Then the battery. Oh the battery. The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead. This also caused premature drain. Guess what? Dells batteries are rated for less cycles (half compared to apple) and this seemed to coincide with the end of my warranty period (time to buy a new one) but it doesn't even matter because their premium support only covers battery replacements for the first year!

And get this! They only sell refurbished batteries. Just everything about this company is trash.

The XPS is a nice line. It is very premium, but only skin deep

I had an issue that was known with certain Dell universal docking stations. We had the elevated support and got a hot fix in a few days. A colleague with the same laptop, same dock has the same problem and got nothing - they refused to acknowledge or support the dock connection, claiming that they only support “hardware” and not windows drivers. Eventually the driver was released a few months later.

Other OEMs like Lenovo and HP don’t fuck around with stuff like this. Just price Dell like for like with the equivalent support offering. Dell’s pricing is usually very competitive, so you’ll probably find they will still win some comparisons, and when they do the “pro” offering is better.

Note that apple would not sell AppleCare if they were losing money on it. If you can afford to replace a laptop, you might as well do that. Dell’s professional warranty sends someone to your house next day to fix it, which is worth something extra, especially if you are far from an Apple store. But I do not think Apple’s does anything special like that.

But if you break anything on that device and you want to have it repaired, that’s likely to be pretty expensive. In contrast, if you have AppleCare, the repair may be free, or just the cost of the replacement components and no labor charge.

More recent versions of AppleCare have even started covering screen replacements, which can easily exceed the value of the device, or even the cost of buying another one that is identically configured.

So, yeah — I always buy the maximum AppleCare I can. Just one broken component, and it has paid for itself for the remaining lifetime of that device.

With Apple, remember that they are masters of business process, supply chain and scale. You either hump the computer to the Apple store or do a depot repair. There's no man in the van. They put OEM parts or replace the unit and refurbish it in some industrial process. Apple makes of money on this, as the process maximizes utilization and minimizes loss - they are using their own staff or a smaller number of depot contractors, and push losses like shipping shrink to their contractors like FedEx.

But... remember that you have captive to a single supplier for most replacement parts, and replacement parts are a profit center for Apple. It's gross, but if you're not prepared to essentially replace the unit in year 2, and you need the device, you may be better off with AppleCare. Another factor is because Apple devices are unpredictably hit or miss for quality. My company had a defective keyboard MacBook that was replaced in full 7 times. There have been issues with batteries, de-lamination, and other things at various times that are a risk as well.

Personally, I buy AppleCare for Macs, but not for things that are more accessories like Apple TVs, iPads, etc. My kids iPad has a cracked screen stabilized with scotch tape.

Not for laptops, the quality is so high I’m stacking them up as I can’t justify throwing them out or recycling them. I have a macbook pro from 2012 still going strong (albeit slow)

I had the prosupport, still got Indian call center.

Boy was I wrong. The laptop itself was great when it worked. But my XPS 13 shipped with a barely functional trackpad. As with you, I had to spend countless hours on the phone with them to get them to repair the laptop that was well within its warranty. Never again.

Thanks for the warning, friend!

I've been very happy with my dell xps 13 developer edition. Had it for years running windows and linux dual boot with zero problems.

Dell is the only company I know of that really stands behind their products. The default(at least here) warranty includes next business day on-site repair.

The times I've had issues during the last 15+ years Dell has sent someone to fix it, fast. Nobody else seems to be willing to do that if their product fails. Must be really expensive for Dell when something goes wrong.

They do however stop producing/selling batteries much earlier than they should...

Iam pretty sure its only with linux on my xps 13. Any fix? I hate it.

Unless you need x86, just go with an M1 Mac. They're ridiculously power efficient without sacrificing performance.

I've owned ibm, lenovo, clevo, dell, apple, and all of them were okay.

At least the framework people are going in the right direction.

And stating Apple is just okay next to the rest of those is completely disingenuous. Apple clearly had higher quality than all of these manufacturers.

Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.

I have a personal Lenovo Yoga that has none of these issues, is 4 years old, and apart from the battery being degraded (my bad), has been amazing. Meanwhile, I can't wait until I hit IT's refresh window on the Mac, as I'm going to delight in destroying it myself.

