Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

Every time I read this I have to think to my self how silly it is to lead an article with Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working

Thats total balony, trackpads and WiFi have been well supported in Linux for almost a decade. It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work. Yes every now and then you get a vendor who insist on doing something different, but most of the time its a synaptic track pad ( well supported ) and a Broadcom or Intel WiFi card ( well supported ). I can remember back in 2004 taking my Government Issued Dell laptop and installing Fedora on it and everything working out of the box.

I think when people say trackpad support they want full support not just basic support, like there are many laptops that on windows have scroll and hot corners and stuff but on linux you may only get basic functionality.

Not entirely true, wifi on the wrong chipset was a nightmare till just a few years ago, and even on the right chipset (Intel) there were problems as recently as Oneiric. (I installed it and my Intel wifi throughput went down to .5kb/s, there was an active and angry Launchpad issue about it.)

This is exactly what most people mean. I've instead Linux on my Macbook Pro, compared to the support OS X had Ubuntu's was a joke. Same with wifi, it did not just work out of the box for me. And I know it's lightyears ahead of where it use to be, but that doesn't hide the fact that the default OS X experience was just plain better and hassle free.

Tell that to the HP Mini 210 that I bought in April 2011.

Synaptic "clickpad" trackpad that claims to support multitouch: Sorry, only with their Windows driver. Not only I don't get multitouch in Ubuntu, but I can't even click or drag/drop anything. Ubuntu 12.04 claimed to fix the issue with clickpads, but it didn't work out of the box, and even after extensive tweaking, some features were still very buggy. In the end, I switched to a laptop that has a traditional trackpad without the multitouch bullshit.

Broadcom wifi card: Works fine once you install the additional driver. But there's a catch: last time I checked, the driver didn't come with the install CD. So I have to download it in order for wifi to work ... but I need wifi in order to download it. Ended up digging out an old ethernet cable from a dusty closet and crawling under another closet to connect it to the modem. Not pleasant!

Of course, most of the problem lies with hardware vendors who don't release fully functional open-source Linux drivers for their gadgets. But since when does the average user care whose fault it is that their trackpad doesn't work? The great thing about this Dell release is that all their drivers are fully functional and freely available as a PPA. Because without those drivers, few of today's latest PC laptops work with Linux out of the box.

Not so fast there - Radon graphics still suck, with both the official as with the open source drivers.

The Lenovo s300 with Intel HD 3000 however works flawlessly out of the box, with HDMI, audio over HDMI, multitouch touchpad, camera, suspend and everything. Just don't touch anything with an ATI card.

I always hear this comment yet I can still not get wifi to work on an early 2000's HP laptop with ubuntu. I pretty much just gave up this point

I just picked up a laptop for a relative that both had trackpad issues, lacked touchscreen support, and even had fn-keys that didn't work (you know, for controlling brightness and volume and such on the laptop) under Linux. And it was a pretty mainstream ASUS with Intel.

That's not always a driver issue. The software must support anything your trying to do. Things like two finger scroll work just fine, however things like pinch to zoom , maybe not.

I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.

Your doing it wrong [1] A Single data point does not a result make. Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. For a counter point I could never get the CD-ROM hotplug working on my old dell laptop in windows. Clearly windows doesn't support CD-ROMS.

1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210

Consumers and their whole experience of one are the only data point they use to make decisions after purchases.

Dude when I install Fedora it comes with less power management options because of the _WINDOW MANAGER_!!!

I love Linux, but if you can't admit to how fucked up certain basic concepts are you are living in a TTY.

Here's the thing: On most laptops, most things will work "OK enough" under Linux. But there always seems to be some kind of small issue. And even when it works, it often stops working after an upgrade. Like my Toshiba that worked well until an upgrade suddenly made it unable to boot into X, or my ThinkPad that had the annoying fan running all the time for no apparent reason.

That's the problem. It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break, Linux on Laptops is great. And you're in a better position to fix things when they do, since you can modify the source.

