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Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted here

614 points by _gjnk ↗ HN
Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted here.

Dell's new Latitude 5420/7420/7520 Notebooks have a ongoing issue where their CPU are severely throttled when running on any Linux distribution, even on Ubuntu OEM Certified System according to some reports at the forum.

After a link to the Dell forum post was ported to HN, the post mysteriously was deleted in the same day. Many users of this model posted to the forum thread since last year and so far no solution was provided and we only received very unenthusiastic responses from Dell support.

Shocking to see this apparent action to hide the problem.

Originally Here: https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-5420-7420-7...

You can still see it on Google Cache https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PFSFF4...

Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/Va8EMMA

300 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] thread
blueflow
torch & pitchfork store...
rootsudo
if only the userbase of ubuntu users and people who paid more for the XPS linux edition cared.

But, no. I agree, it's not good but Dell has a history of doing this and other dodgy updates/implementations for their EFI.

But I did have a similar issue with Dell XPS 13's 9350, 9360 if I used a non -oem battery, on ubuntu and windows 10, immediate throttle even if I disabled speedstep. Only going to an OEM battery did it fix the issue - though I know 100% this is not related as the users are new laptop purchases.

Still my 9350 experience was great outside that.

DiabloD3
As a reminder: don't buy Dell, they have a history of ignoring issues and refusing to fix.

The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.

pseudosavant
This x1000. A co-worker of mine just switched to Mac because of a horrible experience with a $4000 Dell XPS with a discrete GPU that had chronic overheating issues that seemed to be a design defect. Dell would replace it with a refurb and they all had the issue. Forums online showed other people all had the same experience. Dell just ignored it.

Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.

tomrod
I'm facing a similar issue on a Dell XPS 15, purchased in 2020.

That, plus structural defects cause case flexing when picked up, resulting in the touchpad being inoperable and (more recently) freezing the system entirely.

This is even when the pick up is very gentle -- the case flexes under its own weight. If I type too hard or rest my hands too heavy on the system it can also occasionally cause the issue.

The issue started two days out of warranty.

alias_neo
Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to being flexed somehow.

Last week I was sitting in a meeting and tilted my screen up a little on the XPS 15 so I could see past some glare from lights and the hinge snapped. It has the smallest little piece of metal at the point it snapped, about 3-4mm wide and 1-2mm thick, it was no wonder it snapped, so work had to give me a new XPS 15. The hinge itself is plastic-welded to the chassis so it can't just he replaced without the whole chassis being replaced.

I was planning for my next laptop to be a Framework anyway but my (£1600) XPS 13 is only ~2 years old so I am a little way from wanting to buy a new laptop just yet.

This sort of behaviour from DELL is confirming that going Framework is probably the right choice.

EDIT: Also don't get me started on the i9 / 4K XPS 15 a friend of mine bought that seems to want to kill itself any time it's switched on, and has never worked correctly since day dot.

gambiting
>>Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to being flexed somehow.

I've had XPS laptops all the way back in 2010, then 2013 and then 2016 - they all rocked on a table, it's like Dell's factory is crooked and they are physically incapable of making an even laptop.

serf
my XPS 15 7590 is dead flat. I have encountered ones that rock, but it's because the owners would slide them across tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly. I tend to pick the laptop up and re-place it when I need to move it rather than slide, and i've had good luck.

Now, I agree that kind of thing shouldn't have to be thought about as a wear item -- but it seems to be one.

alias_neo
I assure you I do no such thing, and two for two my XPS laptops "rock" on the table.

Neither laptop has any wear whatsoever on the rubber feet from sliding them on a desk, or on anything else for that matter. I'm a software engineer, not a savage.

From my rudimentary testing, the front right corner is a little bent upward compared to the rest of the laptop. If I touch that corner with one finger it rocks, on both models and on any level surface.

Both of my machines are older than your 7590 but they both did it since new.

I got a 2020 model this week when the hinge broke on my XPS 15 but I'm yet to test if it suffers the same issue.

gambiting
>>but it's because the owners would slide them across tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly

I assure you all of mine did that straight out of the box. When the second one did it I was like "Huh, what are the chances" but I almost expected it with the third.

tomrod
It's a big shame. They have so many little details right but really wooshed on overall quality it appears.
alias_neo
Definitely.

I've been through my fair share of laptop brands over the years.

Leaving Apple out of the equation, the XPS is still the best built, thinnest (though not lightest) laptop I've had that's got the grunt to get my work done.

The XPS 13 is disappointing because of the soldered WiFi meaning I can't swap out that crap Killer WiFi for Intel.

throw_m239339
> Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.

Unfortunately Dell is cheap, make (or at least used to) fairly robust computers for their price with spare parts that can easily be found. Mac is much more expensive and good luck sourcing parts from other brands. Lenovo went downhill when they were sold off.

tomp
What do you mean? High-end XPS laptops were about the same price as equivalent Intel Macs - judging just by features (RAM, etc), of course MacBooks have much superior build quality.

