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Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted here
614 points by _gjnk on Feb 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 296 comments
Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted here.

Dell's new Latitude 5420/7420/7520 Notebooks have a ongoing issue where their CPU are severely throttled when running on any Linux distribution, even on Ubuntu OEM Certified System according to some reports at the forum.

After a link to the Dell forum post was ported to HN, the post mysteriously was deleted in the same day. Many users of this model posted to the forum thread since last year and so far no solution was provided and we only received very unenthusiastic responses from Dell support.

Shocking to see this apparent action to hide the problem.

Originally Here: https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-5420-7420-7...

You can still see it on Google Cache https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PFSFF4...

Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/Va8EMMA




I had an XPS, top of the line with full warranty/premium support. Horrible experience. They swapped many models to a shitty wifi card that caused bsod. I had to spend over 15+ hrs with support to finally convince them the fix was to swap the card to the original Intel and not doing another system restore or reformat.

Then the battery. Oh the battery. The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead. This also caused premature drain. Guess what? Dells batteries are rated for less cycles (half compared to apple) and this seemed to coincide with the end of my warranty period (time to buy a new one) but it doesn't even matter because their premium support only covers battery replacements for the first year!

And get this! They only sell refurbished batteries. Just everything about this company is trash.

The XPS is a nice line. It is very premium, but only skin deep


The secret to Dell is you need to buy “ProSupport”. It costs like $100 more.

I had an issue that was known with certain Dell universal docking stations. We had the elevated support and got a hot fix in a few days. A colleague with the same laptop, same dock has the same problem and got nothing - they refused to acknowledge or support the dock connection, claiming that they only support “hardware” and not windows drivers. Eventually the driver was released a few months later.

Other OEMs like Lenovo and HP don’t fuck around with stuff like this. Just price Dell like for like with the equivalent support offering. Dell’s pricing is usually very competitive, so you’ll probably find they will still win some comparisons, and when they do the “pro” offering is better.


Yup. Prosupport was very worth it.. People who buy Macs for work also buy Apple Care, right? Same thing. Dell sent technicians to my house twice to fix issues. My only gripe was that my Precision didn't seem to fully support the Ubuntu 18.04 it came with, but everything has been better with 20.04.


I do not buy AppleCare, especially for MacBook Airs. There are no moving parts, and I feel like the likelihood of something not working is so low in the period that AppleCare covers that it is just worth it to buy a new laptop if anything happens to it.

Note that apple would not sell AppleCare if they were losing money on it. If you can afford to replace a laptop, you might as well do that. Dell’s professional warranty sends someone to your house next day to fix it, which is worth something extra, especially if you are far from an Apple store. But I do not think Apple’s does anything special like that.


Apple won’t send a technician to your house, no.

But if you break anything on that device and you want to have it repaired, that’s likely to be pretty expensive. In contrast, if you have AppleCare, the repair may be free, or just the cost of the replacement components and no labor charge.

More recent versions of AppleCare have even started covering screen replacements, which can easily exceed the value of the device, or even the cost of buying another one that is identically configured.

So, yeah — I always buy the maximum AppleCare I can. Just one broken component, and it has paid for itself for the remaining lifetime of that device.


Extended warranties are very high margin - probably 65-75% for Applecare. For a vendor like Dell, they pay a variety of third party entities something like $25-40 per on-site visit, plus a commodity part. If you're handy, it is often cheaper to DIY.

With Apple, remember that they are masters of business process, supply chain and scale. You either hump the computer to the Apple store or do a depot repair. There's no man in the van. They put OEM parts or replace the unit and refurbish it in some industrial process. Apple makes of money on this, as the process maximizes utilization and minimizes loss - they are using their own staff or a smaller number of depot contractors, and push losses like shipping shrink to their contractors like FedEx.

But... remember that you have captive to a single supplier for most replacement parts, and replacement parts are a profit center for Apple. It's gross, but if you're not prepared to essentially replace the unit in year 2, and you need the device, you may be better off with AppleCare. Another factor is because Apple devices are unpredictably hit or miss for quality. My company had a defective keyboard MacBook that was replaced in full 7 times. There have been issues with batteries, de-lamination, and other things at various times that are a risk as well.

Personally, I buy AppleCare for Macs, but not for things that are more accessories like Apple TVs, iPads, etc. My kids iPad has a cracked screen stabilized with scotch tape.


Yeah I'd be more worried about the ipad pro or latest iphone. The screen on the pro costs like $700 alone.


> People who buy Macs for work also buy Apple Care, right?

