I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple.
But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
I have Thinkpad which is supposedly built to run ubuntu as well and even certified for RHEL and Ubuntu. It doesn't work so good, though. It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management.
I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.
> It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management.
Windows has these rough edges, too, though. It's actually pretty shocking that here in 2024, PC manufacturers and OS vendors are still struggling with basics like sleep/wakeup. Last job I had with Windows laptops, everyone would walk around the office from meeting to meeting with their laptops propped open because nobody could be sure that their OS would actually wake up when they opened the lid. And when you closed it and went home for the day, would standby actually work or would it be on fire and out of battery the next morning? Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem.
> Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem.
Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc. get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby mode" on ARM seems like at least part of the picture for why Apple gets this so much better. I bet it's part of why Windows is trying to release their ARM variant and have been working on it for 10+ years
This used to work, but Windows/Intel have this new thing called Modern Standby that just doesn't do what anyone wants. It's on purpose. It's very frustrating.
I think so. My company's new refresh policy is "buy your own recycled corp device from us and we'll install all of our tracking software on it so you can use it as a corp device" (the _worst_ kind of BYOD imaginable). So, I'm probably using the initially "free" Intel Macbook until it dies, I do, or my job does.
I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.
I've had a Dell XPS 13 9343 (2017 model, non-Developer edition) running Fedora for years without problems. I suppose you might consider it cheating because I replaced the original Broadcom WiFi card with an Intel WiFi card, as that driver was a bit flaky in the early days (whereas the Intel driver has kernel support).
Other than the pitiful 4 hour battery life, the laptop still runs fine, and mostly does what I need it to do for a permanently-docked daily driver.
Hey there! I no longer use my 9343, but I remember I was not able to run Fedora without breaking the sound support for it (Ubuntu had some kernel option set on startup that put the sound card to some legacy mode, instead of the I2C that Windows used). And I never managed to setup palm rejection, it was a constant pain whenever I had to use the (otherwise excellent) trackpad.
(The external "carbon-like" skin texture just disintegrated on it after a few years, and the hinges got loose, but otherwise it is tip-top, still functional!)
That seems likely. I know that firmware is one of the big differences between System76 laptops and the version that Clevo subsequently offers with Windows. I think the chips can vary sometimes too.
Just from an ACPI perspective, I'd expect the Linux variant to (at a minimum) be built with the Intel compiler and the Windows one with Microsoft's. It is likely that there are far more differences, though.
The biggest problem with System76 laptops: their screens.
$1400 for a laptop with 1920x1080 at 60hz in 2024 is a joke. $200 more gets you a 3024x1964 @ 120hz, with an M3 processor and the ability to get warranty service walk-in anywhere around the world.
I agree that a better screen would be great, and walk-in service anywhere in the world would be fantastic.
But I want a Linux laptop, not Windows or OSX. I also want a computer that obeys me, not some megacorp (not unrelated to the previous point.) I also want to not fight it all the time.
I bought Dell 3410 once which was shipped with Ubuntu. I closely inspected that Ubuntu, compared it with vanilla Ubuntu install. All I've found are branding packages (desktop pictures, etc) and one package which blacklisted some module. No secret drivers, no secret kernels.
Can't comment about XPS, but I feel that it'll be the same.
I ordered one with Ubuntu pre installed and it worked well, however there was an annoying issue where the mouse would freeze for a few seconds every couple minutes. I eventually swapped it with Garuda Linux and got a much faster UX, but suspend/sleep doesn't fully work. Doesn't bother me.
I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell.
This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense.
I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.
Yes, standby is working fine. I don't have the machine in front of me now but I don't remember fiddling with any of the power settings either. It was all working after the install. I definitely run software update so that might explain why it's working so smooth too.
Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine, twice. What a mess.
FWIW I had similar problems with my X1, sleep on lid close was working about 50% of the time (which is probably worse than not working at all, because you genuinely don't know what is going to happen...).
As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And of course I just set it up like before, even though this one works :)
In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones.
It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that heat is trapped in there, cooking the device. Some system BIOS are removing the option to even disable modern standby mode (vs traditional standby where just the memory was energized)
The rumor is that this is a bug that happens when you close your laptop screen to put it to sleep BEFORE you pull out the power plug, so the laptop basically never realizes it stopped being plugged into the wall, and does work it shouldn't, like a windows update. I always remove the power before putting a laptop to sleep and do not have this problem anymore.
It happens on macbooks too weirdly.
A sleeping laptop, even "modern sleep" should not be doing enough work to create a meaningful amount of heat.
This should work much better than it does. Microsoft is right - Windows machines should be able to run background services as well as a tablet or phone.
Their Modern Standby requirements should have included a clause saying that the machines efficiency core (which I assume is what would be running in standby) should not be able to raise the temperature enough to require a fan.
No, Microsoft did not ask the users if they wanted this or not (or made this behaviour configurable). Just as they did not ask users if they wanted to see ads in their Start menu...
It works well on mobile devices because from the get-go, it is established that the operating system can aggressively suspend or halt processes. Laptops + PC's, on the other hand, have 40+ years of legacy that assume that the OS won't kill a process unless the user insists, or a resource disaster is imminent. They can deal with a pause, provided the processes external view of the state of the CPU + memory are not drastically changed.
Windows finally had suspend working reliably, where memory was frozen, and nothing else on the PC could change the state of memory or the CPU. Modern standby is Intel/Microsoft's effort to hoist that mobile-style of operating system management onto PC's, in an environment that was not expecting it.
