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Dell Latitude 5411: the Linux compatibility sweet spot
- nottorp 3y ago> Oh god, the noise Time to sound like an Apple fanboi. No. 1000 times no. Do not accept hardware like this. For your own health.
- darthrupert 3y agoOh man, thanks for reminding me. I've been on Air M2 for a year or so and am getting nostalgic about having a Linux laptop. But the noise. Nope to that.
- nortonham 3y agoSame. On an M1. Loved my thinkpads but between the battery life and the screens, using a M1 macbook is like a different world completely.
- mongol 3y agoI have this one. I did not use it for a long time but after I moved into it, the touchpad was very shaky. Once in a while the cursor jumped all over. I found I could disable it with an xinput disable command, but that was just a temporary relief. After research I came to the conclusion that it was a hardware problem, but as I found it after the warranty expired I could not return it. There are descriptions on the interwebs how to solder a wire to better ground the touchpad so I did that. It improved it but it still goes bad once in a while. Apart from that, I like it.
- paulsmal 3y agothere are few PC vendors (Dell included) offering first class Linux support for some of their products. You can order a laptop with Linux installed out of the box. No need to use old and outdated hardware.
- cdogl 3y agoI’ve been running Linux for over 10 years on contemporary dell, Lenovo and Apple laptops. It’s fine.
- sys_64738 3y agoI think the GP was talking about vendor supported Linux. Apple doesn't support Linux on their BootCamp partitions I don't believe.
- zokier 3y agoI went to check Dell website and indeed what seems like the successor of OPs laptop, Latitude 5440, is available with Ubuntu, so that is nice. Although even with Latitudes it seems bit hit and miss which models are and are not configurable with Ubuntu. But the most confusing thing to me is that I also found Precision 3480, which looks exactly same as that Latitude 5440, is available in similar configurations and even costs roughly the same. I struggle to understand what is going on here, why is the seemingly same thing sold under two different models?
- diffeomorphism 3y agoFor the same reason car designs share a base. So the base for a workstation (precision) and office (latitude) is basucally the same, but upgrade options are different, e.g. Xeon and quadro options.
- zokier 3y ago> upgrade options are different, e.g. Xeon and quadro option Except they aren't??
- diffeomorphism 3y agoExcept they are? https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/dell-notebooks/precision-7760-workstation/spd/precision-17-7760-laptop/xctop7760emea_vivp https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/dell-notebooks/precision-776...
- kzrdude 3y agoI have a similar dell latitude and when I have linux problems from time to time, I usually first blame the hardware, but then it turns out to be something more mundane - network disks and network usb devices seem to be bigger problems for suspend/resume than anything else.
- commoner 3y agoThis laptop actually has a pointing stick with three mouse buttons above the trackpad, which is nice. (Dell calls it Dual Point instead of TrackPoint.) It's a shame that Dell no longer makes any laptops with pointing sticks and that the ones they did make used Intel instead of AMD Ryzen 4000+ processors.
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- usrusr 3y agoI hardly ever use the nub, but it factors into my buying decisions nonetheless because when I use a touch pad and there are buttons both below and above, I always prefer the ones above (and I'm not a friend of those pads with whole-pad click, I'd rather completely abandon any clickyness and go with solid state tap gestures alone).
- jmclnx 3y ago>This laptop actually has a pointing stick with three mouse buttons above the trackpad Did not notice that, the trackpoint is my number 1 requirement for a laptop. The other is the ability to completely disable the track pad via BIOS. Many do not allow that anymore, but I usually can disable it using xinput. And of course the # 2 requirement is no Nvidia anything :) If it has both Nvidia and Intel graphics, Nvidia must be able to be disabled using BIOS.
- unnah 3y agoSorry to hear that. Indeed it seems none of the current Dell Latitudes or other professional models have a pointing stick any more. It looks like HP has also dropped the pointing stick from its latest professional laptops. Interesting how the two main competitors for enterprise laptop fleets made the same downgrade at the same time... At least Lenovo still provides the Trackpoint on multiple Thinkpad models.