But you're applying the data point of "I didn't have any problems" as your generalisation, I can say from having installed Linux on a weird amount of laptops recently that occasionally things like the trackpads will not have full features, occasionally webcams will fail to be found and/or not work properly and so on. But the thing is, that's just my experience with one specific distro (Ubuntu 11.04) out of the box, and shouldn't be taken for a whole.

> A Single data point does not a result make.

Just like how installing Fedora on a laptop 8 years ago and having everything work doesn't mean that there aren't some things that are perpetually broken on Linux distros.

I'm not disputing your point, but as a long-time application developer (and of course general computer user), I had to look up what the difference was. I've never had the need to switch between them (that I'm aware of). In what circumstances does it become important?

Yes, but you can't say it doesn't work because it didn't work _for me_. I have found people are really quick to blame Linux when things aren't working on their Linux laptop , but they blame everything else before they blame windows when it happens on a windows based system. Thats why you should always check the consensus of the community* most of the time they can point you in the right direction

*I would just like to point out that in addition to having just a good if not better hardware support across the board , Linux really excels with its community and availability of online resources to fix most problems. I know some people don't like the idea that they might need to go look for solution and just want things to work , and I understand that, but I like knowing if I need it there is help out there I can leverage. Things will break no matter what OS your running and someone will need to fix it.

Debate.

You can install any number of window managers on Fedora. You can even do it at install time using Anaconda.

Things will break, I fully agree, but for the most part they work really really well. I have installed Linux on scores of laptops , and I have seen some stuff just not work, but in general ( and I think you will find this to be the consensus around the community ) it works great and most laptops work with nothing more then a fresh install of your Distro of choice .

>> But there always seems to be some kind of small issue

Another Toshiba (Satellite L650) owner here. I had major issues with wifi and display. Drove me mad.... Ubuntu forums were helpful, but ultimately ineffective. If I installed it on VMWare... no issues though.... what in the name of heaven is going on.....

>> It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break

And I didn't have that liberty either, plus you really shouldn't be doing this kind of thing at this day and age, if you know what I mean.

For Linux, I still have to fire up the VM, the RAM usage goes up, the machine heats up.... and the family has a field day teasing me about my obsession with Linux... Frankly, some days I wonder it it's all worth it to jump so many hoops.

I just got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon[0] ultrabook 2 days ago and installed Xubuntu 12.10. It really is stunning how the hardware just works. I didn't have to fiddle with any of it - I had out of the box support for the video card, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. Even multitouch trackpad gestures work (although I personally prefer the trackpoint). The laptop itself is nothing short of amazing[1], especially once you wipe Windows from it. In fact, Lenovo TrackPoints have never worked the way I like in Windows (where you can use the middle mouse button for both middle-clicking and scrolling), but they do in Linux.

I thought I would dislike the new chiclet keyboard, which deviates from IBM/Lenovo's two-decade old keyboard design, but unbelievably, I actually like it. Having used chiclet keyboards on MacBooks, I never liked them, but Lenovo seems to have done it right.

Edit: there's one other issue, but this seems to be a (depressing) trend in the industry: decline in user serviceability of laptops. You can't replace the SSD (it's soldered onto the mobo), and replacing the RAM is not recommended. The price is quite high, especially if you upgrade the SSD (not recommended; just get a 2.5" USB 3.0-powered external HDD - I got a 1 TB one for $70 just a few days ago) or RAM (recommended; 8 GB is always good to have these days, and there's only one slot, so if you replace it later, you'll still have to buy 8 GB), so watch for sales/coupon codes (there was a good one for Black Friday) or use your college .edu address to get a student discount.

Edit 2: Lenovo also changed the power connector to a rectangular shaped one, because the X1 Carbon's profile is too thin to use the old, circular one. This means all your old ThinkPad power cables are now useless.

0: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...