Not for laptops, the quality is so high I’m stacking them up as I can’t justify throwing them out or recycling them. I have a macbook pro from 2012 still going strong (albeit slow)


This is such a bad business decision as they could really establish themselves on the notebook market, even it got smaller in the meantime. But they have had this strategy for years and I don't believe they will be able to continue this for much longer because more and more people talk negatively about Dell. Problem is there are not too many alternatives and it seems to be a general trend.


> The secret to Dell is you need to buy “ProSupport”. It costs like $100 more.

I had the prosupport, still got Indian call center.


I've received plenty of decent support from what seem to be Indian call centers. ("seem" because I could be wrong about accents). I've had awful support from other call centers. I have also been involved in multiple call center procurements: The question is more about the training of call center staff that you're willing to pay for, not location. Dell could get high quality call centers in India if they were willing to put resources into building an excellent knowledge based and extensive training for call center staff. Dell has chosen not to go that route.


Yea of course, my implication was that it wasn't US support, which could have more maneuverability and decision making as opposed to a rigid script. But you are right in that it's actually about the company and training/policies.


I had disavowed Dell more than a decade ago due to their horrible support, but I figured it was time to give Dell another shot at the height of MacBook keyboard gate.

Boy was I wrong. The laptop itself was great when it worked. But my XPS 13 shipped with a barely functional trackpad. As with you, I had to spend countless hours on the phone with them to get them to repair the laptop that was well within its warranty. Never again.


I was contemplating buying a Dell to replace my 10-year old MBP, but after reading your comment, I will stay as far away from Dell as I can.

Thanks for the warning, friend!


You will find a person complaining about every laptop, the internet is a big place.

I've been very happy with my dell xps 13 developer edition. Had it for years running windows and linux dual boot with zero problems.


How’s the screen hinge holding up? The last fell I had (an alienware) the hinge gave out after about 1.5 yrs and had to go external screen only.


The wake from sleep issue only started in 2017 and going forward, might be why you are not having issues.


I've had mostly good experiences with dell's XPS 13 laptops. Coil whine has been a problem.

Dell is the only company I know of that really stands behind their products. The default(at least here) warranty includes next business day on-site repair.

The times I've had issues during the last 15+ years Dell has sent someone to fix it, fast. Nobody else seems to be willing to do that if their product fails. Must be really expensive for Dell when something goes wrong.

They do however stop producing/selling batteries much earlier than they should...


I worked for EMC through the acquisition by Dell. I spoke with a someone in Dell MFG about their test process. In short, they test as configured by the customer. We were discussing a blade server. I asked what happens if a customer buys an additional blade and that slot on the backplane doesn’t work, because it wasn’t tested? The answer: we get them a new backplane really quickly. Dell is all about removing cost from the business and that means they made the calculation that it’s cheaper to test as configured and pay for the few cases where someone upgrades and has an issue, versus test everyone’s machine comprehensively. Needless to say, this wasn’t the EMC way. So yes, it’s expensive to overnight a new part to customers, but someone has done the ROI and figured out that is cheaper than testing every system for every anticipated problem.


Lenovo took care of my Thinkpad T14s AMD when the keyboard started acting funky. Ordered the parts and sent a tech to my house to install it within a week. So I would still recommend getting a nice Thinkpad.


> Coil whine has been a problem.

Iam pretty sure its only with linux on my xps 13. Any fix? I hate it.


Keep in mind there will be much more people complaining about how bad some electronic device is than people praising about how good it is because they have more reason to complain. All products have lemons and unless there's a site that collects information on repairs, it's hard to tell which laptop has a bad design. I've had 2 Dells for myself and bought one for my dad (all Inspirons) and never had a problem with them. Lattitudes are workhorses, so with people now working remotely there are companies that buy those laptops by the 100s, so the production quality of Dell Lattitudes should be high enough that Dell wouldn't have to deal with warranty issues from its corporate clients


I don't think this is a case of "some units are lemons"- from what I can see this is a design flaw of some sort. I've been buying Latitudes for personal use now for MANY years and this is the first "annoys me every day and can't be fixed (or they refuse to fix it)" issue I've had.


I'm glad that when I got a Dell XPS I noticed the problems extremely quickly so I could return it. It had a horrendously whiny fan that seemed to always be running. Battery life was unimpressive. And there was a trackpad issue where picking the machine up from a corner would cause it to click (apparently this is an issue that's been there for a few generations).

Unless you need x86, just go with an M1 Mac. They're ridiculously power efficient without sacrificing performance.