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- smitty1e 3y agoIf you want to: A) use the latest hardware B) spec it down to the kernel boot parameters C) enjoy great support I can cheerfully recommend http://emperorlinux.com/ http://emperorlinux.com/ which has been a vendor of the finest nerd gear for a very long time. I've owned two.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoI went to see their Koala laptop and it's equipped with a 5th gen Intel processor. Are you sure you've bought from them recently?
- vladharbuz 3y agoIn case anyone is interested in other Linux-friendly laptops: after reading Joshua Stein's review I got a MateBook X and have been really enjoying it for the past year. https://jcs.org/2021/08/20/matebook https://jcs.org/2021/08/20/matebook
- fikama 3y agoI am a happy user of hp pavilion Aero 13 on Fedora Linux, to add one more laptop to the list
- szundi 3y agoThe linux sweet spot is the 3 year old laptop: most of it has the drivers worked out by now, but it’s not broken yet again.
- zhte415 3y ago3 years is also the time when corporate hardware can start reaching 'end of life' (fully depreciated, often 3-5 years) and disposed of to 2nd hand buyers. Double sweet spot.
- ACS_Solver 3y agoI've had a pretty good experience with several Dell Latitude laptops running Linux. Other than a few sleep/wakeup issues, the classic, I have rarely had an issue. Even the sleep mostly works, it just fails on a few occasions. I'm looking for a good dev laptop now and looks like some kind of Dell XPS is the best choice. My requirements are basically powerful hardware, a real GPU with nvidia strongly preferred, and good Linux support. That list alone seems to mostly narrow it down to Dell or Lenovo, and between those two it's not difficult to choose Dell.
- cout 3y agoI wonder what makes getting sleep to work consistently a challenge. Hasn't ACPI been around since the 90s?
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- bionade24 3y agoThe manufacturers removed S3 aka deep sleep support after Windows modern standby appeared. You can now only have S2 on many Laptops and that's not lasting remotely as long.
- ACS_Solver 3y agoYou'd want S3 sleep, which is where only RAM is powered and refreshing slowly. That was a good thing but S3 has been replaced by S0ix on many laptops. It's theoretically better than S3, as S0ix allows very quick state switching and low power active states where the system is drawing less power while you're doing low-intensity work like reading what's on the screen. A proper implementation of S0ix requires the OS to do a lot more power management work though, so that's a whole lot for Linux to get right on various hardware configurations.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoHave an older XPS, not running linux, and its aged well, having a real GPU makes a world of difference This year it was heating up, making noise, and battery life was crap. I though I was going to hand it down to someone who needs it more, and replaced the battery - and the issue was gone! To this day, its quet (outside of gaming) and works well. Was there a short in the battery generating heat? who knows.
- raybb 3y agoHow much does the processor play into the battery life of the laptop when running Linux? I seem to remember not too long ago people speculating that laptops with the little big CPU style will get much better battery on Linux. Did that come to fruition?
- eggy 3y agoI now run Kali Linux on my 2012/13 Lenovo T430u, and it works fine without any upgrades. I bought it in Macau when I was living over there from late 2009 until end of 2015. I used it in the field in harsh environments for all sorts of work, and it never failed. I was running the latest version of Windows at that time. I switched to Ubuntu on it to replace my older linux box.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoWait, you're daily driving Kali on bare metal? Pretty sure it's not meant for that
- znpy 3y agoNever used Kali linux myself, but from what i read it's pretty much a debian with some applications preinstalled and (i guess) some artwork customized (i'm gonna guess: wallpapers, icons etc). there's no real difference between running debian and running kali linux.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoAFAIK Kali is not as simple as Debian + some pentest apps and fancy graphics, but also has laxer firewall and security permissions to make sure all pentest apps will run properly, meaning you yourself are now vulnerable when running it, which is why it's normally run in a VM during engagements, and not something that you daily drive and host personal information on, like SSH keys or browser cookies.