I’d reckon equivalent M1 Macs are much cheaper.

tryptophan
If you value your time >20$/hr macs are cheaper because you don't need to waste 20 hours fixing stuff.
noasaservice
And if you're OK with the "Apple" way of doing things.

The moment you deviate, all bets are off.

artificialLimbs
>> Mac is much more expensive

I think that was a valid argument before Apple Silicon.

semi-extrinsic
To be fair though, it is physically impossible to run a discrete GPU on any reasonable workload without overheating in a chassis like the XPS. You simply cannot dissipate 100-ish watts on a continuous basis in that form factor.

I guess it's a philosophical question whether Dell should stop selling these kinds of machines, or continue to separate those who ignore basic physics from their money.

I have a semi-portable Dell Precision M6500 from 2011. It still runs and does what it should, but it weighs 4 kg and is 3.5 centimeters thick. Both those numbers are twice that of an XPS 15, and it still throttles down the quad-core i7 after about 120 seconds at full load IIRC.

phonebanshee
I have one of those too out in the garage. It runs a hobby CNC router, so it's basically bathed in very fine sawdust often. I'm astonished every time it actually boots up.
Sohcahtoa82
> or continue to separate those who ignore basic physics from their money.

This comes off as victim blaming.

As a consumer, I would expect the hardware I buy to be able to dissipate its own heat. If it can't, that's a design flaw that Dell needs to either fix or stop selling the product.

MichaelBurge
Some people prefer to buy a GPU and underclock it. Maybe you need fast GPU memory more than GPU compute cores for some algorithm.

I do that with one of my GPU servers, because the alternative is switching to liquid cooling and that's more work than I want to put in right now.

throw10920
The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time, but in this case, I think it's completely accurate - as a consumer buying a product from a large company (as opposed to a shady man in a trenchcoat in an alley), you absolutely have the right to expect and demand that your purchase works as advertised, and the responsibility is on the seller to ensure that their marketing matches reality.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that false advertising is illegal in most countries, including the relevant one here (the US).

Sohcahtoa82
> The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time

Going off-topic, but yup. It's not victim blaming to point out when a victim didn't even take normal precautions. For example, if you're crossing the street, then even if the walk signal says WALK, you should still be looking to make sure there aren't any drivers running the red light. While yes, if you get hit by a car, it's the fault of the driver, you still failed to take the necessary actions for self-preservation.

Hell, there's a pedestrian crossing near me that isn't at an intersection, but has yellow flashing warning lights that turn on when you press a button. There's also a speaker that says "Cross street with caution, vehicles may not stop".

Justin_K
They shouldn't sell the hardware then.
Retric
Dissipating a 100W GPU isn’t that difficult in a thin laptop, you can find plenty of companies doing so. Dell presumably has an issue because they don’t want to redesign the internals to dissipate that much heat.

Back when dual GPU’s where still a thing they actually needed laptops to be thick or wide, but 100w isn’t that bad.

washadjeffmad
The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have a recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because Intel refused to support it.

Also, the 2017-2019 Intel MacBook Pros are poorly suited to "professional" workloads, throttling under load or if, get this, the "wrong" (Intel) TB controller is used. There are reproducible TB bugs that are abandoned, and I still believe T2/BridgeOS was Apple's response to Intel's poor security design; they were forced to design adversarially against components they couldn't trust.

paulmd
> The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have a recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because Intel refused to support it.

Intel website shows their most recent Vega M release is 1/27/22. If Dell isn't keeping their drivers up to date, that's their problem, but the Vega M drivers are out there, Dell probably just isn't putting out releases.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19269/radeo...

anyway, more broadly, this is, unfortunately, just AMD's driver support model. For the longest time they would not even put out iGPU driver updates for their own processors, instead offloading this responsibility to the laptop vendors themselves (who, of course, did not give a shit). i.e. exactly what's happening with your dell.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Better-late-than-never-Radeon-...

And I don't know what people really expect here - Intel is dependent on AMD for drivers, they absolutely cannot write and support a whole new driver stack for an AMD product, if AMD sandbags (like they did previously to OEMs) then Intel is pretty much stuck. AMD got shamed into supporting their own products, finally, but they're absolutely not going to give Intel an inch more than they are contractually obligated to. It's in their financial interest to make your experience as shitty as they can.

Of course, it was probably a mistake for Intel to attempt to collaborate with their largest competitor, and they definitely should have made sure the contract was airtight. But there's really no good reason for these not to be supported by mainstream Adrenalin drivers.

bayofpigs
Dell was the first pc retailer to earn my personal ban after showing their shady business practices followed quickly by Newegg a few months later. Life has been better ever since.
freeopinion
Somebody else might say the same thing about HP and Amazon. But it isn't much help to anybody else. If you steer somebody away from the frying pan and into the fire, what good was your help?