2 words: frame.work


I really wish it was true. Same issues with sleep on framework, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166802


i own one and running Ubuntu on it and I confirm that it will drain the battery if left on sleep. Mine is always on charge and I make sure to shutdown before traveling. Otherwise, it is a decent machine for lagging around


My XPS13 with pre-installed Ubuntu sleeps fine without any battery-running-down issue. Is this a Windows issue?


https://luisartola.com/solving-the-framework-laptop-battery-...


3 words: do not buy.


I own two and love them, but I don't expect perfection either.

I've owned ibm, lenovo, clevo, dell, apple, and all of them were okay.

At least the framework people are going in the right direction.


Some of us, many of us, rely on these machines to do their job. Perfection is pretty well required or you’re using substandard tools which may or may not affect your productivity.

And stating Apple is just okay next to the rest of those is completely disingenuous. Apple clearly had higher quality than all of these manufacturers.


Just look at keyboard-gate to prove that, by design, Apple doesn't care about user productivity. I personally have a work issued 2019 16-inch MBP and it drives me insane.

Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.

I have a personal Lenovo Yoga that has none of these issues, is 4 years old, and apart from the battery being degraded (my bad), has been amazing. Meanwhile, I can't wait until I hit IT's refresh window on the Mac, as I'm going to delight in destroying it myself.


> Just look at keyboard-gate to prove that, by design, Apple doesn't care about user productivity. I personally have a work issued 2019 16-inch MBP and it drives me insane.

One instance, which they fixed. Shall we enumerate the issues with the rest of the brands?

Interestingly your rage is what made that take so long in the first place. Engineers like to claim the sky is falling because their keyboard feels weird. How can anyone take someone like that seriously?

> Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.

Meanwhile I run unreal engine on a macbook pro 13”, with no issues. Sometimes software sucks.


I bought a new Dell a couple of years ago and just after getting it I was sitting beside my wife on the couch. Her macbook had 2 out of 3 wifi bars while my dell had trouble connecting at all. Thankfully they accepted the return and issued a refund without much hassle. I got a Lenovo ThinkPad (T-Series) and it's been rock solid.


I switched to Dell because my Apple MBP was dead-dead and their existing line at the time was garbage according to everyone I knew who got one.

I had the same problem as you with my new Dell. On my own I replaced the Wi-Fi card with an Intel one and it fixed the problems. That said, I had the same battery issues, etc. as the original poster. I don't hate my XPS, but I would not buy again.


> Then the battery. Oh the battery. The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.

I have a Precision laptop (absolutely top of the line business laptop that shares hardware with the XPS 15) that does this too. The only fix is to either keep it plugged in 100% of the time or perform a full system shut down any time it's going to be unplugged.

It's extremely frustrating and has basically killed any usefulness the laptop has as a portable computer.


We used to buy Precision laptops for 3D designers due to the need for a beefy graphics card, and I got the impression they were just heavier versions of Dell's regular crap. IBM was my preference before Lenovo, but now I have no idea if there's any premium Intel laptops left.


Oh man oh man I have the worst story.

My XPS 13's wifi stopped working completely. After a similar experience to yours with support, they dispatched someone to replace the whole motherboard.

The dude completely botched it. The device wouldn't boot into Windows (BSOD), and he told me it was because I needed to reinstall Windows. And he didn't put the laptop back together properly - something inside was jammed under the motherboard so that the back plate wouldn't screw down all the way, and the laptop wouldn't close. Then he said to me, "Can I go now?"

When I tried to argue (politely), he said he'd just call his supervisor, and then drove off! About 15 minutes later, I received an email that the job had been successfully completed. Under the "customer signature" area, I kid you not, he had written something like "verbal confirmation given".

Needless to say, I kicked up such a big stink, emailing customer support, Michael Dell, and Angela Fox at Dell Australia. They sent me a brand new replacement.


> The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.

I am under the impression that this was a more general Windows issue. Does someone else have more information?


I had a couple of similar problem under Linux, but I believe these are purely software issues and thus unrelated to the windows ones. and also not specific to Dell AFAIK.

1. Linux kernel "mem-sleep" mode default [0], which determines what actually happens when systemd-sleep "suspend" is called. The default value is "s2idle" for many distros which is as good as leaving your computer running with processes paused... when what most users expect is some kind of suspend-to-ram ("deep"). Obviously this burns through battery pretty quickly but at least it shouldn't overheat.

2. I found this systemd infinite hybernate loop bug [1] (now fixed) when swap is smaller than RAM... although you only would come across this is you accidentally under-provisioned the swap partition on install like I did - but the failure mode was spectacularly bad, because it will retry over and over swapping and compressing the RAM which obviously ramps up the CPU, get hot with the lid closed, make short work of battery and SSD.