One instance, which they fixed. Shall we enumerate the issues with the rest of the brands?

Interestingly your rage is what made that take so long in the first place. Engineers like to claim the sky is falling because their keyboard feels weird. How can anyone take someone like that seriously?

> Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.

Meanwhile I run unreal engine on a macbook pro 13”, with no issues. Sometimes software sucks.

I had the same problem as you with my new Dell. On my own I replaced the Wi-Fi card with an Intel one and it fixed the problems. That said, I had the same battery issues, etc. as the original poster. I don't hate my XPS, but I would not buy again.

I have a Precision laptop (absolutely top of the line business laptop that shares hardware with the XPS 15) that does this too. The only fix is to either keep it plugged in 100% of the time or perform a full system shut down any time it's going to be unplugged.

It's extremely frustrating and has basically killed any usefulness the laptop has as a portable computer.

My XPS 13's wifi stopped working completely. After a similar experience to yours with support, they dispatched someone to replace the whole motherboard.

The dude completely botched it. The device wouldn't boot into Windows (BSOD), and he told me it was because I needed to reinstall Windows. And he didn't put the laptop back together properly - something inside was jammed under the motherboard so that the back plate wouldn't screw down all the way, and the laptop wouldn't close. Then he said to me, "Can I go now?"

When I tried to argue (politely), he said he'd just call his supervisor, and then drove off! About 15 minutes later, I received an email that the job had been successfully completed. Under the "customer signature" area, I kid you not, he had written something like "verbal confirmation given".

Needless to say, I kicked up such a big stink, emailing customer support, Michael Dell, and Angela Fox at Dell Australia. They sent me a brand new replacement.

I am under the impression that this was a more general Windows issue. Does someone else have more information?

1. Linux kernel "mem-sleep" mode default [0], which determines what actually happens when systemd-sleep "suspend" is called. The default value is "s2idle" for many distros which is as good as leaving your computer running with processes paused... when what most users expect is some kind of suspend-to-ram ("deep"). Obviously this burns through battery pretty quickly but at least it shouldn't overheat.

2. I found this systemd infinite hybernate loop bug [1] (now fixed) when swap is smaller than RAM... although you only would come across this is you accidentally under-provisioned the swap partition on install like I did - but the failure mode was spectacularly bad, because it will retry over and over swapping and compressing the RAM which obviously ramps up the CPU, get hot with the lid closed, make short work of battery and SSD.

Anyway the common issue is #1 which you just have to know about otherwise your computer doesn't really suspend at all, and since most machines are very quiet these days you won't notice unless you dig.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/538541/suspend-to-r...

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/19550

I'm still having an issue where double-finger-touchpad-scrolling causes my X server to core dump, and I can't force the X server to actually dump a core file, because I can't run `ulimit` before the X server runs. You're kind of just shit out of luck as a Linux user.

At least one of those is mentioned there. But a lot of it depends on the implementation by the OEM, ultimately.

As an extreme option you can always replace the binary with a shell script setting ulimit and exec-ing the original Xorg.

The default behaviour is unintuitive to most people and often they are not even aware it's not doing what they expect. This is the problem, not that it doesn't work, but that it doesn't work by default.

powercfg -lastwake

This will tell you which action or hardware initiated the wake. It should provide enough clue of the offending software. Also the wakes are recorded in the log, you would be able to pull up the event viewer to find the lists of the offending software that abuses this. There is a event ID for it which you can use to track this down, I couldn't remember the number.

Edit: Here the guide for finding this in the event viewer.[0]

[0] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/63136-see-wake-source-wi...

> On occasion, the system stays in the active mode (with the screen off) for a longer interval of time. These longer active intervals occur for a variety of reasons, for example, processing incoming email or downloading critical Windows updates.

At this point I’m fed up - what’s a better Windows laptop? Not interested in touchscreen/tablet modes and I’m willing to pay quite a bit. I am leaning towards something from the Surface Laptop line, but open to suggestions.

I'll give it to them though, they didn't quibble about replacing them. On the third one, the keyboard went dark and the top half failed to identify the bottom half (they snap apart so the top half is like a giant ipad, for those unfamiliar). So dozens of device issues popped up constantly. At that point they were ready to give me a fourth and I opted for a refund.