What have you used since then that made life better?

bedast
I started a new job recently. Previous job had me on a Dell Latitude that had such poor thermal handling that the fan was constantly at full blast even under light use, and had throttling issues. Previous Dell laptops through them had various other faults (RAM was replaced twice in one machine, went through probably 6 or 7 docks, etc). After nearly a decade of various Dell laptops at that job, the new one offered the choice of a Dell or a Macbook. Not a fan of macOS, but I don't dislike it enough to avoid getting another garbage computer causing me endless headaches.
jseliger
That seems like it might go too far—their XPS 13 Linux laptops have gotten good notices—but I did marvel at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952. Sleep/wake doesn't work properly on large numbers of laptops in 2021 and 2022?
artificialLimbs
Could never get sleep to work properly on 2 Dells in the last 2 years. Switched to hibernate on lid close and that seems to work.
Lio
I have a XPS 13 9370. I've never had a problem with sleep wake... except that the Wifi doesn't always wake up from sleep.

It's soldered in so can't be replaced.

This is a laptop I bought with Linux support out of the box but I've given up expecting Dell to fix it. It's easier just to kill off and restart the wifi connection when it stalls.

Given that I'm not sure I'd buy another Linux Developer Edition laptop from Dell.

zdragnar
Dell XPS was my worst linux laptop experience. I'll never understand why it gets such high accolades.
jethro_tell
I've had a bad XPS experience, but I also have really good latitude 72xx and 74xx experiences.

I think that XPS build is just the wrong machine for Linux and like someone else said the wrong form factor for poor power performance management.

zerocrates
I've had good experiences with the XPS 13's last two or so generations with Linux... I want to say with the 10 and 11-series Intel chips? I have an older, thicker XPS 13 that only ever ran Windows which never really gave any issues either, apart from its goofy side-bottom-chin webcam placement.

But I also had several coworkers with the same newer 11-series XPS machines who got a series of lemons... Dell replaced the motherboards, but still.

suby
I have an xps 13 developer edition from 2016. It came with Ubuntu preinstalled out of the box.

It was the worst linux experience I've ever had, and just a bad experience in general. They gave it a broadcom wifi chip which has poor linux support, no built in drivers out of the box so whenever I reinstalled I needed to connect an ethernet wire with a usb dongle to download the driver. The wifi also just had very poor reception compared to other laptops.

Sound problems intermittently where half of the time it would have no sound on boot, and I'd have to continually reboot until it decided to work.

They had an absolutely infuriating feature which adapted brightness levels of the screen so that if you transition from dark to bright it would gradually adjust. Except this feature was broken and it does the opposite of what was intended -- it instantly cranks the brightness up to 100 and then gradually adjusts down to what the beightness should be. Even if this feature worked properly it would be undesired, but it is broken in the worst way and there is no way to disable it on my model. I have spent many hours trying.

The computer also arrived with the chasis mis-aligned. I couldnt plug anything in to any ports, we had to get a dell guy come in and reasemble the machine.

The charger also stopped working after about 1.5 years. I bought a new charger but now the charging port only works intermittently.

QA issues aside, you'd think that they would choose parts known to work well with linux but they inexplicably did not.

ohazi
This is Intel's doing, on Microsoft's behalf. There was a big push to replace the old/"normal" sleep (S3) with "modern standby" (S0ix).

In S3, the system controller powers down the CPU and nonvolatile storage while keeping RAM in a low-power self-refresh mode until you wake it up. Your operating system is not running -- the microcontroller that reads the lid sensor and power button determines when the laptop will resume.

In S0ix, the CPU is still running, and the OS kernel is supposed to put itself into a low power state most of the time, while periodically doing things like checking email and performing updates. The lowest power state still uses gobs more power than S3, and Microsoft is aggressively irresponsible about when and why it wakes up. It's more like "turning off the display and spinning down disks after inactivity" and less like a real sleep state. Windows is running the show 100% of the time, even when the laptop is in your backpack.

All this because Microsoft was jealous that Apple can check email and download updates without waking up using their T2 system controller and now their own SoCs. But Apple is way less aggressive about waking up, their firmware is generally pretty okay, and T2 still uses less power than an x86 in standby.

Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state that puts Windows in the driver's seat, and in order to make sure it gets used and people don't "accidentally" get stuck using the "old" S3 sleep, they made it so that you can only have either S3 or S0ix enabled, so all system builders would essentially be forced to switch. Some (Lenovo) offered a BIOS flag to surreptitiously switch between S3/S0ix before boot time, but even that seems to be going away or broken lately.

I have to believe that this will get better eventually, if only because the current state of things is so atrocious, but I wouldn't plan on buying a new laptop in the next 2-3 years.

zerocrates
And my understanding is that the Windows band-aid for bad sleep power drain is to just hibernate after a certain percent of drain, so if "modern" sleep doesn't really work well on your machine you won't necessarily notice so much.
mhitza
I'm probably going to be on the lookout for an AMD based laptop next year (would be nice if frame.work would have AMDs by then).