Don't get me wrong, for the most part things do seem to work really well, staggeringly so when you think about how much clout a free upstart like Linux should have. However, certain hardware has got poor support on Linux and people do get bitten by it every now and again, my argument was mostly your single data point, and my single data point and kijin's data point don't make a conclusive one as the same model of laptop might actually have a WiFi card from one manufacturer which craps out or one that works perfectly.

But for the most part Linux does cover hardware pretty well, and I've not seen a 'core' part of a laptop not work properly for a long while.

I'm curious what your experience with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon has been - I was one of the beta testers for the XPS 13 (as noted in my other comment in this thread). I absolutely love the XPS 13, but the X1 Carbon was the other laptop I would have considered getting.

Not arguing against your point, but there's gotta be a fallacy for this. I know people that refuse to eat a restaurant because they got sick or the food wasn't very good a single time. Or they will never buy a brand of car because they know one person that had a bad experience.

I can imagine people base their computer purchase the same way.

The point isn't that it can be fixed. We all know the answer to that.

The point is the issue shouldn't exist. It's not about Gnome 3/Unity/KDE all deciding create the same interface - it's that they shouldn't have that power to begin with.

Once you create behemoths for managing wireless, power, the display, and rendering what do you expect to happen? These are huge artificial systems that prevent any actual innovation.

The Linux desktop needs awesome APIs and to use modern development practices that allow for decoupling between parts.

I've been eyeing this due to its nice display. Glad to hear it works well with Ubuntu. How well does power management work? Battery life?

Do you really not know that?

This is done to save battery life. In most situations the integrated graphics are more than enough, so the dedicated graphics chip can be turned off. If, however, that isn’t transparent to the user (i.e. happens automatically and on the fly) it’s nearly useless. Who is going to bother and reboot to switch graphics?

This is a pretty standard feature, available in all Apple laptops with dedicated graphics and many (if not all) Windows laptops with dedicated graphics.

Mint didn't work on my t510 laptop (I bought the laptop refurbish three months ago after my lenovo t4xx die after 10 years of usage).

I reinstalled it with kubuntu 12.10 and the volume buttons doesn't work nor some of the fn+command keys. Sometime the touchpad just die and I have to restart the computer if I really want the touchpad (I use vim+tmux to dev so I don't need the touchpad unless I want to surf the web).

edit: As for what was wrong with mint. After Nvidia's driver update sleep wouldn't work, it would sleep forever like sleeping beauty unless you hold down the power button for several second to turn the laptop off and reboot.

For the most part they have awesome API's used to manage those things. Everyone uses the NetworkManager API because it works really really well, and the XrandR API was _ supposed_ to support all the rendering configuration ( most free drivers support it fairly well ). There are also kernel API's for power management, but consider that powermanagement is a little more complex then setting some registers, there is a full stack of changes that need to be made, like when your screen turns off do you want you DE to know to lock the sesison, how about _when_ to turn off stuff, how does a cog type program know when to power stuff down if it doesn't integrate with the DE and X server. also how would the GPU know when to power down if it wasn't integrated with X11. when you get into the grits of power management it really makes sense to have it handled as a system. There might me some abstraction that could be done through D-Bus, but in the end its going to be a big integrated system.

It's been great. It's very light, has good battery life (5+ hours), and is responsive (only tried XFCE) so far. One of the great things about this machine is that it's the same size as 13" ultrabooks, but it has a 14" screen. Some people have said that the 1600x900 screen is a letdown compared to some Asus ultrabooks that sport 1080p displays, but that is most definitely not the case for me. There's more than enough screen real estate for me on the X1 Carbon.

Perhaps it's because I'm running a lightweight Linux distro, but I have absolutely none of the heat problems mentioned in the Verge review. The laptop runs very cool - much more so than my ThinkPad T410.

The trackpad is responsive, although I have little use for it. The keyboard design is fantastic, but the layout is a little annoying. They got rid of the 'back' and forward' keys next to the 'up' key, and I used those all the time in the browser. They also eliminated Scroll Lock, which I had repurposed as a keyboard shortcut. Finally, they moved the multimedia keys from Fn+up/down/left/right to Fn+F10/F11/F12, which is really annoying.