So support is good, the idea is fantastic (loved that crazy giant ipad!) but the dream of the 'hardware creators making sure the OS works perfectly' makes complete sense and has been proven by Apple. But MS failed to do it. I still live in hope for a future iteration that realises the promise.

PS. I know a few people who have others in the surface line which seem reliable, so those are likely to be much better.

I had this happen, but it was the cat that would nap on the keyboard until the laptop died and stopped being warm.

I have an Apple M1 machine this year too.

Battery life / capacity is much better on the Apple.

However, installing two batteries on the Lenovo is cheap to do and overall performance is comparable.

The M1 is 2 to 3x the raw compute of the Lenovo.

Anyway, I shut the lid and drop the machine in my bag all the time.

How?

Just have it hibernate. With today's fast SSD drives, one hardly notices it. I sure don't.

Lenovo is running Win 10. M1 still on Big Sur.

Perception is everything, I just do not understand why Microsoft leadership would not make such a convenient, useful, and publicly visible feature a top priority.

The two Apple machines I own are exemplary! One is the 2012 i7 MBP. Killer, but hot running machine. The M1 Air is crazy lean. Love it. I worry about it, hope I keep loving it. Harder to fix than the 2012... (And I generally fix my own stuff)

All, but one of my Lenovo machines have been exemplary too. Tanks. Dropped 'em, froze one (literally, it got time in a deep freeze by mistake!), travel the world, bump, clank, slide, thump for a few years kind of travel. Not a lick of trouble.

Maybe I've been lucky. However, I love Lenovo and Apple machines. For me, they work, with one gripe and that's the materials Apple uses for power bricks on the 2012. My ancient Lenovo, back from the Thinkpad days, has power devices that still look and work new! The little brick for the Apple has crapped out, damaged cable multiple times. I have an aftermarket one that looks more ugly, but so far just works.

The Lenovo machines are generally easy to service. I've a W420 that I put parts in a couple times. It never actually failed, just got noisy.

Oh, and I have an old T60p running XP. It's offline, has some dev software license or other on it that I don't want to spend for to replace and I may need. A few times a year I fire it up, and it's got a crappy fan assembly... But, the machine runs fine on passive cooling, so what I do is shoot a little air into the fan so the BIOS sees a spin. Once it boots, the fan is never commanded on again. (Or it rattles like no other) That's the machine I traveled with and really beat hard. Display is crisp and bright, keyboard worn down with no characters visible on most keys, and it's a joy to use still.

I don't know whether it's Microsoft.

One thing I've noticed on Dell and HP machines is their BIOS seems aggressive on performance, and often runs the fans hard. My W520 will do that too, if I set it, and I just don't. The other thing I've noted is the little hinge sensors are set to a hair trigger!

To anyone struggling with the machine magically turning on in your bag, consider a few layers of tape where that sensor is. Make sure it's engaged. And that's if you can see the thing. On many newer machines we can't, because it's hidden somewhere, or is inductive.

Apple tends to put a magnet there to keep the machine closed. Maybe they know something the others haven't figured out yet.

But worth a look. My T60p did the cook in bag thing to me just once. I replaced the battery, because it was cooked!! And I put a little blob of nail polish on the sensor nub, and some tape. Later, the blob broke off, and I used thicker, stiffer tape. (the blob was attached to a little point, just not much to bond with) Point being, that little sensor was hair trigger and just does not need to be.

My M1 air has a fairly aggressive lid open sensor. Only takes a degree or two and it's ON! I think it's aggressive, but not too much, but I also would make damn sure it's closed up type aggressive too. It does have a magnet, will stay closed under all but Extreme circumstances. It's probably okay.

I was about to link to a discussion about that, but that seems to be gone as well.

The relevant kernel docs here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt

Support around the XPS is lacking when there is a hardware defect. I've even pointed out one with the bios which Dell wouldn't acknowledge or fix as my 9360 was way out of warranty by the time I'd identified it. (Random lockups on wake caused by bad i2c behaviour from trackpad, fix disable i2c and "fallback" to spi)...

Ended up with 3 motherboards though as my employer has a good warranty agreement. Shame they all suffered from coil whine and the 2nd engineer sliced a cable with a screwdriver. I genuinely could have done better myself, ended up fixing the coil wine with non conductive hot snott..

