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Spent the past 6 months on Linux before switching back to Mac. I bought a new Dell XPS 13” with Ubuntu preinstalled. It was still a nightmare. Some of the hard
by amacneil 5y ago
Spent the past 6 months on Linux before switching back to Mac.
I bought a new Dell XPS 13” with Ubuntu preinstalled. It was still a nightmare. Some of the hardware/driver issues I encountered:
- Laptop would constantly get stuck in suspend, often when plugging or unplugging my thunderbolt docking station. The only way out of this was to hold the power button for 10 seconds, which I had to do almost daily.
- Sometimes the laptop would randomly wake from sleep in my backpack, resulting in a burning hot laptop.
- The battery seems to drain very quickly even while in sleep mode. Possibly related to previous point but it seems to lose charge in sleep mode even if it doesn’t not spontaneously wake.
- Doesn’t seem possible in Gnome to run an external display at a different DPI from the laptop display. This meant I had to constantly switch DPI when I moved from external display to laptop mode.
- Couldn’t get my jabra Bluetooth headset to work. I could get sound, but it required switching the Bluetooth profile every time I connected them, and I couldn’t find a way to get it to remember the correct setting despite hours of searching. I also couldn’t get the mic to work whatsoever.
- Doesn’t seem possible to configure keyboard remapping on certain keyboards only (e.g. swap modifier keys on my external keyboard).
- Couldn’t get scrolling to work with my apple Magic Mouse, had to buy a new mouse. Maybe a minor issue but it works fine on Windows.
- Not a hardware issue but I had a weird issue where google chrome tabs could not be repositioned without the tab becoming “detached” and creating a new window. This was incredibly frustrating.
I don’t think Linux is ready to be used as a daily driver for people who care about getting work done and not tinkering. Maybe if you use a desktop with a couple years old hardware it will work, but latest gen hardware, laptops, or external devices are a recipe for pain.
- trelane 5y agoWow. Now I'm extra glad I never tried Dell preinstalled laptops. Guess Linux-only vendors have more skin in the game.
- rbanffy 5y agoI always get the boring ones. XPS are thin and light, but the Latitudes are cheaper and better built.
- mlnj 5y agoI am using an XPS that i installed Ubuntu on for dev work and I am facing many of the issues mentioned above. Whenever i put the machine to sleep I do a check always assuming the risk that the app states I have, might never be accessible again. I still can't get hibernate working on it to make it all just work for me. But each rabbithole into making my life a little easier comes at a cost of so much time that I just don't find reasonable. Windows has it's pain points but having WSL running makes life so much easier.