Where are these Linux XPS’s on Dell’s website? Windows is the only option for 13 and 15 inch XPS. If I search Linux I only see an XPS desktop and some junk.
How’s the track pad? Track pad and MacOS is still far ahead of the competition. Despite all the backlash Apple gets for TouchBar and Catalina it’s still miles ahead of the competition.
There is? There is an Ubuntu button on the bottom right but using it to filter laptops doesn't bring anything up for me. Other filter options work fine; I'm in Alberta.
“How’s the track pad? Track pad and MacOS is still far ahead of the competition.”
This is one of the main reasons I am keeping my MacBook. The trackpad feel and the gestures on the Mac are much better on then MacBook than on either windows or Linux. When I have my windows laptop on my lap to work everything’s feels really fiddly compared to the MacBook.
I think this is mostly a personal preference. I am used to trackpad in my Dell laptop under Debian, which it is quite practical. But if I have to just click on a link using a MacBook, the experience is so infuriating that my colleague fears for the physical integrity of his computer...
Specs and spec configurations are only a small piece of what makes a good dev laptop. Is it ergonomic and lightweight? Is the trackpad large and the keyboard comfortable to type on for extended periods of time? How tightly does the hardware integrate with the software (i.e.: can I use multi-touch gestures on the trackpad to move through my environment quickly)?
Say what you will about Apple and how they treat developers (read: not well), but the modern MacBook Pro (sans touchbar) is truly a great dev machine.
Thinkpads have much nicer keyboards. I also never use the trackpad for anything, and turn it off immediately. I guess don't conflate what is good for you, as good for everyone.
Pretty much everyone touting MacBook Pros as great dev machines mentions the touchpad. As a person who doesn't like touchpads (despite having used company issued MacBook Pros these past few years), I find nothing compelling about the MacBook Pro versus other laptops as a dev machine.
Macs are not really that great anymore. Between the keyboard, price and lack of upgradability, you have to have a pretty flexible definition of "good for developers" to choose one over even a Windows laptop with WSL, let alone a Ubuntu one.
I think everyone is going to have a different opinion on this but aside from the keyboard fiasco I think Macbooks are still a good option. I agree you cannot upgrade them, but honestly all I can ever see wanting to upgrade is memory but hell, if I Just go with 16gb from the gate I cannot see the need to upgrade in the lifetime of the machine. Its a couple grand but going to last me a while. Linux laptops are still a little flaky for me. I have experienced a couple in the past year and its still not as streamlined as I want. I just don't care about configuration and fine tuning it. WSL is far from ready but I think maybe the Pro version of WSL will yield better results. I think there was still some configuration steps for me that were a little janky especially since I like to use Jetbrains editors. I think PyCharm now does a better job of supporting WSL but again, not as streamlined as I want. Not sure what kind of "developing" you are doing but Macs still work.
It's a couple grand but that used to be OK cause you could sell the machines years later and previously they held their value well. Now the free keyboard program only covers the machines for 4 years from the date of purchase, after that they're not going to be worth much. Demand for these Macbooks will probably be tied closely to the lack of alternatives too and disappear quickly.
I keep seeing complaints from devs about the prices of MacBooks. One has to wonder, aren’t devs paid enough these days to not care about the extra few hundred dollars every few years?
I have heard that the trackpad on the XPS 13 is the pinnacle of Windows (and presumably also Linux) trackpads. Which is to say, in the ballpark of the MacBook ones.
> How tightly does the hardware integrate with the software
Probably not all that well, but probably way better than on a Windows laptop with an aftermarket Linux installation at least.
I really really want MacBooks to remain the go-to dev machine, but over the past few years the company has shown a distinct lack of interest in that market (aside from the Mac Pro announcement, though that's arguably a separate market). We'll see if anything changes with the rumored 16-inch MBP, but it's not surprising to me that companies like Dell are smelling blood in the water.
Apple is no longer a product company - they haven't focused on their product quality in years. They've become a cult, and customers like you have become their true product. Here's some highlights from that list of great dev machine "features"
* No ability to run kernel level debugging tools like dtruss without completely compromising the security of your machine.
* Unreachable battery that requires a one week maintenance window to replace. If your battery is part of a defective batch, you have to give up your work machine for an entire week to replace the battery.
* Super flaky logic board that's completely separate from the main board, with zero ability to troubleshoot or debug any issues with it. It also causes lots of unexpected issues, like the haptic feedback failing, resulting in a touchpad with no click.
* Absolutely no user land documentation at all. If you need to figure out how to configure or use some piece of software, good luck looking through random message boards and blog posts.
* Keycaps that wear through after a few months of heavy use.
* Designed with insufficient cooling, running at near full load will cause the CPU and GPU to massively throttle to reduce heat.
* Only has proprietary Thunderbolt 3 interfaces, without even a single standard interface (the headphone port doesn't count for much)
* No standard USB interface type, and charges massive markup on the required adapaters to allow the use of existing devices.
Fully agree, throw on top of your points a premium price tag for said flawed products and the sun has set on Apple hardware. It's not the same company Jobs ran.
It's backwards compatible with a new and not yet widespread USB format. How does that help me connect my existing monitor, or my keyboard and mouse that are still using the old USB connector?
Am I the only one who actually prefers smaller touchpads with physical buttons at the bottom? I've tried using Macbook's touchpad but couldn't stand it at all.
Besides that, most of the devs that I know seem to rarely use the touchpad of their laptops, relying mostly on the keyboard for navigation (these are your normal IntelliJ using devs, not the Vim warriors), so the space for a larger touchpad is usually just wasted space.
You’re not supposed to do anything else except what you want to.
I’ve typed on a laptop sitting below an external monitor for since 2006ish. I do this because I want a narrow keyboard without a numeric keypad centred below my displays.
I want a touchpad directly below the keyboard so that can reach it quickly before returning to the home row. I want everything as symmetrical as possible.
I touch type with a non qwerty layout so I want my keyboard to have the same feel regardless of if I’m in the office or away on business.
I find heavy, long throw keys make my wrists tired so I use a very light pressure short travel much more comfortable over the long term. Eg the kind of switches you get on laptops.
I have an IBM model m and a Pok3r with MX Brown switches on the for comparison and I don’t really care for either of them.
Your usecases maybe different from mine. I’m fine with that.
