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I'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 issu

I'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 ago
I wonder what makes getting sleep to work consistently a challenge. Hasn't ACPI been around since the 90s?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bionade24 3y ago
  The 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 ago
  You'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 That was a good thing but S3 has been replaced by S0ix on many laptops.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 ago
Have 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.
secondcoming 3y ago
I went for one of Dell's Mobile Precision laptops. Total beast apart from the battery life. Get the minimum RAM from Dell and upgrade it aftermarket.
m45t3r 3y ago
> My requirements are basically powerful hardware, a real GPU with nvidia strongly preferred, and good Linux support. Unless the NVIDIA GPU is for Windows usage or CUDA, I would strongly recommend a AMD GPU instead. My last laptop had a NVIDIA GPU and it was a hell of issues inside Linux, that was amplified for the fact that I needed to use the NVIDIA GPU or I would get no output in its HDMI port. For sure, this was a gaming laptop and I expect a Dell XPS or Precision to use the sanest choice (connect all outputs to the iGPU instead). My Thinkpad P14s Gen 1 (new old stock) with AMD Ryzen 4750U and a Vega 7 iGPU is much better, no issues at all. I had a Dell Precision 5530 from my previous workplace with a NVIDIA GPU (don't remember what) that was much better behaved in Linux, but in this case I just disabled the NVIDIA GPU and used the integrated Intel graphics (that really sucked). So if you are not interested to using NVIDIA GPU at all in Linux I would recommend this one, but to use it day-to-day in Linux desktop I would avoid NVIDIA GPUs.
- ACS_Solver 3y ago
  I do some gamedev work and Nvidia GPUs are the standard there. They dominate the market so it's more useful to develop with Nvidia, and any new graphics library, feature or such will inevitably be better supported and tested on Nvidia. Unlike the CPU situation, where Intel and AMD CPUs are perfectly viable competitors, AMD definitely makes second-tier GPUs. Nvidia on Linux has its annoyances but I consider the issue overblown. On desktop, it's annoying that Nvidia drivers have a separate installation workflow and require you to regenerate the kernel module after every kernel version change, but it's far from the worst Linux issue I've dealt with. On laptops, yes, Optimus is one of the most annoying technologies I've encountered but in the past, I've been able to circumvent it by disabling the iGPU (not a good choice if you need longer battery times though) and on the latest Debian, GPU switching actually works transparently.

cout 3y ago

I wonder what makes getting sleep to work consistently a challenge. Hasn't ACPI been around since the 90s?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bionade24 3y ago
The 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 ago
You'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 ago

Have 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.

secondcoming 3y ago

I went for one of Dell's Mobile Precision laptops. Total beast apart from the battery life. Get the minimum RAM from Dell and upgrade it aftermarket.

m45t3r 3y ago

> My requirements are basically powerful hardware, a real GPU with nvidia strongly preferred, and good Linux support. Unless the NVIDIA GPU is for Windows usage or CUDA, I would strongly recommend a AMD GPU instead. My last laptop had a NVIDIA GPU and it was a hell of issues inside Linux, that was amplified for the fact that I needed to use the NVIDIA GPU or I would get no output in its HDMI port. For sure, this was a gaming laptop and I expect a Dell XPS or Precision to use the sanest choice (connect all outputs to the iGPU instead). My Thinkpad P14s Gen 1 (new old stock) with AMD Ryzen 4750U and a Vega 7 iGPU is much better, no issues at all. I had a Dell Precision 5530 from my previous workplace with a NVIDIA GPU (don't remember what) that was much better behaved in Linux, but in this case I just disabled the NVIDIA GPU and used the integrated Intel graphics (that really sucked). So if you are not interested to using NVIDIA GPU at all in Linux I would recommend this one, but to use it day-to-day in Linux desktop I would avoid NVIDIA GPUs.

ACS_Solver 3y ago
I do some gamedev work and Nvidia GPUs are the standard there. They dominate the market so it's more useful to develop with Nvidia, and any new graphics library, feature or such will inevitably be better supported and tested on Nvidia. Unlike the CPU situation, where Intel and AMD CPUs are perfectly viable competitors, AMD definitely makes second-tier GPUs. Nvidia on Linux has its annoyances but I consider the issue overblown. On desktop, it's annoying that Nvidia drivers have a separate installation workflow and require you to regenerate the kernel module after every kernel version change, but it's far from the worst Linux issue I've dealt with. On laptops, yes, Optimus is one of the most annoying technologies I've encountered but in the past, I've been able to circumvent it by disabling the iGPU (not a good choice if you need longer battery times though) and on the latest Debian, GPU switching actually works transparently.