3 ms·

I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I feel for people being burned by these

I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I feel for people being burned by these bad advices.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I have an XPS running PopOS and it's fine. Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones? I don't really push my laptops though as my job doesn't require it. Everythings seems fine for the two years I've owned it. Survivor bias?
llampx 5y ago
Yup, I bought a Thinkpad after even 5 minutes perusing through both the Thinkpad subreddit and the Dell one revealed that Dells are plagued with issues and it is really just dumb luck if you get a problem-free unit, and their support is not helpful.
tomxor 5y ago
I've used an XPS 9370 with Debian stable for 3-4 years now. Compatibility has been good and performance more than enough for me, but my dev work doesn't require super high performance, IMO this is the wrong form factor for that anyway. I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user so ... that's how low my requirements are for a decent desktop experience. My main gripes: For first few months wifi driver was unstable and would randomly cause kernel panics, sometimes once per day, sometimes once per week. (yes I tried manually installing newer versions and using different kernel versions)... eventually it stabilised and I haven't had any issue since - Even though this was not unique to this machine, it was annoying considering it was supposed to be built for Linux. The battery capacity diminished faster than anything I've ever owned... currently at 20% of original capacity. There was a very sharp drop last year from 80% to 60%, then another sharp drop from 60% to 40% which I'm guessing is the controller writing off cells. (Manually calibrating it by draining never gets it above 30%)... Speculating this is possibly from heat damage (sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot) or just crap battery quality - expecting to find some spicy pockets when I get around to replacing it. Other than that it's been a solid Linux machine and very comfortable lightweight form factor to use. I still don't have performance issues personally, so will replace the battery soon and see how much longer I can keep using it.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user > sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot Off topic, but how did you configure i3 to work nicely with gaming? Last time I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great. These days I use Pop!_shell where I might want to game, and Sway where I'll just want terminals and a browser.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    I'm a lightweight gamer, but i've never had any trouble with drawing gaming windows on i3... I mostly play old stuff or FOSS versions of old stuff e.g ioquake based games, openra, stuff like that. However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not had any issues. What kind of games have you had issues with? Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues? [edit] > I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows, yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions or anything. For games windows that start floating I usually just full screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then i've never played a multi window game.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      > What kind of games have you had issues with? Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be able to take full control of the screen, and then having a panic attack when not allowed to. As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows, that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games, games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I do (just most things :P )
spideymans 5y ago
This really says something about the state of internet tech reviews. None of these reviewers ever keep their products long enough to experience long term issues. They'll keep recommending the XPS 13 (or other flawed products) to consumers, as long as no issues pop up in the week or two they review it. I suppose one good thing about Apple and MacBooks is that just because of how incredibly common they are, and the amount of mindshare they command, if there is a fatal flaw with an Apple product, there will be widespread consumer knowledge of the issues. On the other hand, models from Dell and these other manufacturers sell in low enough volumes that they can just keep pumping out broken products, and not enough people will care to hold them publicly accountable.
- bestouff 5y ago
  Well, I still own an XPS 9360 which works wonderfully well under Linux. That's why at my current job I choose a top-of-the-line XPS 15 i9. Big mistake. That thing went through several support iterations (WiFi, motherboard ...) and it still locks up from time to time. I hate it.

I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I feel for people being burned by these bad advices.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I have an XPS running PopOS and it's fine. Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones? I don't really push my laptops though as my job doesn't require it. Everythings seems fine for the two years I've owned it. Survivor bias?

llampx 5y ago

Yup, I bought a Thinkpad after even 5 minutes perusing through both the Thinkpad subreddit and the Dell one revealed that Dells are plagued with issues and it is really just dumb luck if you get a problem-free unit, and their support is not helpful.

tomxor 5y ago

I've used an XPS 9370 with Debian stable for 3-4 years now. Compatibility has been good and performance more than enough for me, but my dev work doesn't require super high performance, IMO this is the wrong form factor for that anyway. I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user so ... that's how low my requirements are for a decent desktop experience. My main gripes: For first few months wifi driver was unstable and would randomly cause kernel panics, sometimes once per day, sometimes once per week. (yes I tried manually installing newer versions and using different kernel versions)... eventually it stabilised and I haven't had any issue since - Even though this was not unique to this machine, it was annoying considering it was supposed to be built for Linux. The battery capacity diminished faster than anything I've ever owned... currently at 20% of original capacity. There was a very sharp drop last year from 80% to 60%, then another sharp drop from 60% to 40% which I'm guessing is the controller writing off cells. (Manually calibrating it by draining never gets it above 30%)... Speculating this is possibly from heat damage (sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot) or just crap battery quality - expecting to find some spicy pockets when I get around to replacing it. Other than that it's been a solid Linux machine and very comfortable lightweight form factor to use. I still don't have performance issues personally, so will replace the battery soon and see how much longer I can keep using it.

Shared404 5y ago
> I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user > sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot Off topic, but how did you configure i3 to work nicely with gaming? Last time I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great. These days I use Pop!_shell where I might want to game, and Sway where I'll just want terminals and a browser.
- tomxor 5y ago
  I'm a lightweight gamer, but i've never had any trouble with drawing gaming windows on i3... I mostly play old stuff or FOSS versions of old stuff e.g ioquake based games, openra, stuff like that. However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not had any issues. What kind of games have you had issues with? Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues? [edit] > I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows, yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions or anything. For games windows that start floating I usually just full screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then i've never played a multi window game.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    > What kind of games have you had issues with? Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be able to take full control of the screen, and then having a panic attack when not allowed to. As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows, that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games, games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I do (just most things :P )

spideymans 5y ago

This really says something about the state of internet tech reviews. None of these reviewers ever keep their products long enough to experience long term issues. They'll keep recommending the XPS 13 (or other flawed products) to consumers, as long as no issues pop up in the week or two they review it. I suppose one good thing about Apple and MacBooks is that just because of how incredibly common they are, and the amount of mindshare they command, if there is a fatal flaw with an Apple product, there will be widespread consumer knowledge of the issues. On the other hand, models from Dell and these other manufacturers sell in low enough volumes that they can just keep pumping out broken products, and not enough people will care to hold them publicly accountable.

bestouff 5y ago
Well, I still own an XPS 9360 which works wonderfully well under Linux. That's why at my current job I choose a top-of-the-line XPS 15 i9. Big mistake. That thing went through several support iterations (WiFi, motherboard ...) and it still locks up from time to time. I hate it.