Anyway the common issue is #1 which you just have to know about otherwise your computer doesn't really suspend at all, and since most machines are very quiet these days you won't notice unless you dig.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/538541/suspend-to-r...

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/19550


It pains me that there's still no comprehensive user docs for kernel features. Everything from hybrid graphics to power-saving to cpu frequency scaling keeps changing from kernel to kernel, and you need a PhD in kernel hacking to know how to use any feature of a specific kernel. I've searched forums for weeks trying to gleam enough information to just get a graphics card to work.

I'm still having an issue where double-finger-touchpad-scrolling causes my X server to core dump, and I can't force the X server to actually dump a core file, because I can't run `ulimit` before the X server runs. You're kind of just shit out of luck as a Linux user.


https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt

At least one of those is mentioned there. But a lot of it depends on the implementation by the OEM, ultimately.


If you're running X session though systemd, as LimitCORE=... line to that service's file.

As an extreme option you can always replace the binary with a shell script setting ulimit and exec-ing the original Xorg.


You probably need to investigate s0ix and figure out why your machine isn't reaching that state.


It is, the problem is you need to explicitly set it.

The default behaviour is unintuitive to most people and often they are not even aware it's not doing what they expect. This is the problem, not that it doesn't work, but that it doesn't work by default.


From my experience, it is the wake timers in some apps that abuses it. I recalled it is one of the function that use the wake timers. To find this out, open the cmd/PS/WT and type:

powercfg -lastwake

This will tell you which action or hardware initiated the wake. It should provide enough clue of the offending software. Also the wakes are recorded in the log, you would be able to pull up the event viewer to find the lists of the offending software that abuses this. There is a event ID for it which you can use to track this down, I couldn't remember the number.

Edit: Here the guide for finding this in the event viewer.[0]

[0] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/63136-see-wake-source-wi...


Perhaps this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

> On occasion, the system stays in the active mode (with the screen off) for a longer interval of time. These longer active intervals occur for a variety of reasons, for example, processing incoming email or downloading critical Windows updates.


Similar experience with the battery and sleep on XPS devices. Constantly opening my backpack to discover a literal hot mess.

At this point I’m fed up - what’s a better Windows laptop? Not interested in touchscreen/tablet modes and I’m willing to pay quite a bit. I am leaning towards something from the Surface Laptop line, but open to suggestions.


I can recommend the Surface line. I think it's a huge difference when Microsoft is selling both the hardware and software, so you know they are fully compatible. But definitely buy "Microsoft Complete." I've swapped my Surface Pro 4 out twice no questions asked, both times for some screen artifacts which I think came from too much pressure on the screen, and the second time they gave me a Pro 5 which hasn't had the issue. Their keyboards are exactly the same dimensions as Macbook too.


After using a macbook with bootcamp for years, I finally bought a Surface Book 2 a couple of years back, thinking the same thing. Was close to the top of a line, nearly $6k AUD. Nice 'not butterfly' keyboard, unified hw/sw manufacturer. From the first few days it was problematic - had to reinstall from rescue media, and it intermittently failed to see the GPU. In between times, normal windows updates would create annoying issues - no more screen brightness adjustment for example. My least favourite one set the volume on any reconnected bluetooth device to 100%, thanks guys.

I'll give it to them though, they didn't quibble about replacing them. On the third one, the keyboard went dark and the top half failed to identify the bottom half (they snap apart so the top half is like a giant ipad, for those unfamiliar). So dozens of device issues popped up constantly. At that point they were ready to give me a fourth and I opted for a refund.

So support is good, the idea is fantastic (loved that crazy giant ipad!) but the dream of the 'hardware creators making sure the OS works perfectly' makes complete sense and has been proven by Apple. But MS failed to do it. I still live in hope for a future iteration that realises the promise.

PS. I know a few people who have others in the surface line which seem reliable, so those are likely to be much better.


Switched to System76 after I was given one at an old workplace and loved it, never had any problems with Linux on one. Had to deal with their support too once after I spilled beer on the keyboard during a late night hacking session. It was easy, low friction, talked to a real human, quick, and they even offered to replace it for free but I paid for it anyway.


> The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.

I had this happen, but it was the cat that would nap on the keyboard until the laptop died and stopped being warm.


This is either hilarious or you're working for Dell ( I love cats ).


It wasn’t a Dell, no.