I'm glad my employer outfits me with both a Linux workstation and a Linux laptop. One of the little fears of looking for a new job is I'll want to filter out some high percentage (like 90%?) of positions for the petty reason that they just dump a macbook pro on every dev as their sole machine. Thanks but no thanks, I can't stand any Apple hardware or software.
As another comment mentioned, there is no perfect "for devs" computer. Developer tastes are too broad and disjoint.
Why? Because you can end up with a single machine than having have to constantly worry about having same environment and data and all that between multiple machines.
If you plug in your laptop to an external monitor and a keyboard, you essentially get a desktop, except you can take it out there with you without worrying about leaving any data or config behind.
If you have to "constantly worry" about your setup, something is wrong. There are many ways to right such a wrong. In my case I don't worry a bit, I set things up when I have a new machine and I'm done, my tweaks afterwards are few and far between and easily synced or reapplied. I'm not even making use of VMs or containers. If I do find I'm missing data on one or the other, a quick scp later and I'm fine.
When you plug in to a dock you "essentially get a desktop" except in all the important ways: workstations are much more powerful (for me the full build difference is 25 minutes on a 2014 workstation vs 45 minutes on a 2018 laptop; our newer workstations are faster still and will bump me from 64 GB RAM to 128 while the laptop has only a passable 32), don't overheat or degrade from constant power, have faster and bigger storage, have various peripheral ports already (often more than docking stations even (and functional, though this is a jab at a specific keyboard: https://matias.ca/aluminum/mac/viewer/3.jpg -- imagine what happens if you plug in a yubikey)), support proper gigabit+ networking, typically have better GPUs (or make it trivial to insert better GPUs) and can drive more and bigger and faster displays...
Workstations also contribute to healthier work cultures. They demand a desk that's "yours" and can be personalized some which is a tempting thing to take away in laptop-only orgs, they demand a reasonably secure office space and trustworthy maintenance staff, they demand a good office network that among other things also enables a dumb and cheap windows laptop work flow: sign in remotely (like with NoMachine) and everything is done on the workstation, it's also another solution to the 'worry' of missing state. (Some companies take that to another level and cheap desktops are also dumb clients to a cloud VM.) Finally they help avoid the feeling of your work always being taken home with you -- even if you additionally have a laptop it's more there for work-from-home or travel support, not the primary work mode, and expectations of out-of-the-office-hours tasks and availability being normal are gone.
I wouldn't buy a MacBook until they sort out the keyboard problems, but when my employer gives me the latest MacBook Pro to work on, I'm absolutely happy! It's a wonderful machine, and if it breaks – not my problem at all.
There was a time when you could reasonably evaluate employers with the Joel Test: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... But if you take "10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems" as accurate, it seems very few orgs these days lack serious problems. Ignoring the other criteria, few seem to meet even the relatively easy to meet criteria of having quiet spaces (8) and having the best hardware (9) -- or at least if not 'best', then more impressive than what the typical employee has at home.
In my opinion the answers are yes to most of your questions.
I find the XPS13 to be a replacement for the 11” MacBook Air. It’s almost the same physical size except that you get a 13” 4K screen, a quad core processor, 16Gb RAM and 1TB of storage.
The keyboard has a nice feel.
The track pad works well now (IMHO) although out of the box I don’t get all the gestures that macOS has. To be honest I can live with two finger scrolling and better keyboard shortcuts than macOS.
The only real issues left for me are around mixing HiDPI with 1440p external monitor, some sleep issues and Gnome clunkiness in the latest Ubuntu.
Pretty sure those are fixable.
Oh and Firefox could definitely make better use of the GPU.
In my experience, there is a non-zero chance that a kernel update will render the system unable to start the display driver.
Things may have improved in the last couple years, but I switched to AMD and never looked back.
Laptop graphics are one area where you run into issues with drivers still sometimes. I have some MSI laptops where the ACPI tables are fucked hard enough that you can't boot Ubuntu with the nVidia binary blobs installed. Dell is usually better about supporting Linux on their hardware, but even then the binary blobs are a bit of a risk factor.
MSI are the only laptops I have had serious "I give up" issues with trying to install Linux.
Bought one, found official company line is not supported at all, seems deliberately, gave it to my 15 year old.
It was so flimsy that six months of school bag transport, in special bag with laptop section, it is totally trashed. Flimsiest laptop I ever saw, by a long, long way. Plus for the specs, it was slow.
Luckily I was shelling out for the expensive but comprehensive insurance.
I wondered this myself. However my work got me an XPS 15 at my request (with Windows), and I installed Ubuntu on it. I can switch between NVIDIA and Intel graphics just fine. I haven't tested the USB-C video output though, just the HDMI.
The Precision 5000 line uses the same case as the XPS 15 and is mostly the same. A bit more expensive, you choose the parts that go in it, and some different support plans.
The main things are CPU microcode updates, GPU drivers and wireless LAN/bluetooth drivers. But on some devices (don't think this applies to the Dell models in question) if you get into an esoteric hardware configuration you could also have proprietary drivers for things like high speed wired LAN, storage chipsets/devices, audio, fingerprint readers etc.
This is typically stuff you can get on your own usually by downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website and either extracting firmware from their Windows drivers or downloading a Linux-specific driver package, if available. All Dell is doing is collecting it all up and pre-installing/configuring it for you.
A few months ago, I was looking for a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed since I was interested in learning ROS but was pretty disappointed that most of the options available were either 13 inches or clunky/ugly laptops.
I ended up buying the XPS 15 and just installed Ubuntu alongside pre-installed Windows 10. It wasn't without hiccups but thankfully those who came before me posted their solutions on how to fix some of the issues, namely the Wifi card not being supported.
All in all, for my basic needs of coding C++/Python and using ROS, I'm pretty happy with my decision.
Aside from the Dell battery issues, the XPS 15 is a workhorse that runs linux flawlessly. I had some bluetooth messiness but was able to resolve it playing driver bingo. You'll be happy.
Given the state of GPU drivers on Linux someone may end up capturing a bit of this market by launching a great AMD CPU+GPU laptop with a good Zen 2 APU or CPU+GPU pairing. These days you end up having to choose good drivers but poor performance (Intel) or good performance but poor drivers (Nvidia)[1]. The open-source AMD drivers are supposedly finally good and Zen 2 a great CPU on the desktop. So I'd love a Lenovo X1 Carbon with AMD for my next laptop[2].