Is AMD in a better place regarding sleep states?

ohazi
Upvoting because I'm also curious about this...

As far as I'm aware, S3 and SOix both exist on AMD, but I'm not sure whether they can exist simultaneously. There seems to be just as much confused annoyance at power consumption issues on AMD laptops as with Intel, e.g. https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/P14s-Ge...

Not really sure what to make of that, but it sure is disheartening.

Separately, while AMD's better performance / watt would seem to make it a good candidate for laptops, lack of Thunderbolt across the board has also been frustrating, especially if you already have a nice TB dock setup.

Dylan16807
> Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state

Or stuff another embedded core onto those enormous CPU dies.

artificialLimbs
My Inspiron 5505 trackpad stopped working and Dell sent me a replacement. That didn't fix it and they determined it needed a motherboard. The replacement motherboard had some serious issues or didn't work at all (I can't remember, that was last year). They sent me a refurb 5515 in its place, and now it has locked up several times and has some weird ghosting/artifact stuff going on with the display.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any good PC alternative to Dell.

I just ordered a Macbook.

yial
I don’t know your use case, but I have been very happy with MSI.
voakbasda
For Linux, I recommend System76. They stand behind their product.
technofiend
frame.work also gets mentioned here from time-to-time as they support Linux [1], however reviews of the product itself are mixed, so this is not an endorsement, just an observation. I would read hn history and frame.work forum history before buying one for my use.

[1] "...Framework Laptop is working without issue in Ubuntu 21.04.3+ (NOT 20.04.3) and Fedora 35"

https://community.frame.work/t/official-linux-and-framework-...

ratsmack
I have a Dell EMC T40 that was working fine until a BIOS update caused an ACPI issue where one core would sit and spin on an inturrupt eating 60% of the CPU. The discussion on lkml is that it is a BIOS issue and they can do nothing. It's been two years now with two additional BIOS upgrades and it's still not fixed.

Because of this, my newest laptop is a Lenovo... no more Dell computers for me, sorry Dell, not sorry.

duffyjp
My homelab runs on two T20's. 24/7/365 without issue and they sip ~ 25 watts from the wall with Xeon E3 L-series chips.

They are pretty old though and just barely fast enough. Last year I ordered a Precision 3630 to test out as an upgrade. I was so disappointed by the engineering and build quality I requested a return the day it arrived.

ratsmack
I had a T30 that ran 24/7 for about 10 years but started having machine checks, but I was too lazy to see if it was fixable, so I just bought the T40 to replace it. The T30 was a solid machine and I never had a problem with it. I can start to hear some fan bearing failure now in the T40, which means they're not using ball bearing fans and that really pisses me off.
ehPReth
What do you think of Lenovo or HP?
jackson1442
Not sure about Lenovo, but I have been thoroughly unimpressed with my HP Pavilion. Granted, I'm a Mac user so my standard may be higher, but my Pavilion just feels horribly cheap, the display flickers all the time, and the HP bloatware is a mess.
dartharva
Did you buy an HP product that's on the same price range as your Mac? Feels a pretty unfair comparison otherwise.

That said, if not anything else, Lenovo provides the best laptop keyboards in my opinion. Perfectly sized, perfectly spaced, and give the best feedback out of all else. The thermals and overall build are also easily the best on my Ideapad than any other mainstream laptop I have used, though I'd concede I haven't really used as many laptops.

luke2m
HP feels cheap. Lenovo business models are excellent, but their consumer models aren’t great. I would still buy one over HP or Dell though.
karussell
The Yoga Slim 7 is a great laptop for the money. (still soldered RAM)
bachmeier
I decided to give HP another try back in 2016. I bought a Chromebook that promised Android support. As of 2022, it's still listed as "Planned".[1] It only lasted a couple years before the display completely quit working, so the Android thing was not the biggest problem.

I would not have bought it without the assurance that I'd be able to run Android apps. Never a word from HP about the issue (and obviously no attempt to make the situation right after they lied). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if you should give them your money.

[1] https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chro...

76SlashDolphin
I've had 2 reasonably modern HP laptops and they've both been very solid. Currently typing this on a latest-gen HP Envy 14 (Core i5-11300H, Intel Xe, 16GB RAM, 400nit 1200p touchscreen) running Fedora 35 and am pretty impressed with it considering I got it for £550 refurb. Fedora works nearly perfectly out of the box. Performance is great, battery life is great (8+ hours in VSCode + Chromium browser with tlp), the display is bright, the touchscreen works well with GNOME and the built-in hardware camera shutter is a nice touch and, unlike my previous XPS 15, the sleep actually works fine by default and its temperatures are very good even in the "low noise" profile. No issues with WiFi/connectivity either since it's an Intel chip and those have good Linux support.

The speakers are mediocre though compared to the work Mac I used to have and are mostly in line with other Windows laptops sadly. I thought they'd sound great since there are these vents behind the keyboard that look like speaker grills but they're actually for cooling.

