else--no having to manually tinker with the UEFI partition. Post-install, the XPS's UEFI correctly booted to GRUB, which had successfully detected the Windows bootloader (again, no tinkering like with FC20) and can boot either OS. Disabling hibernate in Windows and figuring out how to mount the encrypted Windows partition in Fedora was all that remained. The Linux Kernel 5.5 has a bunch of improvements for the i7-9750H (and other Coffee Lake processors), which is another reason to consider giving Fedora 31 a spin. :) I had this pleasant experience the same time I was trying to figure out how to dual-boot FC31 on a touch bar MacBook Pro. The short answer is: 80% of the MBP's hardware doesn't work in Linux. Broadcom won't release drivers that are compatible with Linux and blame FCC rules for their reason. Insane. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
    - marcus_holmes 7y ago
      dammit, now I'm tempted to try again. Thanks, I think ;)