[1] Before anyone comes in to defend Nvidia, the closed-source drivers may be great for you but the closed-source nature of them means you have to jump through some hoops to install them and some things will simply not work properly (e.g., actual Wayland support)
[2] Bonus points for 1) ECC RAM 2) 32GB+ total RAM 3) 2 or more full-speed SSD slots
What can you actually replace on the X395 that you can't on the X1? RAM is now soldered and that used to be the only difference from what I remember. I currently have the T460s and like the size. The T495s would be the equivalent but looking at it they are all about the same size now. I thought the X395 would be smaller.
Either way the X395 and T495 both have a maximum of 1080p screen. I have a 1440p and will never go back. In fact I want the X1 for the 4K screen and the beefier chassis. I'm on my third panel and they all develop white spots from the cover not being protective enough.
Just bought an X1 Extreme gen 2, and immediately upgraded (aftermarket) to 64GB of RAM and 2x 1TB M.2 drives. Feels pretty good. Ubuntu install was very smooth. The only thing I hate is the super cheap-feeling keyboard.
The Extreme looks great on paper but I'm not sure I want to go up to that size of laptop. I'd have to handle it to figure out. Nvidia graphics make it a non-starter for me right now though.
Before non-Linux people jump to conclusions from your reply: Intel GPUs work just as good (if not better) as in Windows. They are the best solution for a non-gaming laptop.
The drivers are great as I mentioned, probably better than the Windows ones indeed. But the hardware is slow. Non-starter for gaming and for normal graphics they're also slow. Browsers are now becoming GPU accelerated and screen sizes larger. Driving the modern web at 4K is non-trivial.
Modern Intel iGPUs are more than enough for browser acceleration. I mean the bigger issue is that that acceleration is most often disabled on Linux at least for chromium based browsers.
It's even worse for Firefox, although hopefully improving soon. You can definitely get away with an Intel GPU for general usage. We're talking about developer laptops though and there's definitely space for more GPU performance even if you're not doing gaming or ML. I've switched to a tiling WM in large part to reduce the GPU workload for example.
I have a Thinkpad with an Intel GPU and it works just fine in Firefox on Linux with Gnome driving a 4K screen. This is my main development setup. Intel GPUs have been more than enough for non-gaming needs for years. I've no idea what these complaints are about. I don't do web development though.
I would like my next setup to be AMD based though.
GNOME experiences are very mixed for some reason. In my T460s with a 1440p screen GNOME was too slow. After tweaking all sorts of things I just switched to a tiling WM (sway). Part of that is software but there are plenty of things where you want the extra GPU. Compared to 10 years ago it's a first-world problem though, I agree.
My Intel 5500 drives Firefox at 4K just fine (actually, 6.6K because render at a multiple of 96 DPI, then xrandr to scale down, since GDK_SCALE only supports integers). Driving Zoom at that resolution tends to be painful though...
ECC ram on a laptop makes less sense as users are unlikely to run the kind of long jobs that get disrupted by memory errors. If you get a memory error, worst case your word processor will crash rather than loose weeks of molecular dynamics simulation.
EDIT: OP corrected comment - read below only out of idle curiosity!
Minor fact-checking / naming correction.
The CPU core architecture progression has been Zen, Zen+, Zen 2.
The retail consumer desktop and laptop CPUs have been designated Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 with model numbers to help guide you on performance, but starting with a 3 (e.g. 3800X) in desktop CPU indicates Zen 2, while a 3 in mobile or desktop APU indicates Zen+.
Current laptops are based on Zen+, including examples of Ryzen 5 3500U (low power/15W) and 3550H (medium power/35W) and Ryzen 7 3750H (high end).
Many of us are excited for the release of Zen 2 based laptop chips, though!
The generation gap within mobile and desktop Ryzens of the same leading digit model number is really atrocious marketing. Almost like AMD is trying to take advantage of people by pretending mobile is a generation ahead.
The purpose is to position products in a way that avoids a negative impression, in a manner that might impact sales. I would not be surprised to hear that OEMs view this quirk product positioning in a positive light. It doesn't take much to imagine a customer thinking to themselves "Why are the laptop CPUs only in the 2000's when the desktop CPUs are in the 3000's? I'll wait and buy later."
So AMD wants to position the current-best available products in each market segment as the current generation numerically, branding-wise, without respect to manufacturing process details. Most consumers don't know what a "process" or "architecture" is anyway. Then the nerds who track these things, such as ourselves, will complain, but we won't be fooled by it.
If that seems to you like taking advantage of people, then yes, that is exactly what they are doing.
Intel dodges this problem (at least for the last 4-5 years) by shipping their mobile SKUs on a new march or process first, and the nerds waiting on DIY Desktop parts their "8th Gen" or "9th Gen" or whatever later.
I could not agree more. Among some of my professional contacts I am the person they go to for Linux advice (a role I am not sure that I deserve, to be frank). I try to help nonetheless, and over the last few years my attitude of "Well [this] could work or [that] could work" approach to GPUs has hardened into two hard-and-fast recommendations:
1. For laptops: Don't bother with a separate/discrete GPU. Or if you must because you dual-boot Windows to play games or what-not, just keep the dGPU disabled under Linux.
2. For desktops: Unless you need CUDA, get an AMD GPU for the drivers (a phrase that, once upon a time, I never thought I would say).
I cannot speak from experience on AMD drivers for mobile APUs. However, their desktop GPU Linux drivers have impressed me the last few years, which gives me hope they can achieve the same level of stability for APUs, even if it has a time lag (e.g. Linux drivers get features 3-months after Windows-based Laptop SKUs are released).
I'm still hanging on to an old Broadwell-based X1 Carbon. If Lenovo releases an X-series or T-series Thinkpad with the upcoming Renoir APU (Zen2-based) I'm am very likely to finally upgrade. Add an option for 32GB of RAM and it enters "Shut up and take my money" territory.
Nothing is particularly special about the Broadwell X1, in that it isn't better than the subsequent models (thajt . It was, however, point where the X1 line hit its sweet spot and stabilized, while also having the first Intel iGPUs to have the oomph to drive multiple HiDPI displays for non-gaming workloads (technically Haswell did as well, but the Haswell X1 had an "experimental" keyboard design that utterly sucked, including a touch bar four years before Apple!).
If you look at the X1 line since then, it hasn't changed much except incremental CPU upgrades (and that's a good thing, the design works!) and fixing an occasional generation that had lackluster speakers or a lackluster maximum screen brightness.