Great work Dell...

I had exactly the same thing on my XPS 15. I'd take it out of my bag, it'd be warm and the battery would be dead. Plus one day it suddenly decided it didn't have a TPM module (didn't even show up in BIOS) so BitLocker stopped working, and of late the CPU is constantly throtling and fans running at full blast because it's overheating even with next to no load (I've checked the fans for dust).

I assume you mean the Killer card. If you bug their support about this, they'll often agree to replace yours with an Intel one.

Are there any decent battery suppliers that sell dell compatible replacements?

Next one will be a framework laptop.

I reverse engineered a chunk of this (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html) and it got merged into Intel's Thermal Daemon (https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon) which /should/ improve things, but it's complicated by this mechanism allowing for vendor-specific controls that are usually implemented by having a background service running under Windows that triggers them.

There's multiple things that can be criticised here: 1) Intel pushing OEMs to adopt a technology that they (a) don't document and (b) don't write proper Linux support for 2) Canonical not making it clear that OEM certification only requires that the system work, not that it work as well as it does under Windows 3) Dell not figuring out a decent solution for this, even for systems that they nominally support Linux on

Dell could build hardware that doesn't rely on adaptive thermal management, but that hardware would either be bigger or slower than competitors' hardware. Fixing this unilaterally is hard - we need an open spec that's implemented by both hardware vendors and integrated into mainstream Linux distributions. Given where we are, the easiest way to get there would be for Intel to publicly document DPTF.

What does this mean in practice for a standard laptop?

I mean, every laptop supports the classic "turn up fans when CPU gets hot" and "throttle CPU if it gets very hot" - is that not sufficient to let the CPU operate as fast as the laptop's thermal design will permit?

More complex example: the wifi chipset also produces heat. The platform designer should take into account what the effect of CPU thermal output is on the wifi chipset, and expose that information in a way that the OS can make a decision about whether the appropriate response is to throttle the CPU or allow the wifi chipset to throttle itself. Making that decision is going to depend on the current workload, so you don't want to try to implement this in firmware.

If you don't support adaptive policies, then you just restrict the CPU such that even under worst case scenarios, the components can never exceed the desired temperature. Of course, this means that you're (generally) running slower than necessary.

Power management on various chips is a complicated subject, and most modern laptops do a LOT of things to try to draw out battery life as long as possible.

If you want just a brief idea - take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

If it helps, you can think of thermal management and battery management as directly related (that heat is coming from somewhere, and it's the battery in the laptop - the more heat, the more energy being consumed [or wasted].)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

you were doing so well until right here.

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

But to force the people 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!")

Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.

It's already taken more.

Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’d reckon equivalent M1 Macs are much cheaper.

The moment you deviate, all bets are off.

I think that was a valid argument before Apple Silicon.

Is Corporate IT the real reason Dell continues to exist, or is it Intel?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/dells...

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

I just ordered a Macbook.

[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-...

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.

> 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.

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.

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 )

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.

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

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.

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.

Or stuff another embedded core onto those enormous CPU dies.

Is AMD in a better place regarding sleep states?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

What have you used since then that made life better?

It runs an impressively large suite of checks and can help identify areas of platform insanity, such as regions of ACPI tables that are wholesale missing or otherwise don't make sense per the specs. Ideally while your laptop is under a premium support care package, you can relay this report output to the vendor and keep after them to fix things. If you do not have support or the device is older, you may have some success with back-porting sections of ACPI tables from similar platforms (e.g. the XPS and Precision lines are very similar).

In some cases the Intel ACPI Source Language (`iasl` ) compiler used in Firmware Test Suite will have false-positives/negatives if the ACPI table was initially compiled by Microsoft tooling. You'll see mention of `MSFT` in the ACPI table dump during boot (via dmesg).

It still boggles my mind that there's a virtual machine interpreter running in kernel mode.

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.

The problems started with the purchase. My credit card had a security feature where they texted me to ask about a large purchase, and I had to be transferred to 3 or 4 different departments calling Dell sales support trying to get them to recharge my card. Then, I had to deal with the computer itself.

The webcam was horrible, at an odd angle, and it displayed weird horizontal line artifacts that made me look like I'm on a bad 90s CRT monitor. The speakers were extremely glitchy until about a year of driver upgrades. The built-in microphone never worked without making me sound like a robot. The headphone jack never worked well, either.