- eggy 3y agoYou are right, but I only use it for hacking. It's amazing how many people freak out when you say you have it as the main boot OS on a laptop. I have been programming since 1978 (Commodore PET 2001), and started hacking back in 1987 in terms of networking, phones, etc. As I wrote above, my work and personal computers are Windows and Mac and another Debian box.
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- wazoox 3y agoAs I'm happy with my 2020 S540 Ideapad, I've bought my wife the current model (IdeaPad 5 14ALC05) (which is a huge upgrade BTW) and installed Pop_OS on it, like mine. Everything just works. At times when getting out of sleep it requires a Wifi restart (by pressing the "airplane mode button", waiting a few seconds, and pressing it again) but that's really extremely minor and hopefully will be solved at some point with an update. (My wife is an ordinary user : she expects to put the computer in and out of sleep 54 times a day and reboots once every 3 months or less if I don't check myself for kernel upgrades).
- rst 3y agoOne version of "Sweet spot" is having Linux preinstalled at the factory, which at least guarantees working drivers on new hardware. Obviously costs more than an older machine, though. Dell offers this on a bunch of models, including several Latitudes -- as do Lenovo, and a whole bunch of specialty manufacturers.
- derriz 3y agoNot in my experience, unfortunately. I got a new XPS13 for work with Ubuntu pre-installed about 4 years ago and it was far from the "sweet spot". Hibernate/sleep didn't work out of the box (although the fix was relatively straightforward), wifi was flakey (I switched to wired) on the office network but most annoying of all, I could never get a satisfactory second monitor to work without scaling issues and I tried every permutation of suggested fixes known to google. As a macbook owner (for non-professional/non-dev stuff), I didn't appreciate the chore of having to semi-actively manage the system to preserve battery. The burden wasn't huge but it was irritating having to regularly close browsers and the like as most of the applications were clearly designed for a desktop environment. In the end, the compromises were too much for me even as a long-time user of Linux on the desktop.
- trelane 3y agoCounterpoint: I've had a fantastic experience with System76 for a decade now. I think the difference is that, like Apple, System76's existence depends on Linux (for Apple, OSX). In contrast, Dell is basically a Windows laptop vendor with a small Linux side business.
- colanderman 3y agoAnother counterpoint: my at-home install of Debian on a 2022 XPS 15 is absolutely fantastic. WiFi is solid and sleep works perfectly. (I don't think I have hibernation enabled though.) I don't use a second monitor, but projectors have always worked fine for me. Power management at first wasn't great, but simply installing Intel PowerTOP and having it apply all its suggestions on each boot made it easily the most power-conservative laptop I've ever owned. (The OLED screen I think helps with that.) Whereas my work MacBook Pro (2021 model maybe?) had decent power management up until macOS 12 junked up GPU switching, making typing horribly laggy unless I disabled GPU switching entirely -- but since that forced the external GPU, battery life took a nosedive.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago>I’m convinced at this point that USB-C is a cursed standard and will never “just work”. If you disagree, then please look up any article that tries to explain how USB-C works and all the things you have to keep in mind if you want to buy a damn cable for your device that does what you want. And then add Thunderbolt to the mix. The solution is to purchase nothing but Thunderbolt cables, which are universal inasmuch as they support every subset of options. (Obviously this is not the cheapest approach, but NASA said it best: "Faster, better, cheaper — pick any two").