In an era before Dell's "XPS Developer Edition" line hit its stride, one reason you would get a Thinkpad was that so many developers of Linux had one. As a Linux user (versus someone actively contributing to DEs, WMs, drivers, etc.) you benefited from their hard work put into fixing their personal annoyances with drivers. Remember this is coming out an era where the very idea of a Laptop's WiFi working in Linux was a dice roll. Issues still exist, for sure, but things really have improved since the 2000-2010 era.
In every case, there is always a chance of warts. Picking a specific distro or DE or version thereof may still bring more pain than others. Nonetheless, my personal and direct experiences with Dell XPS (13-inch, no dGPU), Thinkpad X-series and T-series, and System 76, have all been positive since about 2015. Total number of systems configured and supported (loosely, for friends over time) with each is over 5 in each category. At work we have many System 76 Galago Pros in use. They do good work, and as others have noted you can get nice things like 32GB of RAM. The physical fit-and-finish is still a half-step lower than Dell and Lenovo (imo), but the overall value is good, and we still use them partly to support such an awesome, Linux-focused company.
Again, there will be occasional warts [0], but far less than getting an MSI "gaming laptop" that has better hardware specs for cheaper, and trying to run Linux on it. It seems like a good deal, but then and after fighting Nvidia drivers for hours, you finally get into a working environment, only to find that keyboard function keys may never truly work (just one example among many, from many tier 2 brands, that I have personally helped troubleshoot), or some other deal-breaker in the experience.
I have no direct experience with Purism, unfortunately.
[0] An example of a random wart: even though I have helped set up four Thinkpads with Ubuntu-derived Distros (Mint, Elementary, Ubuntu itself, PopOS) in the last 2 years, a friend recently had issues with stock Debian on the latest X1 Carbon (I was not involved, but he is a Linux guy who knows what he is doing). Mint just works on that model, but he prefers the free-as-in-freedom of Debian and ran into some snags.
Same here. I've worked for mostly Mac or Windows shops, so I'm the Linux expert just cause that's what I've preferred. I've tried a few different setups, but I'm basically an Ubuntu/Gnome3 Linux casual. It's a nice title to have, but I definitely don't deserve it.
Also, I too am an X1 Carbon user.
Speaking of CUDA, do you have any recommendations for setting up Linux for rendering? I was in a job once where I was planning to do something like this but never got around to it.
I use Ryzen 5 2400G APU for my media box (Archlinux with Kodi) and it has been quite bad. I am disappointed that I spent money on it but I'm living with it and waiting for the software to improve.
With 2400g a year ago I had frequent GPU driver crashes (daily). Now it crashes once a month or so. Running Steam and some light games was not possible at all (haven't tried recently) because it had terrible frame rates, shader and geometry glitches. Meanwhile on Windows it worked just fine.
At the same time my experience with Nvidia on Archlinux has been very good. It has good performance and overall it works as it should.
I had similar experience with AMD GPU drivers 10 years ago when I started using Linux so I stick to Nvidia. I would like to use AMD cards but the software seems to be absolute garbage.
A have also had very good experience with Intel GPUs on Linux in laptops but they are not meant for gaming.
ECC is the stickler to my recollection. AMD apus don't support ECC. Xeons are usually bundled with NVIDIA cards, due to generally lacking on board video.
But that won't fix ECC. Xeon is usually bundled with quadro or radeon pro. I've not heard of a radeon pro option.
Barring ECC. I've got a first gen A485 2700u. Two NVMe drives, 32GB ram. With an option to go 64GB. Great Linux support. The trade off is weight. Since ryzen is not as power efficient at idle I need bigger batteries. Performance is next to an i5 8th gen u series.
Ice lake is just shy of AMD apu performance last I looked. But more power efficient.
I've moved on from a high performance laptop. I have an ITX build that fits into a camera case. For being a digital nomad. Then when at a coffee shop. I have a git lab instance in my home lab with CI/CD. Changes are committed automatically on save pushed and deployed to my home server. For testing code while I'm at the coffee shop.
AMD and intel both haven been phenomenal for linux. I have a low profile AMD wx2100 for my portable ITX build. Perfect for non gaming. I miss Nvidia
s performance edge. But not the driver mess.
So, I bought a Dell Precision 5520 back in 2017 and I'm so impressed with the machine (despite the price tag) that I feel like I really have to chime in.
32GiB of ECC, 2TiB NVMe SSD (and an optional 2.5" SATA bay, but I opted for larger battery), 4k screen (although I took the 1080p), and an nvidia m1000 - but the Xeon inside has an iGPU.
oh and it came with linux pre-installed.
I have used the GPU as a renderer and I'm pleased to say that it also worked well under optirun/bumblebee. (although, I'm not a gamer, and this gfx card would not be as good as a GTX 1050 which was contemporary in the XPS line). Although when ramping the system at full tilt (CPU+GPU) the thermal solution is unable to keep up.
iGPU means that my X11/Wayland doesn't break, and since I don't use the power of a discrete graphics card most of the time it works absolutely wonderfully.
My only greivance with this hardware is that the black rubber-soft surface picks up hand grease super quickly-
Almost the same, except mine was a Precision 7520 -- no Xeon processor, no ECC, but an AMD Polaris 11 based dGPU. My general advice for Dells is to spring extra for the Precision laptops -- sure, they are heavier, but the build quality and ease of upgrades make it worth it. You can even claw some of that cash back by purchasing them via the outlet.dell.com -- it will be a return, but it will have the exact same warranty as a new one.
I wonder what it takes to have more than 16GB of RAM in these "for developers" laptops.
I really like the form factor and the fact that it works well with Linux out of the box, but I am sure I will regret buying a laptop with 16GB of soldered memory in 2019.
I'd like developer laptops to max out at 2 GB of RAM and have really slow single-core processors. Then I wouldn't be subjected to software written for machines with 64 GB of RAM and the latest high-end Intel processor.
I'm with you, but I'd rather they have 64 or 128 super, super slow cores. That way they'd make better use of threads, and hopefully uncover and fix more race-conditions and other concurrency bugs during development.
I was about to reply the same. It's 2019 and many applications still take forever to start and are unresponsive as hell. How did we take orders of magnitude improvement in every metric and make it just as bad? The magic of Software Engineering I guess.