But those are specific to previous ThinkPad owners. The only other real complaint I have is that it's useless for 3D gaming. I installed the Steam Linux beta, and even a game as simple as Cogs[0] stutters. However, I'm not a big gamer, so it's no big loss. In fact, it will probably help my productivity.

0: http://www.cogsgame.com/

> How well does power management work?

Do you mean suspend/resume? It works fine with Xubuntu. I close the laptop, it turns off. I open it up, it turns back on to the lock screen. Then when I log in, it automatically reconnects to wifi within a few seconds. This is all without any configuration.

Battery life is great, I can get 5+ hours. But remember I'm running XFCE - things may not be the same with Unity or KDE.

Linux seems to work fine on 90% of laptops, but from a consumer perspective, I don't want a 10% risk that some little thing won't work.

You're right in that I can be reasonably certain that a laptop I buy will run Linux, but I can't be certain that there won't be issues. And I can't be certain that the random forum poster who successfully is using Linux on the model I want to buy uses their device like I do - maybe they never sleep and always shutdown, or don't ever use bluetooth, or don't care about USB 3.0, or never use two-finger scrolling, or don't need to access SAMBA shares, and so I cannot know before my purchase whether it'll do everything I want.

And so, I stick with Windows, because it is the devil I know.

>Do you mean suspend/resume?

Yes but also CPU throttling. With that battery life it must be working. Does it get very hot or noisy?

Hasty generalization, or Unrepresentative Sample.

Ubunutu on my new Thinkpad x131e can't change the brightness of the LCD and it runs the battery dry in two hours. Windows 8 can run for 7 hours with bthe brightness at 70%.

The track point sensitivity is too low and I have it at the highest sensitivity. (You need to turn the sensitivity in the settings to the lowest value to get the highest sensitivity!)

Don't get me started on lack of uefi boot support. Grub recognizes Windows 8 but refuses to boot it. I've had to install an msata ssd and put the Windows bootloader on that and install grub and a boot partition on the hdd to get useful dual booting.

Linux is far from a cakewalk on my machine.

I just checked the frequency using the xfce4-cpufreq-plugin package, and it looks like the CPU is scaled down to 800 MHz when on battery (the model I selected has a Core i5-3427U CPU @ 1.80 GHz).

It hasn't gotten hot or noisy so far. The most demanding thing I regularly do on this laptop is watch HD video though, so it's not under that much strain. But there are definitely no issues with coding or web browsing.

Dell Precision M4500. 2 years old. Trackpad scrolling: did not work. Wireless: not working out of the box. SD card slot: not working. Camera: not working out of the box. The list goes on. For me that was the last straw, after using Linux as my main OS since -96 I am now mainly a Windows user. I am too old to spend hours investigating the state of kernel patches to get basic hardware working.

I love Linux but the state of hardware support has reached a steady state in my opinion. Things break, others start working, then they break again.

You should take a look at ThinkWiki, they usually have good information on how to get around the little quirks of Linux on a Thinkpad.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

you just have a different value for baseline. I assure you that getting multi-touch trackpads ready for more than two finger gesture support under x does indeed remain quite fiddly in the majority of cases today.

Are you familiar with Bumblebee? It provides switching between integrated and discreet graphics without reboot for NVIDIA Optimus-equipped laptops.

Although at the moment it's a manual install, it should find its way into popular distros soon enough.

http://bumblebee-project.org/

If you don't mind me asking, what would you be playing under Linux that would require discrete graphics? Modern integrated graphics are much, much better than they were a few years ago and you should be able to play any Source game, for instance, without trouble. Now they won't handle Crysis gracefully, of course, but if you're resorting to running things under wine then you have to expect some level of breakage.

I'll take another look. I didn't find a lot two weeks ago.