- midasuni 3y agoNo issues on my t470 with Ubuntu 22.04
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIn 2018, I was studying Linux in school and I had enough space from my Pell Grant that I could consider a very high-quality laptop purchase for educational purposes. I readily selected a ThinkPad T580. Lenovo has/had a whole line of ThinkPads which are certified for Linux, about half and half Red Hat and Ubuntu. Curiously, many of these certified machines shipped with Windows 10. I ordered from the manufacturer's website, and the really cool part was the versatile configurator which let me LEGO-together a machine exactly of my choosing, from many disparate but compatible options. It was assembled and shipped direct to me from China. So I received my Red Hat-certified notebook, immediately deleted Windows 10 without activating it, and installed CentOS, which was crashy and buggy. I decided that a more cutting-edge approach might help, so installed Fedora, and it worked a treat! I ran Fedora until Christmas 2021, when I basically renounced Linux, since I had no more personal or professional need to run it on bare metal, and installed the OEM Windows 10. But that T580 under Fedora was always rock-solid. All hardware fully supported, no ifs, ands or buts. No crashes or bugs or problems that would send me to Support. (One time I got ketchup in the spacebar, though.) I don't doubt that the certified Ubuntu experience would be just as smooth, and so I have no hesitation recommending certified ThinkPads to Linux enthusiasts.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoI’ve had good luck with just-released Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu preinstalled (the “developer edition”). Everything works out of the box and Ubuntu provides upgrade paths while retaining all drivers and compatibility. No need to wait for a 3-year-old laptop. It is more expensive of course :(
- angulardragon03 3y agoSounds nice! Unfortunately the XPS13 9315 I have (similar to the XPS13 Plus you have) doesn't have webcam support out of the box and has graphical driver glitches (both apparently due to missing driver support from Intel). The OEM 20.04 image does supposedly include these, but if you reinstall you're out of luck it seems.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoIf you reinstall stock ubuntu you might be out of luck. You can do a preinstalled image backup and reinstall from that if needed, that preserves the drivers and tweaks from the oem image.
- davidw 3y agoI got one of those for work last fall and while Ubuntu works great on it, one hardware choice they made is something I am not a fan of: the "borderless" trackpad. I am always accidentally hitting the thing and generating mouse events that I did not want to and it's pretty annoying. Doesn't have anything to do with the OS, just a bad HW choice they made aiming for some kind of 'clean' look.
- zamnos 3y agoDoes palm rejection not work on that hardware?
- pjfin123 3y agoI have a Dell Latitude 5490, which was cheap refurbished from Amazon, and it works great with Ubuntu.
- rescrack 3y agoIs sleep/hibernate working for you? I could never get it to work on mine.
- juujian 3y ago> There is a workaround to the electrical noise: try running the CPU at a lower speed... When running the CPU slower, the noise is much less severe. That holds true for all my devices. And I noticed that performance for ~90% of applications doesn't really suffer. I only run computationally intensive stuff every other day or so, and when I do I turn the setting back to "performance" (if I remember). The only exception is for some reason... Gmail. just doubles or triples the already slow time of opening the site. Which is not a dealbreaker for linux laptops. It's a dealbreaker form gmail frankly.
- quickthrower2 3y agoTry https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui
- juujian 3y agoWhat kind of black magic is this? :O
- quickthrower2 3y agoI just edited the link btw. Not sure what version you got
- juujian 3y agoOh, I see. I vaguely remember using that html version before I got too invested in the "Promotion" and "Social" tabs as additional filters. It is very responsive though, maybe it's time to go back.
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- ncphil 3y agoI've stuck with ThinkPads for Linux over the last decade. Thanks to the OP, I'll now keep an eye on used Dells. My work issued me a later model Precision a while ago (that they require me to run Windows on: the desktop engineering folks have my number, as I'm the OG who helped take us from 3270 terminals to desktop PCs at the turn of the century), but I've been reasonably impressed with it over time. Would like to see if something like it would actually be more useful than the X250 I've been running in my personal life the last 2 years.
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- patrakov 3y agoDell Inspiron 7415 also works OK-ish, except for the digital pen (reported: https://marc.info/?l=linux-input&m=168275886027392&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-input&m=168275886027392&w=2). No coil whine, but bad sRGB coverage and poor-quality (low level + hiss + non-zero DC offset) internal microphone. But at least Windows users suffer from the same issues. So pick your poison.