These machines are literally supercomputers but they still struggle to perform common basic operations without delay even though much slower computers could manage a tolerable UX 20 years ago.
How? By focusing on developer productivity and not the consumer. We can't get any more anti-consumer in the the tech industry if we tried at this point.
By using a remote machine, you gain in upfront cost but you lose dev time due to poor tooling. It's possible to use X11, SSH, SSHFS, or Kubernetes but it never truly replaces the flexibility of developing locally with an IDE. Kubernetes tooling _might_ get there in the future though.
If you have a team at work dedicated to the tooling problem, remote dev can become really nice though.
It's absurd to me that this "Developer Edition" laptop can be purchased with, at most, half of the 32 GB of RAM that my 6.5 year old ThinkPad has had since day one.
I have 8GB on my Mac and I'm constantly slowed down by lack of RAM. Built a Hackintosh with 32GB and it's a world of difference. I don't know how people survive with such little RAM.
I do all my development on a Mac with 8 GB of RAM. It’s fine for my needs; I’m just very picky about keeping Chromium from running in the background on my Mac.
Spoken like someone that just uses a text editor to write JS. I used to spend a long time in massive Java codebases where the IDE would need some serious horsepower to index the code. Then I'd be running an application server for testing (inside a VM) and running another VM to for the SOLR index and another VM for the very heavy SAP ERP system. Then I've got Chrome and other apps asking for memory and processor power.
This setup is pretty common for people working on large integration projects.
Yeah, I use IntelliJ, Chrome, Photoshop and a few other smaller apps and sometimes even run Win10 on Vmware but I never see any noticeable slowdowns. I do tend to quit apps that I don't use as I hate cluttering my alt-tab list.
Call me old, but these days everything including people are so ram hungry I cannot believe the days when things were being done with less than a GB ram.
People talk like having more ram feels like a champ but as developers you might as well want to think about how things can be achieved using less ram.
I don't care about using less RAM, why should I? My applications run in our private cloud and sometimes in public clouds. We optimise the parts that need optimising but it's often cheaper to scale the environment, add more SOLR servers etc than it is to jump in to the opcode and figure out the best way to get the JVM to JIT something.
Came here to say the same thing. I have an "old" T480 with 32GB of RAM. There is no way I'm buying a new laptop with half the RAM. I just don't get why the memory needle is not moving with manufacturers.
Swappable RAM and storage is a feature. I don't care if it adds 2 oz and makes the laptop thicker (the X220 was both thin an light enough for me). Bring them back, at least on "developer" machines.
So what stops Dell from making all their systems Linux friendly. Why do you have to faf with "Secure Boot" just to install an Ubuntu on an XPS15?
It's it Microsoft crippling things (technically or legally) or are Dell not capable (technically, or otherwise) of making the install of Linux work in a straightforward manner ... or what?
Does anyone else do it better? How do Lenovo compare, say?
My experience is that the Dell setups _are_ Linux friendly. Could be that enough of the hardware exists to be targeted or maybe they're submitting fixes themselves. Intel employs folks to make Linux compatible with their new hardware.
With Dell it's mostly a marketing exercise since they don't really write any of the software or drivers, they're just packaging the products (hardware and software) that others produce. They are no different than most of the other major PC manufacturers in this regard. (some of the smaller specialty Linux PC companies do go at least a bit further than this)
You can get Linux running on the vast majority of PC (desktop and laptop) models. There's value in this sort of bundle for people who want to buy a Linux machine with components known to have driver support and/or don't want to be bothered with installing and configuring it themselves.
They'd win quite few more if they fought for open drivers and firmware from the big names as well. There's a lot of people trying to make that a thing, but support from Dell could really push things forward.
Not even just 3rd party chipsets: I bought a first generation linux-based developer XPS13 and a proprietary Dell chip that only served to check that the power supply was an original Dell malfunctioned, so my laptop refused to charge and would limit CPU speed. I was left with a useless slow 13" desktop.
But AMD maybe? I think they're big enough that if they started doing it, NVidia might consider doing at least a branch of products that had open drivers.
I applaud Dell for supporting Linux on their hardware. Their main contribution should be open-source drivers for their hardware included in major Linux distributions.
That said, I would not use their pre-installed Linux because of security concerns. I would certainly install one myself, with full-disk encryption.
bought a brand new kit-out macbook the other day. the right arrow key gets stuck already. wtf? and then forgot my dongle at work, no watching hockey on my tv :( seriously, this thing is a shell of the beautiful machine i bought in 2015. but i am pretty excited that my next laptop could be linux! system76 please learn aluminum! ;)
I can physically do my work on a 13" screen. I physically can't do my work in 16 GB (well I'm exaggerating a little, but we're getting close these days.)
fwiw, I just bought a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 and Ubuntu 19.10 worked right out of the box - even wifi and proprietary nvidia drivers. I was very surprised. I haven't tested the fingerprint scanner, but I don't use biometrics, so I can't speak to that.
Yes, thinkpads work great with linux. But if I'm going to shell out more than 4000 EUR for a top of the line P-series, I just don't want to end up with a laptop that does not hibernate or throttle correctly. For that, it is essential that the vendor provides a pre-installed OS with all the functionalities.
So when am I going to get a linux driver for my XPS fingerprint reader? Still doesn't work too well. Dell also still ships killer wireless cards, which generally don't work as well with linux drivers as, say, intel. Though this is probably also because killer cards are just junk.
I second that. I own a XPS 13 9380, running archlinux and it is pretty much the only thing I am missing from Windows.
I bought the Windows XPS 13 version, just in case I had issues with Linux.
There are currently no drivers for the Goodix fingerprint reader under Linux.
I miss that it is quite useful.
I tried the Linux equivalent of Windows hello, i.e, howdy with the infrared camera but it does not work well for me and is not as secure.
Most/all of the laptop drivers are in the kernel and would be universal, or mostly universal, with other distros. I don't really care if Canonical or Red Hat or Theo de Raadt paying for it, since it will almost certainly be comparable with other distros and would be free of the Windows Tax; if you don't want OpenBSD or Unbuntu then just install something else. Plus you can do the SHA1 sum when doing your own install and know it's a valid ISO from the source.
The aluminum enclosure is gorgeous and the hardware is great.