The broken hibernate is my biggest problem - back in college my laptop cooked itself one day because it woke up in my well-padded messenger bag and started installing updates. >_<


I do not understand how people with MacBooks have been able to slam their lid shut, shove the laptop in their bag, and then walk away for 15+ years, and in 2022, it is still only Apple laptops that can do that.


I have a moderate Lenovo and have done that for years. It is a P Something. Nothing special.

I have an Apple M1 machine this year too.

Battery life / capacity is much better on the Apple.

However, installing two batteries on the Lenovo is cheap to do and overall performance is comparable.

The M1 is 2 to 3x the raw compute of the Lenovo.

Anyway, I shut the lid and drop the machine in my bag all the time.

How?

Just have it hibernate. With today's fast SSD drives, one hardly notices it. I sure don't.

Lenovo is running Win 10. M1 still on Big Sur.


That’s good, I have not experienced betting same to shut the lid on any Dell Latitudes or HP Probooks, and the last Lenovo I tried was Yoga, which also did not have it.

Perception is everything, I just do not understand why Microsoft leadership would not make such a convenient, useful, and publicly visible feature a top priority.


I really dislike Dell laptops. Nothing but bad experiences. There's that perception right there! Won't own one.

The two Apple machines I own are exemplary! One is the 2012 i7 MBP. Killer, but hot running machine. The M1 Air is crazy lean. Love it. I worry about it, hope I keep loving it. Harder to fix than the 2012... (And I generally fix my own stuff)

All, but one of my Lenovo machines have been exemplary too. Tanks. Dropped 'em, froze one (literally, it got time in a deep freeze by mistake!), travel the world, bump, clank, slide, thump for a few years kind of travel. Not a lick of trouble.

Maybe I've been lucky. However, I love Lenovo and Apple machines. For me, they work, with one gripe and that's the materials Apple uses for power bricks on the 2012. My ancient Lenovo, back from the Thinkpad days, has power devices that still look and work new! The little brick for the Apple has crapped out, damaged cable multiple times. I have an aftermarket one that looks more ugly, but so far just works.

The Lenovo machines are generally easy to service. I've a W420 that I put parts in a couple times. It never actually failed, just got noisy.

Oh, and I have an old T60p running XP. It's offline, has some dev software license or other on it that I don't want to spend for to replace and I may need. A few times a year I fire it up, and it's got a crappy fan assembly... But, the machine runs fine on passive cooling, so what I do is shoot a little air into the fan so the BIOS sees a spin. Once it boots, the fan is never commanded on again. (Or it rattles like no other) That's the machine I traveled with and really beat hard. Display is crisp and bright, keyboard worn down with no characters visible on most keys, and it's a joy to use still.

I don't know whether it's Microsoft.

One thing I've noticed on Dell and HP machines is their BIOS seems aggressive on performance, and often runs the fans hard. My W520 will do that too, if I set it, and I just don't. The other thing I've noted is the little hinge sensors are set to a hair trigger!

To anyone struggling with the machine magically turning on in your bag, consider a few layers of tape where that sensor is. Make sure it's engaged. And that's if you can see the thing. On many newer machines we can't, because it's hidden somewhere, or is inductive.

Apple tends to put a magnet there to keep the machine closed. Maybe they know something the others haven't figured out yet.

But worth a look. My T60p did the cook in bag thing to me just once. I replaced the battery, because it was cooked!! And I put a little blob of nail polish on the sensor nub, and some tape. Later, the blob broke off, and I used thicker, stiffer tape. (the blob was attached to a little point, just not much to bond with) Point being, that little sensor was hair trigger and just does not need to be.

My M1 air has a fairly aggressive lid open sensor. Only takes a degree or two and it's ON! I think it's aggressive, but not too much, but I also would make damn sure it's closed up type aggressive too. It does have a magnet, will stay closed under all but Extreme circumstances. It's probably okay.


AFAIK, the issue with hibernation, partly at least, is because they don't provide an alternative sleep method via firmware. Only the default method is available; e.g. S2idle on Linux.

I was about to link to a discussion about that, but that seems to be gone as well.

The relevant kernel docs here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt


A 2015 Dell XPS 13 9343 is still running fine today. I replaced the battery twice, DIY-sourced on AliExpress. Stellar machine for the price (< 1000€ at the time)


The sleep issue is in firmware, was introduced in 2017, and any time the ability to use the correct sleep mode is introduced in firmware, it's quietly removed. The 2015 XPS is a great laptop, the 2017 and forward have significant, ongoing power management issues.


I had so much trouble buying a replacement battery for a server raid card. At the time, this was a card they were still selling! Oh man. Dell. What a mess.