The final straw was last month, when I tried to join a Zoom call from my personal computer for the first time in a few years. I installed Zoom, connected my external webcam and headphones, and Zoom crashed. Then, the Windows audio driver itself crashed. I restarted, and Bluetooth wouldn't come up for me to connect my headphones. Finally, after another restart, I was able to do a Zoom call with my external webcam and headphones.

It was comically bad. I bought an M1 MacBook Pro the next weekend, and it's the best computer I've ever had.

It's unfortunate, because I had a great experience with a Dell desktop in the mid 2000s, but their problems are really unacceptable. Stay away from Dell.

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

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.

I'm still fuming.

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.

On a whim I upgraded an old hand-me-down ThinkPad T430s to the classic 7-row keyboard since I had one lying around, and I'm finding myself using that machine more and more. Planning to upgrade its screen soon. Not all older laptops are good, of course, but the T430s with the upgrade feels like... a computer fit for getting things done. Everything gets out of the way. Full of utilitarian touches. For example, the lid's profile conforms to the palmrest's downward curve, giving it a functional sunshade.

The thermal design and CPU freq selection is also far from perfect given it often throttles during ~10s every few minutes under constant load (sign the CPU freq under load is too high and/or the thermal dissipation is too weak)

The general mechanical hardware quality is also inferior to a MBP. The keyboard marked the screen a little (still tolerable though).

Given the XPS are supposed to be kind of flagships for Dell, I do not recommend Dell if you want a laptop that works and that is not a toy you intend to trash after 2 or 3 years. I wished reviewers talked about typical medium/long-term experience of brands and product ranges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

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.

I use it primarily to do remote desktop to my desktop at work. IOW: I don't stress it at all.

- I already had IT replace the SSD because it would boot Windows but the screen remained black.

- The trackpad is almost useless, with a lot of phantom clicks. Maybe that's because I've been spoilt by 15 years of MacBook trackpads.

- Speaking of the trackpad, when you press it to click, it started feeling weird after a few days, as if something mechanical came loose.

- After a few days of non-interrupted use (as in: not rebooting), the microphone stops working. Nothing else but a reboot fixes it, but I've just resigned to using MS Teams on my phone for voice and audio, and the laptop for screen sharing with volume set to 0.

- It never goes into a low power state. I'm only doing remote desktop and not running anything else, but if you'd go by the noise of the fan, you'd think it's mining crypto at peak performance. When you check the control panel, the CPU load is just a few percent.

- Recently it started hanging every few days, forcing another reboot.

But, hey, the 4K display is pretty good and it even has a touch screen. Which I'm reminded off whenever my finger accidentally hits it. (Touch screens on laptops are indeed useless.)

The same issue is being reported all over lenovo linux forums as well and for example on https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/issues/255 you see lots of lenovo people reporting the same.

I personally suffer the same issue on my X1G9, the best fix so far is the unload/load all related kernel modules one which makes throttling at least only drop to 1.2 Ghz.

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.

IBM Thinkpad (years and years) -> Dell (3 years) -> HP (3 years) -> Back to Lenovo Thinkpad (for the past 5-6 years)

Mind you, they didn't go with cheap HP or Dell. They were pretty expensive stuff...

Thankfully, I missed the Dell and HP wave because I held onto my Thinkpad T61 for almost 8 years before they finally pried it out of my hands.

The first is it cannot hibernate; if it goes to hibernation, the CPU will run full throttle until the battery is dead. Sleep is fine at least, so I get by with just disabling hibernation. Not a huge deal as 95% of the time it is on my desk and plugged in.

The second: you cannot unplug a USB keyboard while it is running or else the machine will hard-freeze and requiring a hard-reboot to recover. I originally set up a KVM switch for my mouse/keyboard to switch between my personal machine and work machine without having to plug/unplug a bunch of stuff, but it will automatically switch over if it detects one machine is active while the other is not, and that would usually end up freezing the Dell every night.

Absolutely inexcusable all around for these kind of issues to go on this long. I have to imagine it's either solely warranty/service contracts, or simply sheer naivete on alternatives from large businesses, keeping Dell in business.

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