I wish they would ditch the chintzy plastic interior tho. I would pay double for a new MacBook Pro if it supported Ubuntu and had a reasonable keyboard. I miss my old 2011 model.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadHow’s the track pad? Track pad and MacOS is still far ahead of the competition. Despite all the backlash Apple gets for TouchBar and Catalina it’s still miles ahead of the competition.
Note that you need to choose "For Work" in order to get the option for the Developer Edition with Ubuntu.
https://www.dell.com/en-ca/work/shop/laptops-ultrabooks/sr/l...
https://www.dell.com/en-ca/work/shop/laptops-ultrabooks/xps-...
Under tech specs, it will say "Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04, Linux - Included in price".
This is one of the main reasons I am keeping my MacBook. The trackpad feel and the gestures on the Mac are much better on then MacBook than on either windows or Linux. When I have my windows laptop on my lap to work everything’s feels really fiddly compared to the MacBook.
Say what you will about Apple and how they treat developers (read: not well), but the modern MacBook Pro (sans touchbar) is truly a great dev machine.
> How tightly does the hardware integrate with the software
Probably not all that well, but probably way better than on a Windows laptop with an aftermarket Linux installation at least.
I really really want MacBooks to remain the go-to dev machine, but over the past few years the company has shown a distinct lack of interest in that market (aside from the Mac Pro announcement, though that's arguably a separate market). We'll see if anything changes with the rumored 16-inch MBP, but it's not surprising to me that companies like Dell are smelling blood in the water.
* No ability to run kernel level debugging tools like dtruss without completely compromising the security of your machine.
* Unreachable battery that requires a one week maintenance window to replace. If your battery is part of a defective batch, you have to give up your work machine for an entire week to replace the battery.
* Super flaky logic board that's completely separate from the main board, with zero ability to troubleshoot or debug any issues with it. It also causes lots of unexpected issues, like the haptic feedback failing, resulting in a touchpad with no click.
* Absolutely no user land documentation at all. If you need to figure out how to configure or use some piece of software, good luck looking through random message boards and blog posts.
* Keycaps that wear through after a few months of heavy use.
* Designed with insufficient cooling, running at near full load will cause the CPU and GPU to massively throttle to reduce heat.
* Only has proprietary Thunderbolt 3 interfaces, without even a single standard interface (the headphone port doesn't count for much)
* No standard USB interface type, and charges massive markup on the required adapaters to allow the use of existing devices.
You can disable just the “debug” portion of SIP, though this is supposedly an unsupported configuration.
> Absolutely no user land documentation at all.
Contrary to what the internet has been abuzz about, there actually is some documentation. It’s just not very good as of late.
> Only has proprietary Thunderbolt 3 interfaces, without even a single standard interface (the headphone port doesn't count for much)
> No standard USB interface type, and charges massive markup on the required adapaters to allow the use of existing devices.
Uh, Thunderbolt 3 is backwards compatible with USB C?
Am I the only one who actually prefers smaller touchpads with physical buttons at the bottom? I've tried using Macbook's touchpad but couldn't stand it at all.
Besides that, most of the devs that I know seem to rarely use the touchpad of their laptops, relying mostly on the keyboard for navigation (these are your normal IntelliJ using devs, not the Vim warriors), so the space for a larger touchpad is usually just wasted space.
If you work at a desk, you're supposed to add an external monitor and a keyboard.
I’ve typed on a laptop sitting below an external monitor for since 2006ish. I do this because I want a narrow keyboard without a numeric keypad centred below my displays.
I want a touchpad directly below the keyboard so that can reach it quickly before returning to the home row. I want everything as symmetrical as possible.
I touch type with a non qwerty layout so I want my keyboard to have the same feel regardless of if I’m in the office or away on business.
I find heavy, long throw keys make my wrists tired so I use a very light pressure short travel much more comfortable over the long term. Eg the kind of switches you get on laptops.
I have an IBM model m and a Pok3r with MX Brown switches on the for comparison and I don’t really care for either of them.
Your usecases maybe different from mine. I’m fine with that.
I'm glad my employer outfits me with both a Linux workstation and a Linux laptop. One of the little fears of looking for a new job is I'll want to filter out some high percentage (like 90%?) of positions for the petty reason that they just dump a macbook pro on every dev as their sole machine. Thanks but no thanks, I can't stand any Apple hardware or software.
As another comment mentioned, there is no perfect "for devs" computer. Developer tastes are too broad and disjoint.
If you plug in your laptop to an external monitor and a keyboard, you essentially get a desktop, except you can take it out there with you without worrying about leaving any data or config behind.
When you plug in to a dock you "essentially get a desktop" except in all the important ways: workstations are much more powerful (for me the full build difference is 25 minutes on a 2014 workstation vs 45 minutes on a 2018 laptop; our newer workstations are faster still and will bump me from 64 GB RAM to 128 while the laptop has only a passable 32), don't overheat or degrade from constant power, have faster and bigger storage, have various peripheral ports already (often more than docking stations even (and functional, though this is a jab at a specific keyboard: https://matias.ca/aluminum/mac/viewer/3.jpg -- imagine what happens if you plug in a yubikey)), support proper gigabit+ networking, typically have better GPUs (or make it trivial to insert better GPUs) and can drive more and bigger and faster displays...
Workstations also contribute to healthier work cultures. They demand a desk that's "yours" and can be personalized some which is a tempting thing to take away in laptop-only orgs, they demand a reasonably secure office space and trustworthy maintenance staff, they demand a good office network that among other things also enables a dumb and cheap windows laptop work flow: sign in remotely (like with NoMachine) and everything is done on the workstation, it's also another solution to the 'worry' of missing state. (Some companies take that to another level and cheap desktops are also dumb clients to a cloud VM.) Finally they help avoid the feeling of your work always being taken home with you -- even if you additionally have a laptop it's more there for work-from-home or travel support, not the primary work mode, and expectations of out-of-the-office-hours tasks and availability being normal are gone.
This should go without saying I hope!
There was a time when you could reasonably evaluate employers with the Joel Test: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... But if you take "10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems" as accurate, it seems very few orgs these days lack serious problems. Ignoring the other criteria, few seem to meet even the relatively easy to meet criteria of having quiet spaces (8) and having the best hardware (9) -- or at least if not 'best', then more impressive than what the typical employee has at home.
I find the XPS13 to be a replacement for the 11” MacBook Air. It’s almost the same physical size except that you get a 13” 4K screen, a quad core processor, 16Gb RAM and 1TB of storage.
The keyboard has a nice feel.