One of the downsides is that it has coil whine when charging off the USB-C port which doesn't bother me much as I almost exclusively use it on battery or with headphones. The fan curve is also really weird where it's silent 80% of the time but it sometimes turns on and off for 15 seconds at a time which is a bit jarring. I think there's some way to tune this though but I wish the fan were a bit quieter or that there were a way to just have it cool passively. I've also not managed to get the fingerprint reader working, mostly for a lack of trying, as it seems like there's a fork of libfprint that specifically adds support for it (Elan 04f3).

I also have an HP Chromebook 14 with an Intel Celeron N4000 and 4GB of RAM which I got as a cheap laptop to bring on trips for remotely accessing my desktop and it's only real pain point is the performance - Android and Linux apps work, sound is on par with the other laptop, display is decent, no fan and no coil whine so it's very nice to use in a quiet environment and fantastic battery. I was actually surprised when I found out it can drive 2 1440p displays off a single USB-C port which is something my flatmate's M1 Macbook Air can't do.

So yeah, I can say that the consumer line HP laptops are pretty good this gen, just be careful with the displays since a lot of their laptops still use sucky 250 nit screens and also be careful with Nvidia GPUs. In my experience those never work well and you're better off getting a desktop/console/streaming service for gaming or renting a cloud GPU for compute.

drcongo
This was the received wisdom last time I had to use a Windows PC, and that was 20 years ago. I'm amazed they're still going.
tarsinge
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.
llampx
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
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
> 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
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
> 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 )

stjohnswarts
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?
spideymans
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
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.
bradlys
> The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.

I'm sure this will happen around the same time a wealth tax is implemented, universal healthcare is adopted, the US stops invading countries, and we stop subsidizing suburbs. (i.e. never)

soperj
You forgot the metric system.
sgjohnson
Where it matters, the US already uses the metric system. Virtually all products are dual labeled, with good chunk being in metric sizes. The military uses metric exclusively, and so does most of the science community.

But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.

unbalancedevh
> to go fully metric would take a genereration

Longer than that, I'd say. I remember watching videos about the metric system when I was in grade school back in the 70's. ("You can measure how far from your car to a star -- with the metric system!")

sgjohnson
I mean, not if there was an actual metrication effort. There isn’t. Nobody’s putting up any speed limit signs in kilometres per hour or using celsius for the weather forecast.
genewitch
not just speed limit signs. Mile markers, exit numbers, distance signs. There's millions of them all over the US. It would cost unfathomably (lol) large amounts of money to do that, and for arbitrary reasons.
not2b
You saw it in the 70s because that's when there was an effort (later abandoned) to convert the US to metric.
oasisbob
I'll believe the US is using metric when you can buy rice by the kilo, gas by the liter, paper in ISO sizes, and construction sheet goods in increments other than 8x4 feet.

Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.

not2b
The Carter administration attempted to start a full transition to metric in the late 1970s. When Reagan took power this was killed and no one attempted to revive it, because it was turned into a nationalist thing, one of those things Republicans reflexively oppose.
CRConrad
> But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.

It's already taken more.

sixothree
We officially switched to metric at one point. People were using metric. Specifically, nurses were using metric. Reagan put an end to it. And here we are.
stjohnswarts
I don't think I've ever seen a doctor or nurse use oz for medication?
sgjohnson
Yeah, I was under impression that medicine is also one of the fields that exclusively use metric.
genewitch
there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric sounding divisions of inches.

Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5 grams. Both literally and figuratively.

CRConrad
> there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Milligrams? Grams are already quite a bit smaller than an ounce. A millilitre of water weighs one gram.

genewitch
I was referring specifically to the medical part. an IV bag might have a half liter, but it's 500 "mil". ~28 grams in an ounce, which is unwieldy, even by american standards, and medicines are usually scant amounts of active ingredient, so milligrams is used.

Occasionally microgram is used, just as i have to occasionally measure things down to ~20 microns. I'd never use inches, there, and i'd never say "a kernel of corn weighs 1/250th of an ounce". This whole thread kinda caught me off guard. Normally i am making fun of the metric system, but something rubbed me the wrong way up-thread.

CRConrad
Ah. I was thinking of a comparable scale for liquids and fluids, as in, say, cooking. I can't decide if recipes that are obviously translated exactly from wierd-old American-and-British units but expressed in metric are more infuriating than ridicuolous or more ridicuolous than infuriating; probably six of one and half a dozen of the other: "Take 138 g butter and 267.5 ml milk..." No, for fuck's sake! Take 140 g butter and 250 ml milk! Or 150 and 300 -- i.e 3 dl. Sheesh...
sixothree
We still measure weight and height using dumb people measurement systems.
CRConrad
He was an arsehole in so many more ways than most people nowadays realise.
olyjohn
I like some of our standards. Temperature is one of them. I like that 0 is cold as hell, and 100 is hot as hell. And I like the fact that in Fahrenheit, the degrees are finer. Don't have to set my thermostat in half-degree increments in my house.
novok
I think preference that just comes from familiarly. In practice you don't set your temperature in half increments in places with Celsius, it's just 20, 21, etc. Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful.