Dell monitors are pretty nice and have high quality. About the only thing I'd buy from them though.


Yes... there are some nice models we'd like to buy. But we are business customers of Dell, and they tell us that these have 95 working days lead time (almost 4 months). While on their regular web page for consumers it says that these are available within 3 weeks. :(


Yep, have to agree completely.

Support around the XPS is lacking when there is a hardware defect. I've even pointed out one with the bios which Dell wouldn't acknowledge or fix as my 9360 was way out of warranty by the time I'd identified it. (Random lockups on wake caused by bad i2c behaviour from trackpad, fix disable i2c and "fallback" to spi)...

Ended up with 3 motherboards though as my employer has a good warranty agreement. Shame they all suffered from coil whine and the 2nd engineer sliced a cable with a screwdriver. I genuinely could have done better myself, ended up fixing the coil wine with non conductive hot snott..

Great work Dell...


The wake from sleep issue on the XPS 15 is what killed Dell for me as a brand. I do not have this problem with any other brand. I chat with a lot of Dell XPS 15 owners and they all report the same issue.


> The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.

I had exactly the same thing on my XPS 15. I'd take it out of my bag, it'd be warm and the battery would be dead. Plus one day it suddenly decided it didn't have a TPM module (didn't even show up in BIOS) so BitLocker stopped working, and of late the CPU is constantly throtling and fans running at full blast because it's overheating even with next to no load (I've checked the fans for dust).


I had similar issues with dell support and my XPS 13 a while ago. Absolutely no way that I'll be buying another dell.


> They swapped many models to a shitty wifi card that caused bsod.

I assume you mean the Killer card. If you bug their support about this, they'll often agree to replace yours with an Intel one.


> Dells batteries are rated for less cycles (half compared to apple) [...] They only sell refurbished batteries

Are there any decent battery suppliers that sell dell compatible replacements?


Yep. 3 generations of dell for me, every time a different problem. I miss my samsung ativ book.

Next one will be a framework laptop.


Companies might also change / evolve / devolve over time--how old is your experience?


Isn’t this a known issue that it can’t hibernate properly?


The conflict between the market wanting systems that are (a) as small and light as possible and (b) as fast as possible means that modern systems are designed to have close integration between the platform and the OS to perform appropriate thermal management. If the OS doesn't indicate that it supports doing this, the hardware will run in a much more constrained mode. Apple can do this without too much trouble since they implement the whole stack, but it's more complicated in the PC space. Intel have a spec called Dynamic Power and Thermal Framework (DPTF), but the useful part of it is the adaptive thermal policy, and Intel refuse to publicly document it.

I reverse engineered a chunk of this (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html) and it got merged into Intel's Thermal Daemon (https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon) which /should/ improve things, but it's complicated by this mechanism allowing for vendor-specific controls that are usually implemented by having a background service running under Windows that triggers them.

There's multiple things that can be criticised here: 1) Intel pushing OEMs to adopt a technology that they (a) don't document and (b) don't write proper Linux support for 2) Canonical not making it clear that OEM certification only requires that the system work, not that it work as well as it does under Windows 3) Dell not figuring out a decent solution for this, even for systems that they nominally support Linux on

Dell could build hardware that doesn't rely on adaptive thermal management, but that hardware would either be bigger or slower than competitors' hardware. Fixing this unilaterally is hard - we need an open spec that's implemented by both hardware vendors and integrated into mainstream Linux distributions. Given where we are, the easiest way to get there would be for Intel to publicly document DPTF.


Exactly. When I was at Intel (working on the Mesa 3D drivers for Linux) we would routinely get reports that performance was less than on Windows and ultimately determine it was because on Windows the thermal limits would be set to e.g. 45W but on Linux we'd be stuck at 35W.


> modern systems are designed to have close integration between the platform and the OS to perform appropriate thermal management.

What does this mean in practice for a standard laptop?

I mean, every laptop supports the classic "turn up fans when CPU gets hot" and "throttle CPU if it gets very hot" - is that not sufficient to let the CPU operate as fast as the laptop's thermal design will permit?


Trivial example: you want to avoid the exterior of the laptop getting hot enough to be uncomfortable for the user. If you support adaptive policies, you can read the skin temperature sensor and then only throttle the CPU if that's above a certain temperature. If you want to get more fancy, you can make that temperature conditional on whether there's a dock attached or not (if the machine's sitting on the desk then the bottom temperature can go higher than it could otherwise).