The track pad works well now (IMHO) although out of the box I don’t get all the gestures that macOS has. To be honest I can live with two finger scrolling and better keyboard shortcuts than macOS.
The only real issues left for me are around mixing HiDPI with 1440p external monitor, some sleep issues and Gnome clunkiness in the latest Ubuntu.
Pretty sure those are fixable.
Oh and Firefox could definitely make better use of the GPU.
Bought one, found official company line is not supported at all, seems deliberately, gave it to my 15 year old.
It was so flimsy that six months of school bag transport, in special bag with laptop section, it is totally trashed. Flimsiest laptop I ever saw, by a long, long way. Plus for the specs, it was slow.
Luckily I was shelling out for the expensive but comprehensive insurance.
Steer clear of MSI.
It would seem easier for Dell to market a single product range that all have good Linux support.
That would seem to give them better good will. I know nothing about marketing so maybe there’s some reason I don’t get.
This is typically stuff you can get on your own usually by downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website and either extracting firmware from their Windows drivers or downloading a Linux-specific driver package, if available. All Dell is doing is collecting it all up and pre-installing/configuring it for you.
I ended up buying the XPS 15 and just installed Ubuntu alongside pre-installed Windows 10. It wasn't without hiccups but thankfully those who came before me posted their solutions on how to fix some of the issues, namely the Wifi card not being supported.
All in all, for my basic needs of coding C++/Python and using ROS, I'm pretty happy with my decision.
[1] Before anyone comes in to defend Nvidia, the closed-source drivers may be great for you but the closed-source nature of them means you have to jump through some hoops to install them and some things will simply not work properly (e.g., actual Wayland support)
[2] Bonus points for 1) ECC RAM 2) 32GB+ total RAM 3) 2 or more full-speed SSD slots
Either way the X395 and T495 both have a maximum of 1080p screen. I have a 1440p and will never go back. In fact I want the X1 for the 4K screen and the beefier chassis. I'm on my third panel and they all develop white spots from the cover not being protective enough.
Wow, really. Hadn't heard that. Complete bullshit.
Is that what it's from!? My T450s screen is full of those spots...
I would like my next setup to be AMD based though.
Minor fact-checking / naming correction.
The CPU core architecture progression has been Zen, Zen+, Zen 2.
The retail consumer desktop and laptop CPUs have been designated Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 with model numbers to help guide you on performance, but starting with a 3 (e.g. 3800X) in desktop CPU indicates Zen 2, while a 3 in mobile or desktop APU indicates Zen+.
Current laptops are based on Zen+, including examples of Ryzen 5 3500U (low power/15W) and 3550H (medium power/35W) and Ryzen 7 3750H (high end).
Many of us are excited for the release of Zen 2 based laptop chips, though!
What purpose does it serve?
So AMD wants to position the current-best available products in each market segment as the current generation numerically, branding-wise, without respect to manufacturing process details. Most consumers don't know what a "process" or "architecture" is anyway. Then the nerds who track these things, such as ourselves, will complain, but we won't be fooled by it.
If that seems to you like taking advantage of people, then yes, that is exactly what they are doing.
Intel dodges this problem (at least for the last 4-5 years) by shipping their mobile SKUs on a new march or process first, and the nerds waiting on DIY Desktop parts their "8th Gen" or "9th Gen" or whatever later.
I agree - high-end 3xxx Zen+ mobile CPUs are generally compared to 8th/9th gen Intel Core i5 chips.
1. For laptops: Don't bother with a separate/discrete GPU. Or if you must because you dual-boot Windows to play games or what-not, just keep the dGPU disabled under Linux.
2. For desktops: Unless you need CUDA, get an AMD GPU for the drivers (a phrase that, once upon a time, I never thought I would say).
I cannot speak from experience on AMD drivers for mobile APUs. However, their desktop GPU Linux drivers have impressed me the last few years, which gives me hope they can achieve the same level of stability for APUs, even if it has a time lag (e.g. Linux drivers get features 3-months after Windows-based Laptop SKUs are released).
I'm still hanging on to an old Broadwell-based X1 Carbon. If Lenovo releases an X-series or T-series Thinkpad with the upcoming Renoir APU (Zen2-based) I'm am very likely to finally upgrade. Add an option for 32GB of RAM and it enters "Shut up and take my money" territory.
Pls ELI5, what is special about Broadwell-based X1 Carbon? What is X1 offering now?
How is XPS? Also how is the spec quality of system76 & purism?
If you look at the X1 line since then, it hasn't changed much except incremental CPU upgrades (and that's a good thing, the design works!) and fixing an occasional generation that had lackluster speakers or a lackluster maximum screen brightness.
In an era before Dell's "XPS Developer Edition" line hit its stride, one reason you would get a Thinkpad was that so many developers of Linux had one. As a Linux user (versus someone actively contributing to DEs, WMs, drivers, etc.) you benefited from their hard work put into fixing their personal annoyances with drivers. Remember this is coming out an era where the very idea of a Laptop's WiFi working in Linux was a dice roll. Issues still exist, for sure, but things really have improved since the 2000-2010 era.
In every case, there is always a chance of warts. Picking a specific distro or DE or version thereof may still bring more pain than others. Nonetheless, my personal and direct experiences with Dell XPS (13-inch, no dGPU), Thinkpad X-series and T-series, and System 76, have all been positive since about 2015. Total number of systems configured and supported (loosely, for friends over time) with each is over 5 in each category. At work we have many System 76 Galago Pros in use. They do good work, and as others have noted you can get nice things like 32GB of RAM. The physical fit-and-finish is still a half-step lower than Dell and Lenovo (imo), but the overall value is good, and we still use them partly to support such an awesome, Linux-focused company.
Again, there will be occasional warts [0], but far less than getting an MSI "gaming laptop" that has better hardware specs for cheaper, and trying to run Linux on it. It seems like a good deal, but then and after fighting Nvidia drivers for hours, you finally get into a working environment, only to find that keyboard function keys may never truly work (just one example among many, from many tier 2 brands, that I have personally helped troubleshoot), or some other deal-breaker in the experience.
I have no direct experience with Purism, unfortunately.
[0] An example of a random wart: even though I have helped set up four Thinkpads with Ubuntu-derived Distros (Mint, Elementary, Ubuntu itself, PopOS) in the last 2 years, a friend recently had issues with stock Debian on the latest X1 Carbon (I was not involved, but he is a Linux guy who knows what he is doing). Mint just works on that model, but he prefers the free-as-in-freedom of Debian and ran into some snags.