If you come from a Celsius place and then move to the USA, you find it actually fairly annoying, because a bunch of useful numbers to remember is arbitrary as fuck. What is the freezing point again? 35, 37, 33? In Celsius it's 0 and very easy to remember. The freezing point is very useful, since you'll know if the rain will become snow if it's just under 0, or if ice will start forming on the road or not. Similarly what is the boiling point? 200, 205, 210, 212? vs. a nice round easy to understand 100. You can also think about how hot your water can be as a 'percentage of boiling', so 75 becomes 'hotness that is %75 the way to boiling'.

Vast majority of the world also knows that -17 (OF) is cold as fuck, and there is nothing special about that specific number too! You would also know that -16 and -18 are cold as fuck. Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot! And there are no unique properties about 0F and 100F, unlike 0C and 100C.

layer8
> Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful.

The radiator thermostats I use have a 0.5 °C gradation. A 1 °C gradation would be too coarse as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t mean that I’d prefer Fahrenheit, but 1° C is actually a quite significant step subjectively for environmental temperature.

genewitch
> Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot!

you were doing so well until right here.

BoxOfRain
My favourite distance measurement is neither metric nor imperial but nautical. A nautical mile is 1852 metres which approximates the distance of a minute of arc of the Earth's meridians. A cable's length is 1/10 of a nautical mile which (depending on the definition used) is in turn about 100 fathoms. I know all unit systems are arbitrary, but for some reason it feels a bit less contrived than miles or kilometres to me.

Having said that I've never actually used cables or fathoms in practice, only metres or feet for depth and nautical miles for distance.

CRConrad
The only real measure of velocity is furlongs per fortnight.
bradwood
In Celsius 0 is also cold as hell and 100 also hot as hell.
layer8
Depending on whether hell freezes over.
BoxOfRain
I think that would need a lot of public buy-in, here in the UK we aimed to go fully metric in the '70s and it's still a mix to this day. Most things are officially metric but you still see a lot of informal use of imperial even among young people (height, weight etc) as well as quite a few official things like signs on roads and pints of draught beer in pubs.

Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.

PaulDavisThe1st
> Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think,

it was a political football here back in the 70s when there was talk of metric adoption.

i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc) feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing against metric, in spite of the good things they also did.

genewitch
The US is metric for everything except casual conversation. In the same way that i see and hear people in the UK say "he weighs 18 stone" or whatever, but everyone knows what a gram and kilogram and metre is.

There's some things where knowing the SI definition is irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter.

Industry and commerce is conducted on the global standard, though. And while the average american might not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far, 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot.

Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace every road sign in the entire country (there's millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country. Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking smack because we're backwater imperial measurement users", would you force everyone to pay for that?

BoxOfRain
>Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon.

This is pretty much why British roads still use miles and yards, the cost to the taxpayer of switching over would be horrendous. We do have dual measurements on heights and widths though, feet/inches and metres because many HGV drivers from the Continent aren't familiar with feet and there was concerns about them driving into bridges and so on.

CyberRabbi
If the US did all that then it would lose its unique charm and I’d have no reason to visit.
stjohnswarts
European nations have mostly gotten rid of wealth taxes. You want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back? Ukraine gets invaded.
p_j_w
>You want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back? Ukraine gets invaded.

America hasn't even pulled back and we still can't stop Ukraine from getting invaded. Besides, preventing Ukraine from getting invaded isn't worth a whole lot of money as an American. We can not and should not try to be the world's police.

JoeAltmaier
At what point does "not being police" change into "ignore your friends getting mugged"?
p_j_w
We upheld every promise we made to Ukraine. This may not be a polite thing to say, but Ukraine is not valuable enough to risk any sort of war with a country like Russia, nuclear OR conventional.
JoeAltmaier
And there is the crux of it. America used to be the 'white city on the hill' where we stood up for what's right and did what we had to do for our friends.

This Utilitarian cynicism is all too common, and unworthy of a great people. Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.

p_j_w
>America used to be the 'white city on the hill' where we stood up for what's right and did what we had to do for our friends.

This has never been true.

>Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.

Kinda like how we told Russia we wouldn't be expanding NATO eastward and after did that and pointed it out the response is akin to "neener neener did you get it in writing?"

stonemetal12
To be fair they gave up nukes on the promise the US would defend them. Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes and then not do anything.
p_j_w
>promise the US would defend them.

That's not what the Budapest Memorandum said, this was the actual promise:

>Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".

Such action was indeed sought at the UNSC on March 15, 2014, in spite of the fact that there was no threat of nuclear aggression. We actually exceeded our obligations under the memorandum.

>Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes

They weren't their nukes, they were Russian nukes, and IIRC Ukraine had no way to actually use them as nukes, even if they wanted to.

emptysongglass
Except for Denmark. I don't even make that much and I'm already at top taxes (49 percent!)
martin_a
Their USB C docks are _always_ delivered to users with a piece of clear film tape wrapped tightly around the USB plug.

The tape is added by our IT department, because otherwise they'll have to replace the dock after two weeks because the plug just dismantles. Great build quality...

JaimeThompson
In my experience clear heat shrink tubing lasts a lot longer than tape.
martin_a
Probably out of stock in the IT department. :-D
kenmacd
I expected this before they shipped models running Linux, but thought I was safe now. I've learned my lesson.
muh_gradle
For that matter, don't buy HP as well. As a long time Apple hater, I finally changed to Macbook pros with Apple Silicon. The hardware quality from Apple is still consistently good.
enriquto
But what OS do you run on it? Is linux well-supported (regarding throttling, sleeping, etc)? I can't stand the macOS gui.
Ecstatify
100% this. Have a dell XPS, laptop has been on a flat desk since the day I got it. Screen randomly starts getting distorted and is unusable now, had to buy an external display. The repair costs would be at least half the cost of what I paid for the laptop.

They’re supposed to be a premium laptop but after 2 years it’s essentially a desktop.

Windows hardware in general is junk. Saving for a MacBook at the moment.

aborsy
Once you achieve those, you have no companies to begin with. See EU.
razemio
I am a huge fan of XPS laptops. Sad to see, this kind of reaction.
mr337
Same here too, I'm on my third XPS. This is the same crap that gets pulled with non linux supported laptop and I sort of understand. But these are specifically Linux supported.
trevoristall
Streisand effect in full swing
smcl
Yeah I'm in the market for a laptop and had memories of people vaguely posting positively about the XPS line I was gonna look into. But I'll probably pass and stick with a Thinkpad.
Iolaum
Framework cannot expand their laptop line up soon enough ;)
ju-st
The post on HN got 5 points so I don't know how likely a causation is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329842
hdiniz
The Dell forum post was going on for months now, with more than a hundred posts from owners and some Dell input. Why delete it it today, if not to prevent spreading to a larger audience outside owners?
jabiko
I don't think it has something to do with the post here.

For me it seems like everything except the "Work from Home" forum has disappeared. So its probably just some forum issues.

donio
Please let us have our moment of self-importance.
afroboy
How many issue that was raised in here that was solved like in day or two? seriously even twitter and reddit has this power.
exikyut
Whoa, this has 95 points after only 20 minutes.
throw_m239339
Wow I just ordered an refurbished E6430 to use as a Linux server, does it suffer from the same issue? that's nuts. Why the f would Dell do that?

archive of page 1: https://archive.fo/5iQCF

There are 14 pages or so, I suggest people save every page of the discussion still in google cache and archive it, for instance page 2:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JO-IqO...

https://archive.fo/9BYs4

Since Google cache might be deleted at Dell's request. Don't just use screenshots, these can be easily doctored.

edit: corrected the model's name.

xuhu
If you mean E6430 (model from about 2014), mine isn't throttling. It does get hot though.
pomian
Have had very good luck with all dell refurbished laptops, these last many years. Possibly they are better, because anything broken, is fixed.
bennyp101
The link on the first post to another Linux issue is also not there. https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-7420-thrott...

Maybe someone did a delete where post like '%Linux%'

ILMostro7
I'm not seeing any posts in any of the community threads. Not sure what the reason is, although we could always speculate with more or less reasonable certainty. Might as well just sit back and wait :shrug:
unnouinceput
For those, like me, who uses Firefox + uBlock Origin + NoScript and can't see the image on imgur, because of their shitty antiblock (@hdiniz - stop using that crap for images), I uploaded to postimages. I had to open Edge (bleah!) to view the image on imgur. Here it is:

https://i.postimg.cc/1396wMSb/Dell-HN-Issue.png

LE: I had to disable both NoScript and uBlock for me to be able to see their pop-up and after clicking on it, the image loaded properly on imgur. Still a shitty site IMO.

pmontra
Thank you for the effort. Unfortunately the image I see on postimg is 241x800 px. The image on imgur is 1908x6336 px. Deep link: https://i.imgur.com/IS9mH3l.png
unnouinceput
Yeah, initially postimages was full as well, now I see it got resized
bityard
I use Firefox + uBlock and can get to everything on imgur just fine.
unnouinceput
Like I said in the edit above, I had to disable both to see their pop-up. Clicked accept (what else to do these days, it's a joke), enabled back and can see as well.
jjgreen
Years and years ago I was given a Dell (Pentium I?), it was running a bit warm, so I got a suitable fan for that (standard) motherboard. When I opened the box to install it, I found that it was not quite standard, the extra-fan power socket was not there. After some research I discovered that Dell ordered special versions of standard motherboards with only the bits that they were using in their models, shaving a few cents off the price. I determined to avoid Dell ever since (so avoided the whole "exploding capacitor" thing of the early 2000s).
artificialLimbs
There was another round of exploding caps in the mid-late 2000s as well. Or at least, the batch of hundreds we worked on had those issues.
jjgreen
I did a 4-month stint as sysadmin in a University which was exclusively Dell in the middle of the great capacitor plague, dozens of machines sent back every week, they stopped asking why and just replaced them. Happy days :-|
Delk
My memory isn't the best but I'm under the impression that not-quite-standard or otherwise crappy solutions were fairly common in major brand desktop PCs of that era.