More complex example: the wifi chipset also produces heat. The platform designer should take into account what the effect of CPU thermal output is on the wifi chipset, and expose that information in a way that the OS can make a decision about whether the appropriate response is to throttle the CPU or allow the wifi chipset to throttle itself. Making that decision is going to depend on the current workload, so you don't want to try to implement this in firmware.

If you don't support adaptive policies, then you just restrict the CPU such that even under worst case scenarios, the components can never exceed the desired temperature. Of course, this means that you're (generally) running slower than necessary.


no, unfortunately it's nowhere close to sufficient.

Power management on various chips is a complicated subject, and most modern laptops do a LOT of things to try to draw out battery life as long as possible.

If you want just a brief idea - take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

If it helps, you can think of thermal management and battery management as directly related (that heat is coming from somewhere, and it's the battery in the laptop - the more heat, the more energy being consumed [or wasted].)


Have the kernel patches you mentioned in the post been merged already in some form? Or is that required for a hacky solution?


They're merged, and if you're running a current version of Thermal Daemon then things /should/ be better than they were. But most policies don't actually explicitly modify the throttling temperature MSR, and Windows definitely defaults to a different value there when compared to Linux, so there's something more going on.


As a reminder: don't buy Dell, they have a history of ignoring issues and refusing to fix.

The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.


> The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.

I'm sure this will happen around the same time a wealth tax is implemented, universal healthcare is adopted, the US stops invading countries, and we stop subsidizing suburbs. (i.e. never)


European nations have mostly gotten rid of wealth taxes. You want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back? Ukraine gets invaded.


>You want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back? Ukraine gets invaded.

America hasn't even pulled back and we still can't stop Ukraine from getting invaded. Besides, preventing Ukraine from getting invaded isn't worth a whole lot of money as an American. We can not and should not try to be the world's police.


To be fair they gave up nukes on the promise the US would defend them. Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes and then not do anything.


>promise the US would defend them.

That's not what the Budapest Memorandum said, this was the actual promise:

>Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".

Such action was indeed sought at the UNSC on March 15, 2014, in spite of the fact that there was no threat of nuclear aggression. We actually exceeded our obligations under the memorandum.

>Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes

They weren't their nukes, they were Russian nukes, and IIRC Ukraine had no way to actually use them as nukes, even if they wanted to.


At what point does "not being police" change into "ignore your friends getting mugged"?


We upheld every promise we made to Ukraine. This may not be a polite thing to say, but Ukraine is not valuable enough to risk any sort of war with a country like Russia, nuclear OR conventional.


And there is the crux of it. America used to be the 'white city on the hill' where we stood up for what's right and did what we had to do for our friends.

This Utilitarian cynicism is all too common, and unworthy of a great people. Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.


>America used to be the 'white city on the hill' where we stood up for what's right and did what we had to do for our friends.

This has never been true.

>Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.

Kinda like how we told Russia we wouldn't be expanding NATO eastward and after did that and pointed it out the response is akin to "neener neener did you get it in writing?"


Except for Denmark. I don't even make that much and I'm already at top taxes (49 percent!)


https://i.imgur.com/1TQctN0.gif


You forgot the metric system.


And while we are at it, drop this MM/DD date formatting nonsense!


ISO 8601 master race, checking in on 2022-02-14!


YYYY-MM-DD is the true path. It is known.


This is the way, that is naively sortable.


I think that would need a lot of public buy-in, here in the UK we aimed to go fully metric in the '70s and it's still a mix to this day. Most things are officially metric but you still see a lot of informal use of imperial even among young people (height, weight etc) as well as quite a few official things like signs on roads and pints of draught beer in pubs.

Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.


The US is metric for everything except casual conversation. In the same way that i see and hear people in the UK say "he weighs 18 stone" or whatever, but everyone knows what a gram and kilogram and metre is.

There's some things where knowing the SI definition is irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter.

Industry and commerce is conducted on the global standard, though. And while the average american might not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far, 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot.

Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace every road sign in the entire country (there's millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country. Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking smack because we're backwater imperial measurement users", would you force everyone to pay for that?


>Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon.

This is pretty much why British roads still use miles and yards, the cost to the taxpayer of switching over would be horrendous. We do have dual measurements on heights and widths though, feet/inches and metres because many HGV drivers from the Continent aren't familiar with feet and there was concerns about them driving into bridges and so on.


> Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think,

it was a political football here back in the 70s when there was talk of metric adoption.

i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc) feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing against metric, in spite of the good things they also did.


We officially switched to metric at one point. People were using metric. Specifically, nurses were using metric. Reagan put an end to it. And here we are.


He was an arsehole in so many more ways than most people nowadays realise.


I don't think I've ever seen a doctor or nurse use oz for medication?


