Fwupd Updated With New Support, Developer Endorses Dell For Linux

[M@yeulC]

Noted. But will probably wait for Ryzen, to see.

[Sloth]

OK, so this is great...BUT...

I've had two Dell XPS 15's in a row, one was the 9550, and my current machine is a Precision 5510. Each of those has had three motherboards replaced. Kudos to Dell for replacing them, but I dread the minute they fall out of warranty.

The 5510 has a crap BIOS. Under Linux, it corrupts itself on resume. Probably does under Windows, too, but I'm not running that. The net effect is random reboots if you use suspend. So don't do that, I guess. Running a dmidecode before and after suspend will show the problem clearly - tables corrupted.

The TB3 port on the 5510 does not work after a resume, and I doubt that is coincidental.

All of this has been reported to Dell.

These are awesome machines. Truly nothing else better out there, for my purposes. I love them so much that I live with the aforementioned problems. And I would *never* use one as a primary machine without a backup machine available.

So Kudos to Dell for getting this stuff working and for supporting Linux. But really, really, really: buyer beware.

[r1348]

High end and AMD APU... those two things don't go together.

High-end as in ultrabook-like, not very high performance.

[r1348]

I don't see any AMD laptops at Dell.

But I'm not going to buy HP either:

* Crappy arrow key layout with tiny up-down arrows. WTF are they thinking?
* MS tax- no Linux or FreeDOS options available

I'm still waiting for Ryzen- maybe that will increase availability of AMD laptops, and maybe some local guys will get no-OS or Linux ones. Current AMD laptop selection sucks really really bad.

I do own an HP Elitebook 755 G2. I'm really fine with it for now, once I replaced the crappy Broadcom wireless chip with an Atheros one, and put in an SSD, but yes, it's still HP. I'm willing to support any Linux-friendly manufacturer, but I won't go for Intel+Nvidia, AMD deserves our money much more for their commitment to Linux. And as I'm not looking for a gaming laptop, an APU is really fine with me.

[coder111]

Im on an old Asus with APU+dGPU. Also replaced HDD => SSD and installed ath9k wifi card, and added RAM. I can survive for now.

But that laptop is getting damn old, and I'm looking to upgrade. But I don't want to compromise this time, so I want AMD CPU+dGPU and no-OS or Linux preinstalled. And there's nothing on the market remotely close to it. Hell, there aren't laptops with powerful AMD dGPUs at all.

The closest ones I was able to find is old MSI GX60 but I'm not trading one obsolete machine for another. Or maybe Lenovo Y700, but that's unavailable here in EU, and I'm not buying a Lenovo with all the shit the company pulled recently. And Microsoft tax needs to be paid for both...

EDIT. Because of the crappy situation with laptops, I'm also considering building a Fractal Design Node 202+RX480 desktop for home this time and keeping old laptop for when I need portable computing. I mostly use the laptop at home anyway, but home is small and not much space is available. But there's no good AMD CPU to be used in combination with RX480, so I'm stuck waiting for Zen for that as well...

I do own an HP Elitebook 755 G2. I'm really fine with it for now, once I replaced the crappy Broadcom wireless chip with an Atheros one, and put in an SSD, but yes, it's still HP. I'm willing to support any Linux-friendly manufacturer, but I won't go for Intel+Nvidia, AMD deserves our money much more for their commitment to Linux. And as I'm not looking for a gaming laptop, an APU is really fine with me.

[grigi]

I have a now 4.5 year old Dell Precision M4700 Intel+AMD(gpu) setup. Have been using it daily, and possibly the only linux complaints are that initially the touchpad sucked, then some guy from dell submitted patches back in the Kernel 3.6 days that resolved it. I'd get a Dell again, easily. But seriously, the AMD Mesa stack is really solid in all the ways that count on a notebook.
Monitor hot-plugging works perfectly every time. Dodgy projectors on 30m+ vga cables work much better than just about any other notebook. Rock solid stability.

I still get between 3-4h of usable battery life on the original battery too.
The only thing the newer notebooks offer is the same package, but lighter, and better battery life. So I'm not that inclined to upgrade right now either.
Awesome machine.

Unfortunately, I had no option but to pay the MS tax, as Dell doesn't offer the linux editions here.

[GreatEmerald]

I got a low-end Dell laptop with Ubuntu for my parents a year ago or so. Certainly nice to see Ubuntu stickers and so on. The build quality is a bit suspect, and the touchpad is unusable, but who cares about touchpads these days anyway. The largest problem with that device is that it uses a Broadcom wireless chip for both Bluetooth and wifi, and it's not supported by anything other than the proprietary driver. Oh well.

[pal666]

pro-linux with nvidia lol

[zboson]

I got an Alienware 13 R3 which has a GTX 1060 about a month ago. Ubuntu 16.10 runs great with the Alienware 13 R3. I did not have to install anything special. I can't control the back lighting though (though a quick search showed some people have done this on some Alienware systems with Linux it's not something I care about). It was an OLED screen which is awesome. It's the best laptop I have owned.

The Dell Dock WD15 even works with Ubuntu. I have ethernet, HDMI, USB keyboard, and USB mouse through the USB Type-C Thunderbolt port and everything works.

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-dock-wd15-with-180w-adapter/apd/450-aeuo/pc-accessories

[silviumc]

I can attest for the Dell support for Linux on the server side. We have between a hundred and two hundreds of Dell servers at work, we run mission critical database and applications on SUSE Enterprise Server. Updating firmware on the Dell servers from Linux is easy and just works. A couple of months ago I've set up a central management app for this, it's called Dell OpenManage Essentials. Unfortunately, it runs only on Windows.

Also remote management through their dedicated software, called iDRAC is great. They finally made a HTML5 client for remote console.