Update:

My device isn't listed on the wiki. I'll have to spend several more hours digging through various pages to find things to try. This is why I don't like linux for laptops. Windows 8 works out of the box. I'd rather just up the ram to 8gb and virtualize linux.

>I just got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon[0] ultrabook 2 days ago

Isn't a touch version of that coming out soon? Even if you don't like touch, it might be good to have if it's not too much extra cost.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon...

Yes, I've heard the news as well. I have no interest in a touchscreen laptop though, particularly if Linux support isn't available. In fact, I would look at the release of the touch version as a chance to get the non-touch version on discount (as it will no doubt be once the touch version is released).

So spend 30 minutes doing a little research before you buy? Seems like something you should be doing anyway before making any >USD1k purchase.

Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with my trackpad: on Windows, it just supported the basics along with scrolling along the side. On Linux, it supported a bunch of multi-touch things (like two-finger scrolling and two/three finger button presses), both horizontal and vertical scrolling and circular scrolling (some of these were settings turned off by default, but they could be configured from a nice settings GUI).

> It really is stunning how the hardware just works.

That's been my experience with Linux in the last 3-4 years. Almost everything just works for the "usual" settings. No more futzing with XFree86Conf files... :D

Actually, I would go further include the BSDs. I recently installed PC-BSD 9, and the only issue I had was some uncommon aftermarket usb speakers needing a one liner to be recognized on boot. Runs nVidia drivers, etc, etc.

Are you using "perpetually" ironically in that sentence or is the logical absurdity of what you said evading you?

(look up "perpetually").

> Dude when I install Fedora it comes with less power management options because of the _WINDOW MANAGER_!!!

What do you mean by "power management" here? I am having a hard time figuring out what has window manager got to do with power management?

Why thank you, kind sir, I never would have thought of that myself.

Where do you research it? As I was intimating, all I can ever find is some person on some forum who says it's working fine for them. I have zero confidence in such "research".

This just isn't true.

A couple of years ago an issue with the USB3 driver broke suspend on laptops with USB3 for quite some time, requiring workarounds. Multi-touch trackpads took some time to get full gesture support. Auto-switch between paired graphics cards still doesn't work.

That's not to say things aren't pretty good now - but to imply that linux doesn't require some fiddling about under the hood hardware-wise is stretching a lot.

Yes, I really didn't know that — it had never come up for me. It sounds like it's mostly really useful with games and similarly rendering-intense applications, which I don't use.

It is quite clear what perpetually means in that sentence. Are you really trying to start an argument about semantics with a stranger on the Internet? Do you consider this the best use of your one finite lifetime?

I just don't understand what you're trying to save. It can't be or have a "perpetually unfixed problem" if it "everything work[ed]" at one point in time.

Besides, it's not like there was anything substantial there besides more hand waving old inaccurate stereotypes about linux.

See the second definition:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perpetual

occurring continually : indefinitely long-continued

As in, every time I install Linux on a new laptop, as I have several times over the past 5 years or so, problems with WiFi continue to reoccur, and require some level of googling around to resolve. Yet, years later, with an updated distribution on a new computer, they occur again, perpetually.

The problem can remain perpetually unfixed at the distribution level if everyone who installs it is willing to spend time tinkering around to get things to work right.

> You can't replace the SSD (it's soldered onto the mobo), and replacing the RAM is not recommended.

That's not quite correct. The SSD is not soldered, it is replaceable. The problem with the SSD is that it's not a standard mSATA part. The RAM does appear to be soldered to the motherboard.

Source: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Hardware Maintenance Manual - http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/detail.pa... - SSD replacement instructions on p62; note the absence of RAM replacement instructions, indicating that it is not a Field Replaceable Unit (FRU).

    > A Single data point does not a result make. 

no, it's entirely reasonable here.

Earlier you claimed that linux support was good. It doesn't make many counter examples to contradict that. YMMV is not Good.

You had an experience where linux worked. Some other have been able to struggle machines over the line previously but this is not evidence of maturity.

    > Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. 

If ever there was clear evidence of platform immaturity, this is it.

It's common to read in this forum and others comments like yours, "oh linux has been well-supported on laptops for years" and then to optimistically go out and buy hardware, or try something, and find that you can't boot or similar. Just three weeks ago I had a hell of a time trying to get different distributions of linux (including ubuntu) to boot consistently on a three year old macbook with dual video cards. The problem seems to be caused by an issue that has been known about for two years, but with much fiddling in grub I couldn't get it to the stage where it would boot every time. And then there were all sorts of suspend/resume problems.

Wireless has definitely not been mature for a decade. Wireless on ubuntu has been mature from backend to user interface for about four years. Earlier than that there were all sorts of things that should have been done in the background being done in gnome tooling, and it caused suspend/resume problems on some platforms, and configuration was broken. Maybe a commenter could point out that there was some magic combination that didn't have that problem. Doesn't matter. magic combinations != mature.

Another favourite is where you install the base distribution, and things work, but then you make reasonable changes using the approved package management system and all sorts of crap just starts breaking. Flash stops working, or audio vanishes, or your display doesn't work in X any more, or your second display stops working.

Have you been able to do that in a way so that power consumption doesn't get high? I try to run my laptop so the fan doesn't kick in in normal operation, and when I've tried linux under vmware I've found it gets hot fast.

I've got a thinkpad and have also had trouble getting the trackpad stuff configured the way I want it to work with extra utilities. That's the only problem I've had with it though. I wish the bios just had a way to switch off the trackpad, but leave the buttons above it functioning.

Bumblebee works well for me on a Samsung QX411. Once installed, just prepend 'optirun' to any command (like when running a game) and it will use the discrete graphics card.

It's good to hear Bumblebee works now. When I was researching laptops earlier this year I read that it was unstable.

Huh, I watched a review that said the SSD is soldered to the mobo.

As for the RAM, its absence from the hardware maintenance manual is because Lenovo doesn't recommend/support its replacement. You need to remove 7 screws and the entire bottom base of the laptop to do so.

That is the truth. I've had Ubuntu on my Dell laptop for years, and it was an entire learning experience to perfect the setup completely to my liking. It was great when I was young and had the time to play around, but recently I made the sad jump to a MacBook, because when it came time to actually work on real projects, I needed a rock solid desktop experience where I didn't have to constantly fiddle with my own computer. My Mac is nowhere near as fun or personal as my Linux setup, but it is what I rely on to do my work. Hopefully this Sputnik project makes Linux what Apple does in terms of the complete hardware/software package

"It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work..."

Nunh-unh. I recently tried to repurpose an original MBA to Ubuntu 12.10 because it isn't supported by current OSX. While I was very favorably impressed by the current state of the Ubuntu out of the box experience, it just didn't work smoothly on the MBA:

* Sleep/wake wasn't smooth, often had to click the mouse or the power button to wake it;

* "right click" is an unintuitive two-finger tap that is often falsely detected as you attempt a two-finger scroll gesture -- the Mac convention of control-click isn't recognized;

* there is a persistent "serious problem" warning that pops up a couple of times every time it wakes up, related to a known bug with the graphics adapter -- it was harmless but would be dead scary to the novice I planned to give the machine to -- and it wasn't fixed after several weeks.

* After I plugged headphones into the jack, the internal speaker went silent. Ubuntu still knew whether there was a headphone in the jack or not, but the speaker never sounded again.

I finally put OSX Snow Leopard back on it and of course, everything "just worked" (including the internal speaker). The recipient will just have to live with end of life software.

I haven't had time to do that yet. I mainly use the thinkpad for writing and watching videos when I'm away from home. Windows 8 runs evernote and VCL just fine. I go back to my Mac if I want to do development.

I'd consider that reasonably servicable, but then I did once replace a hard disk in a G4 iBook.

56. 56 goddamn screws.

Plenty of other things use GPU other than games.