Dell Finally Rolls Out XPS 13 Developer Edition With Ice Lake, Fingerprint Reader

[da_habakuk]

i want a ryzen in a 2in1 xps13 case with good battery life... so my 5 yr old xps13 will have to hold up another few years until then...

[curfew]

Does the new device actually have a working driver for its fingerprint sensor, or do they just mean that it ships with the sensor hardware but no actual support?

I suppose it goes like before: the device is barely working for the first odd months or years until it is finally patched to an acceptable state.

P.S. My wifi does not crash anymore on a daily basis since maybe September or October. I have last year's model, maybe it's 9370 or so.

[Venemo]

My wifi does not crash anymore on a daily basis since maybe September or October. I have last year's model, maybe it's 9370 or so.

I have a 9370 too, but haven't had too much issues with the wifi since this patch was merged: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail...ay/011545.html - unfortunately these patches are rarely backported to old kernels, and even then the distros using old kernels are pretty slow to pick these up.

[curfew]

I have a 9370 too, but haven't had too much issues with the wifi since this patch was merged: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail...ay/011545.html - unfortunately these patches are rarely backported to old kernels, and even then the distros using old kernels are pretty slow to pick these up.

I'm on Arch Linux so the patches should come pretty quick, though. May feels a bit too early for me, as I recall having to battle with this issue for a long time in my current apartment where I moved in April. Before that in my previous apartment I did not even notice any issues, hence it took some time to stop blaming the WiFi network in here, hehe.

I have no idea about WiFi internals but maybe it is about connection quality since here I have worse receptivity than before.

[Venemo]

here I have worse receptivity than before.

I've had that problem too recently. I think this has to do with the firmware of the wireless card. I managed to fix the problem by manually upgrading the firmware to the latest.

[vitalif]

I 100% agree with the first comment about the shitty arrow key layout. By the way, this layout is the invention of HP. Apple was the one who dropped pgup/pgdown/home/end first.
What really pisses me off is that there's literally no way to send any feedback to laptop manufacturers. And they don't listen even if you manage to. Even Barton George seems to ignore questions unrelated to purchases
I'd say them to give us:
1) Arrow keys of uniform size
2) Vertical row with home,pgup,pgdown,end buttons on the right side of the keyboard
3) Radeon instead of "fuck you nvidia"
Calling a laptop "developer edition" without a good keyboard is I think... a bit strange.

[curfew]

I've had that problem too recently. I think this has to do with the firmware of the wireless card. I managed to fix the problem by manually upgrading the firmware to the latest.

Sure I did try that too. First I of course tried the one labeled as "firmware-6" but it caused different kind of issues, not really improving the situation overall. Then I tried the other one, "firmware-4", which was a little bit more stable than the blob provided with Arch's kernel package.

Back then I used to have issues with the wifi crashing and freezing whole system, or if I managed to crash the wifi chip and tried to reboot, the whole system would again just get stuck in a limbo. The first concrete improvement was being able to reboot NetworkManager without killing my system on the side...

Nowadays the crashes are gone for what I can recall. Sometimes network seems a little bit sluggish and doing "rmmod ath10k_pci && modprobe ath10k_pci" seems to help but that could be due to many other things related to wifi issues.

Other problems still existing or possibly solved only recently involve the system fan going full speed despite CPU usage remaining low. This was due to something happening on the wifi side due to poor receptivity. I think I still can repeat it by taking my laptop to the corner where I have virtually no signal.

[nils_]

I’m not sure Apple started this trend to crappy keyboards however I can agree that most keyboard have moved to the point of being highly unusable. Actually my biggest problem comes from large hands that really suffer on cramped keyboard, that is followed closely by the total lack of feel. The. You have the stupidity of Microsoft or somebody deciding that a small section of the track pad should produce a different set of clicks.

I think part of the problem is the attempt to make laptops thinner and thinner and shaving of a couple grams in weight and a couple mm in height. Results in worse and worse key travel and also cooling issues with the CPU running slower. Also the keyboard layouts are often dumb for no good reason (Thinkpads with the FN Key, Dell with the Arrows etc.), I really like the keyboards on the Tuxedo/Clevo (system76 offers them in the Colonies I believe) 14" models, on the larger ones they unfortunately have a numpad which is somewhat awkward when sitting in front of the device.

[royce]

I can see why people complain about the arrow keys placement. On my 9560 (XPS 15) the cluster retains the classic inverted T shape, and home and end are on the left and right keys via FN mod, to which I acquired muscle memory almost instantly.

[Venemo]

Nowadays the crashes are gone for what I can recall. Sometimes network seems a little bit sluggish and doing "rmmod ath10k_pci && modprobe ath10k_pci" seems to help but that could be due to many other things related to wifi issues.

What I see is that it's pretty good after bootup and then it gradually gets worse and worse until I reboot. I think it might get messed up from suspend-resume, but I'm not completely sure what's going on.