- vbezhenar 3y agoI bought cheap Latitude 3410 with Ubuntu preinstalled and its Linux compatibility was perfect. I installed Fedora and without further configuration everything just worked. If anyone looks for Linux laptop, my recommendation would be Dell Latitude or Precision laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled with Intel GPU.
- nix0n 3y agoNote to the author or anyone else having similar problems with a Thunderbolt/USB-C dock on a Dell running Linux: Try hard-resetting the dock. (Just yank the power and put it back in.)
- hddherman 3y agoHi, author here. I gave that a try as well, but in my experience it didn't improve the situation much. After giving it some thought I suspect that it may or may not be related to Thunderbolt settings in UEFI that refer to enabling Thunderbolt support in the pre-boot environment. I'll make sure to update the post if I discover anything new regarding this.
- guss77 3y agoI agree - I think the problem is mostly the dock: I have a Dell Precision and a similar dock - TB16 - at the office and a Cable Matters dock at home (with a similar peripheral setup), and the CM never gave me any trouble while the TB16 always have issues with one of the external displays not connecting (sometimes one, sometimes the other), the USB hub taking ages to init and then sometimes disconnecting in the middle of the day, and other stuff. Hard reseting the dock (disconnect power and TB cables and reconnect) sometimes helps, but not always. Also Google "tb16 xhci disconnects" for more issues and workarounds.
- thebrid 3y agoBoth Dell and Lenovo will sell you laptops with Ubuntu. The selection is admittedly (significantly) smaller than for Windows laptops, but it certainly removes uncertainty over whether the hardware will be supported. My last two personal laptops came with Ubuntu pre-installed - the first a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and more recently a Ryzen-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13. I've been extremely happy with both.
- jseliger 3y agoBoth Dell and Lenovo will sell you laptops with Ubuntu. The selection is admittedly (significantly) smaller than for Windows laptops, but it certainly removes uncertainty over whether the hardware will be supported. It seems strange to me that, over the last 15 years, hardware makers and sellers haven't tried harder to commoditize their complements and ensure that every computer they sell is at least Linux capable and ready to go.
- xupybd 3y agoUnfortunately the vast majority of their customers use Windows. So there is little commercial drive to add Linux support to everything. I'm glad that it's starting with a few models.
- dark-star 3y agoI have used Linux on multiple Dell Latitude laptops (6510, 6540, 7380) and it has always worked out of the box and completely flawlessly, including all integrated peripherals (even WWAN cards, smart card reader and dual GPU setups), EXCEPT for the fingerprint reader. Sleep and Hibernate both work fine, external monitors just work, docking station with its peripherals just works, ... The missing fingerprint reader is no big deal for me since I didn't plan on using that anyway. tl;dr: I can vouch for (at least these) older Latitude models being very fun to use with Linux. I'm using Manjaro exclusively though, other Linux (or BSD) variants may or may not work as well....
- vondur 3y agoThe 10th gen mobile CPU’s are notoriously hot and power hungry. They behave similarly under windows. I mostly tried to purchase mobile Ryzen based laptops during that time.
- a6 3y agoFramework laptops are also firmly in that sweet spot, with the great repairability and flexibility being a big bonus.
- bdl211 3y agoI was wondering about the "sweetspot" of laptops to use with Linux and doah, of course, it's because the community has had a chance to update the drivers and make sure things work. Which dovetails into my curiousity of Linux computer makers selling hardware well matched to Linux and make sure Linux works out of the box vs using a new Windows PC. I wondered why it would make a difference and this also explains that. Thanks for the explanation.
- footlose_3815 3y agoThe title is more optimistic than the article... Not to sound like a contrarian, but how can it be a sweet spot if you write an article on making it better and doesn't even want to use the laptop?