They should have slowly rolled it out, with thermal protections from the get go to prevent disaster, and after a generation or two when the hardware + software are working correctly, made it on by default. It seems like they rushed it for Win 10, and then made it the default on Win 11 before it was really stable.
> Some system BIOS are removing the option to even disable modern standby mode
The CPU manufacturers have stopped providing support for developing firmware with an S3 (“traditional standby”) function for recent CPU generations, except for a couple of laptop manufacturers receiving special treatment.
I really hope this doesn't become a contributing factor in a future plane crash from an onboard fire in the baggage compartment. I could see someone throwing their laptop in a suitcase with a bunch of clothes and having that heat building up into a thermal runaway. It's asinine to me that there isn't a hardware thermal sensor that just shuts off power if the heat is too high. In addition to the tragedy of an accident, what will happen is they'll probably block everyone from bringing laptops with them.
Standby on windows just appears to be a cue for the OS that the user isn’t actively using the machine so it should use the time to install updates and restart itself 5 times.
The machine isn't waking from sleep, it's that the standby processing is intensive enough and the hardware is so poorly designed that the computer heats up which requires the fan to run.
> When Modern Standby-capable systems enter sleep, the system is still in S0 (a fully running state, ready and able to do work). Desktop apps are stopped by the Desktop Activity Moderator (DAM); however, background tasks from Microsoft Store apps are permitted to do work. In connected standby, the network is still active, and users can receive events such as VoIP calls in a Windows store app. While VoIP calls coming in over Wi-Fi wouldn’t be available in disconnected standby, real-time events such as reminders or a Bluetooth device syncing can still happen.
Macbooks also wake from sleep while closed and yet it doesn't destroy the computer. How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?
Connected Standby has worked on my devices for a decade. When I plug in my laptop to my dock in the office and it wakes up, it comes on pretty much instantly. Its already on the WiFi, which it joined when I walked in the building. My email has already synced. My chat has already synced before I even log in.
It has been doing this just fine since Windows 8 came out across multiple Thinkpads, Surface tablets, and other devices.
Even pre-Windows 8, sleep has generally worked perfectly fine for me. I'd have my computer on sleep between classes, open it up and pretty much instantly be right back in OneNote ready to take notes. Cheap Compaq laptops, expensive HP laptops, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, Surface tablets, no-name cheap Walmart laptops, all kinds of devices. In the last almost 20 years I've had less than a dozen instances of a hot bag running XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, now 11.
I had issues with sleep on some desktops in the past, where it wouldn't want to stay in sleep. Every time it was some dumb app waking up the machine. Never due to some specific Windows issue, always something I installed.
I don't want my computer to do _anything_ if I set it to sleep, other than keep the memory contents alive for some time. Although these days even Ubuntu with KDE starts up so fast that the only reason for sleep (instead of shutdown) is to keep some programs running, with some mid-work state.
“How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?”
Why would I want it to do that? OTOH, coming back from pay of on modern hardware is fast enough that I just reenable hibernation and use that instead of sleep, now that MS has made sleep less sleep-ish.
> But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
I feel like the forces around device driver development conspire to make sure this rarely happens, that is, we can’t have “commodity” hardware that has “cutting edge” device drivers because the time and expense of developing the driver isn’t justified with commodity pricing.
Here's my massive pet peeve around PCs that I don't even believe that the Dell XPS 13 has resolved:
All those computers charge over USB-C with the full force of the port. This is fine. But the second the battery is completely drained, the port cannot revive that computer. You must use the laptop's crappy barrel plug.
Only Apple allows you to use only USB-C as a charger.
huh? The current XPS 13 and many other laptops do not have a barrel plug. My Dell laptop without a barrel plug didn't become bricked when it ran out of battery.
Are they built better now? I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and while their support is great and their pre-built desktops are fantastic, their laptops were just rebranded Clevo trash.
I really wish that System76 would offer a Framework based option... would definitely pay a bit of a premium for Pop OS support on Framework hardware. Those two companies are just screaming for a teamup IMO.
No, still Clevo. Although the CEO said they are currently designing a custom laptop chassis in house. Probably still a minimum 2 years away, but at least they are working on it.
This is such an elitist attitude, and I'd like to see less of it.
The vast majority of users aren't going to be bothered by those screen specs. For many coming from low-end hardware, it's actually an upgrade. Most work won't be significantly impacted by increasing the refresh rate, and while better resolution can be helpful if you keep multiple windows on the screen, most programs still feel tailored to 1920x1080 screens. Office workers writing emails, reports, purchase orders, and basic spreadsheets aren't likely to notice a better refresh rate and they're more likely to get a positive impact from turning a monitor vertical to fit more of a page on their screens.
Don't get me wrong, I use two 2560x1440p monitors at 144Hz at home, but I honestly get just as much work done on my dual 1080p 60Hz monitors at my desk at work. Saying that a laptop with 1080p@60hz is a waste is elitist and unnecessary in my opinion.
My first laptop in 7th grade was 1366x768(@60?) and it's what got me into the whole industry. I still use 1920x1080@60 as my daily driver work laptop and it's fine. If I need bigger screens / higher refresh rate I have my desktop.
I have a cheap Ideapad Pro with an AMD proc that gives me the same experience using Pop_OS.
MacOS doesn't run on anything(1) but a Mac and people seem to be okay with that, but good grief, you tell them to pick a machine that is compatible with Linux and they lose their shit.
But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.