current laptop recommendations

[Chris Murphy]

I just got a Dell XPS 13, late 2013. It's the same thing as the
Sputnik project's Ubuntu developer version. It was $900 on the
microsoft store, so yeah it came with Windows 8.1 instead of Ubuntu
but I was planning on running Fedora on it anyway and see about
Windows in a VM rather than dual booting. And I figured by now most
quirks would be solved. No.

I think it's a better deal than a Macbook Air, it has better out of
the box hardware support e.g. wireless and the trackpad. The build
quality is not quite as good, it still has this "coil whine" people
complain about on the Dell forums, even though it's now "better than
it was" when the model was new. It's not that noticeable except in a
quiet room. But it's also not flat. In that, on a flat surface as I'm
typing, the laptop wobbles. I've never experienced this and I haven't
decided if this is a deal killer or not. The firmware, both what came
with it and what I upgraded it to, gets confused inexplicably saying
it can't find a boot drive. I power off and power back on and then
it'll boot. And a GRUB2 bug where the Windows entry doesn't work for
some reason [1] so I'm having to use the firmware boot manager,
possibly part of why it gets confused from time to time.

Maybe the most frustrating thing, is battery life between Fedora and
Windows. It's ~15 hours on Windows, and half that running Fedora. I
haven't run powertop so maybe it sorts out some optimizations it can
do, I'm not sure. In the category of silly statistics: Warm boot
(restart) are ~7 seconds on Windows and both cold and warm boots are
12 seconds for Fedora. That's with grub timeout set to 0. Since
shutdown on Windows by default is actually a kind of suspend-to-disk
(it writes out a hibernation file), cold boots are surprisingly fast.
4 seconds, no kidding, just timed it. I

Chris Murphy



[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1180787