I'm not defending those solutions, and I don't know if Dell's builds were even more limited than some other brands or not, but I doubt those kinds of issues were unique to them.

auxym
I had to Dremel out a Dell desktop case to fit a standard ATX power supply, circa 2005.
pacohope
How much you wanna bet it's nothing nefarious? Just the performance of the forums is so terrible that the extra traffic was clobbering them and they just deleted the post to get load back under control. :)
toomuchtodo
PSA: Archive a link (Wayback, Archive.is) that may be controversial to a corporate image before posting to social.
okl
Maybe we can take this post as an opportunity to discuss alternatives, specifically to the Latitude 5420/7420/7520 series notebooks. What can you recommend?
SSLy
Zen 3 Thinkpads.
sjcoles
They have funky Realtek NICs though don't they?
SSLy
Oh, forgot about that :/
voakbasda
System76 provides good value, and they stand behind their product.
bbotond
I bought a refurbished Fujitsu Lifebook a month ago after 7 years of using various Dells and Macbooks. The experience (on Linux) has been surprisingly smooth. Everything just works, zero overheating. The machine has thinkpad-like build quality but it looks nicer.
nixcraft
I had a similar experience with Thinkpad X1E 2nd gen (I tried both Arch and now on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, soon to jump to 22.04 LTS pre-release). It throttles heavily despite being certified as a Linux device. Before that, I used Dell precision with RHEL (later CentOS), which worked wonderfully. But the precision line is so expensive. So next time, I will try to get System76.
fguerraz
The solution is

https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/

Been using it on various XPS laptops for years.

Sadly it requires support for MSR writes which are being slowly deprecated by the Linux kernel. I believe the same should be achievable with thermald be I haven't been able to be bother yet.

bitcharmer
The restriction on MSR writes from the kernel people is just nuts. It's like they are saying: we know better, you're stupid and shouldn't be doing this so we just won't let you.

I'm still fuming.

halz
Context: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...

Writes to arbitrary MSR are still allowed by linux, but it'll squawk a warning with the PID from what poked the MSR. What has been preventing writing to MSR is microcode updates (loaded via Linux via initram/firmware, or via the vendor in a BIOS update), such as the one(s) in response to plundervolt https://plundervolt.com/ Writing to the plundervolt-related MSR was particularly helpful to undervolt a thermal-throttled laptop. So! Can either downgrade the BIOS and/or rollback the microcode that your distro is loading during boot.

bitcharmer
Thank you for providing context and some background. There are so many legitimate uses for wrmsr I still think this move from kernel devs is quite openly user hostile.
sjcoles
My 5420s (~50 of them out of a ~200 laptop fleet) with an i5-1135g7 on Fedora Rawhide and CentOS 7 (with mainline kernel) don't seem to be affected by this, BUT I have a couple 5490s with 8656u CPUs that are.

I should note that the 8656u CPUs have been nothing but trouble (multiple mobo replacements and still have suspend issues).

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tonto
I forget where I got this from but this is an alias you can use to check your CPU speeds

alias cpuspeed="watch -n.1 \"cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep \\\"^[c]pu MHz\\\"\""

prints out current mhz on all cores, normally you'll see in the 2,000 mhz range (2ghz) and the 400mhz would be quite noticeable. for the record i have a dell precision 7540 with ubuntu from the oem and it has been a journey to make it workable

bitcharmer
This is the worst possible way to measure CPU frequency. Just use turbostat.

https://www.linux.org/docs/man8/turbostat.html

karussell
what about nmon? (press 'M' to see the frequencies)

for stress testing and monitoring you could try https://github.com/amanusk/s-tui

bitcharmer
Cool suggestions, thanks for sharing!

Two reasons why Turbostat is my weapon of choice here. It's part of the kernel tools package which might be important if you don't have access to outside repos (think CoLo sites, etc).

The other reason is acces to tsc frequency which is pretty important in my line of work.

I'll definitely give s-tui a try. Looks really nice.

amcoastal
Is this a conspiracy? Or is the mod team on Dell's forums just ignoring their job and browsing HN front page all day :D
89vision
In 2013ish I had the XPS 13 "Developer Edition". It always felt extremely underpowered for the specs, so I wonder how long they've been doing this.