Also, I too am an X1 Carbon user.
Speaking of CUDA, do you have any recommendations for setting up Linux for rendering? I was in a job once where I was planning to do something like this but never got around to it.
My NVidia experience was like:
1) System upgrade
2) NVidia driver falls
3) Revert old kernel/gcc/etc
4) GOTO 1
After doing this 5-10 times I had very strong feelings to break my NVidia GPU upon the wall, but sold it and never buy it again.
Some distros get this right (and very rarely have a problem) and others just don't get it at all.
With 2400g a year ago I had frequent GPU driver crashes (daily). Now it crashes once a month or so. Running Steam and some light games was not possible at all (haven't tried recently) because it had terrible frame rates, shader and geometry glitches. Meanwhile on Windows it worked just fine.
At the same time my experience with Nvidia on Archlinux has been very good. It has good performance and overall it works as it should.
I had similar experience with AMD GPU drivers 10 years ago when I started using Linux so I stick to Nvidia. I would like to use AMD cards but the software seems to be absolute garbage.
A have also had very good experience with Intel GPUs on Linux in laptops but they are not meant for gaming.
ECC is the stickler to my recollection. AMD apus don't support ECC. Xeons are usually bundled with NVIDIA cards, due to generally lacking on board video.
The AMD RX5500M may change this https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-5500m
But that won't fix ECC. Xeon is usually bundled with quadro or radeon pro. I've not heard of a radeon pro option.
Barring ECC. I've got a first gen A485 2700u. Two NVMe drives, 32GB ram. With an option to go 64GB. Great Linux support. The trade off is weight. Since ryzen is not as power efficient at idle I need bigger batteries. Performance is next to an i5 8th gen u series.
Ice lake is just shy of AMD apu performance last I looked. But more power efficient.
I've moved on from a high performance laptop. I have an ITX build that fits into a camera case. For being a digital nomad. Then when at a coffee shop. I have a git lab instance in my home lab with CI/CD. Changes are committed automatically on save pushed and deployed to my home server. For testing code while I'm at the coffee shop.
AMD and intel both haven been phenomenal for linux. I have a low profile AMD wx2100 for my portable ITX build. Perfect for non gaming. I miss Nvidia s performance edge. But not the driver mess.
So you bring a spare monitor with you to the coffee shop too?
32GiB of ECC, 2TiB NVMe SSD (and an optional 2.5" SATA bay, but I opted for larger battery), 4k screen (although I took the 1080p), and an nvidia m1000 - but the Xeon inside has an iGPU.
oh and it came with linux pre-installed.
I have used the GPU as a renderer and I'm pleased to say that it also worked well under optirun/bumblebee. (although, I'm not a gamer, and this gfx card would not be as good as a GTX 1050 which was contemporary in the XPS line). Although when ramping the system at full tilt (CPU+GPU) the thermal solution is unable to keep up.
iGPU means that my X11/Wayland doesn't break, and since I don't use the power of a discrete graphics card most of the time it works absolutely wonderfully.
My only greivance with this hardware is that the black rubber-soft surface picks up hand grease super quickly-
IMO it doesn’t matter if you’re developing local desktop apps or cloud apps, anything that’s intended for broad distribution.
What’s the point of one extra test run and compilation in a local fiefdom of personal customization?
It’s even sillier for containerized apps where desktop metrics are way different than cloud providers.
Never run any tests locally?
Going to be tricky to develop on a flight then, isn't it?
If you have a team at work dedicated to the tooling problem, remote dev can become really nice though.
I've been developing on 8GB Mac for years with no problem. Doubt Linux needs more to do the same.
Also I can't compile servo and run IntelliJ at the same time which really slows down turn around.
That's not even accounting for Firefox + other programs.
This setup is pretty common for people working on large integration projects.
Call me old, but these days everything including people are so ram hungry I cannot believe the days when things were being done with less than a GB ram.
People talk like having more ram feels like a champ but as developers you might as well want to think about how things can be achieved using less ram.
Sometimes for testing a VM or container (or three) are needed for testing.
Sometimes something heavy needs to run local for testing, maybe even one that specifically requires an OS you aren't currently running.
Given how dirt cheap ram is, I think it's really silly for all laptops/desktops to not support at least 32GB ram.
Seems like a selfish short term perspective to limit ram to 16GB, although I do expect that it significantly shortens the useful life of a laptop.
This is due to the well known engineering limitation that links LCD size to the density of RAM modules that can be supported by a motherboard.
Autonomous
Remote
Cache
Assignment
Synchronization
Monitoring
Also, even among software engineers, the need for more than 16 GB RAM is presumably rare.
Would you care to mention what do you need it for?
This is a standard setup that I've seen hundreds and hundreds of developers use on large enterprise / consulting and systems implementation projects.
It's still very common for many many developers to live in world that doesn't solely consist of a text editor with JS.
It's it Microsoft crippling things (technically or legally) or are Dell not capable (technically, or otherwise) of making the install of Linux work in a straightforward manner ... or what?
Does anyone else do it better? How do Lenovo compare, say?
You can get Linux running on the vast majority of PC (desktop and laptop) models. There's value in this sort of bundle for people who want to buy a Linux machine with components known to have driver support and/or don't want to be bothered with installing and configuring it themselves.
That said, I would not use their pre-installed Linux because of security concerns. I would certainly install one myself, with full-disk encryption.
Excuse me, what year is it?
The only real fiddling I had to do was disable the lame 'windows sleep' that kills the battery quite quickly.
You mean, starting at 16GB of memory, right?
But please, PLEASE, make them for sale in Australia! I want xps laptops! I don't want windows!
Yet, linux support along the Dell product line is extremely sparse. Between the inspiron 3000 and the xps 13 there is a huge, windows-only gap.
I tried the Linux equivalent of Windows hello, i.e, howdy with the infrared camera but it does not work well for me and is not as secure.
Dell must fix that situation.
Why not OpenBSD, Debian, FreeBSD or Arch?
In my opinion we have to do more to free driver source code. To use Ubuntu does not support this I think.
I wish they would ditch the chintzy plastic interior tho. I would pay double for a new MacBook Pro if it supported Ubuntu and had a reasonable keyboard. I miss my old 2011 model.