Yeah, I was under impression that medicine is also one of the fields that exclusively use metric.


there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric sounding divisions of inches.

Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5 grams. Both literally and figuratively.


> there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Milligrams? Grams are already quite a bit smaller than an ounce. A millilitre of water weighs one gram.


I was referring specifically to the medical part. an IV bag might have a half liter, but it's 500 "mil". ~28 grams in an ounce, which is unwieldy, even by american standards, and medicines are usually scant amounts of active ingredient, so milligrams is used.

Occasionally microgram is used, just as i have to occasionally measure things down to ~20 microns. I'd never use inches, there, and i'd never say "a kernel of corn weighs 1/250th of an ounce". This whole thread kinda caught me off guard. Normally i am making fun of the metric system, but something rubbed me the wrong way up-thread.


Ah. I was thinking of a comparable scale for liquids and fluids, as in, say, cooking. I can't decide if recipes that are obviously translated exactly from wierd-old American-and-British units but expressed in metric are more infuriating than ridicuolous or more ridicuolous than infuriating; probably six of one and half a dozen of the other: "Take 138 g butter and 267.5 ml milk..." No, for fuck's sake! Take 140 g butter and 250 ml milk! Or 150 and 300 -- i.e 3 dl. Sheesh...


We still measure weight and height using dumb people measurement systems.


I like some of our standards. Temperature is one of them. I like that 0 is cold as hell, and 100 is hot as hell. And I like the fact that in Fahrenheit, the degrees are finer. Don't have to set my thermostat in half-degree increments in my house.


I think preference that just comes from familiarly. In practice you don't set your temperature in half increments in places with Celsius, it's just 20, 21, etc. Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful.

If you come from a Celsius place and then move to the USA, you find it actually fairly annoying, because a bunch of useful numbers to remember is arbitrary as fuck. What is the freezing point again? 35, 37, 33? In Celsius it's 0 and very easy to remember. The freezing point is very useful, since you'll know if the rain will become snow if it's just under 0, or if ice will start forming on the road or not. Similarly what is the boiling point? 200, 205, 210, 212? vs. a nice round easy to understand 100. You can also think about how hot your water can be as a 'percentage of boiling', so 75 becomes 'hotness that is %75 the way to boiling'.

Vast majority of the world also knows that -17 (OF) is cold as fuck, and there is nothing special about that specific number too! You would also know that -16 and -18 are cold as fuck. Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot! And there are no unique properties about 0F and 100F, unlike 0C and 100C.


> Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful.

The radiator thermostats I use have a 0.5 °C gradation. A 1 °C gradation would be too coarse as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t mean that I’d prefer Fahrenheit, but 1° C is actually a quite significant step subjectively for environmental temperature.


> Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot!

you were doing so well until right here.


My favourite distance measurement is neither metric nor imperial but nautical. A nautical mile is 1852 metres which approximates the distance of a minute of arc of the Earth's meridians. A cable's length is 1/10 of a nautical mile which (depending on the definition used) is in turn about 100 fathoms. I know all unit systems are arbitrary, but for some reason it feels a bit less contrived than miles or kilometres to me.

Having said that I've never actually used cables or fathoms in practice, only metres or feet for depth and nautical miles for distance.


The only real measure of velocity is furlongs per fortnight.


In Celsius 0 is also cold as hell and 100 also hot as hell.


Depending on whether hell freezes over.


Where it matters, the US already uses the metric system. Virtually all products are dual labeled, with good chunk being in metric sizes. The military uses metric exclusively, and so does most of the science community.

But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.


> to go fully metric would take a genereration

Longer than that, I'd say. I remember watching videos about the metric system when I was in grade school back in the 70's. ("You can measure how far from your car to a star -- with the metric system!")


I mean, not if there was an actual metrication effort. There isn’t. Nobody’s putting up any speed limit signs in kilometres per hour or using celsius for the weather forecast.


not just speed limit signs. Mile markers, exit numbers, distance signs. There's millions of them all over the US. It would cost unfathomably (lol) large amounts of money to do that, and for arbitrary reasons.


You saw it in the 70s because that's when there was an effort (later abandoned) to convert the US to metric.


I'll believe the US is using metric when you can buy rice by the kilo, gas by the liter, paper in ISO sizes, and construction sheet goods in increments other than 8x4 feet.

Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.


The Carter administration attempted to start a full transition to metric in the late 1970s. When Reagan took power this was killed and no one attempted to revive it, because it was turned into a nationalist thing, one of those things Republicans reflexively oppose.


> But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.

It's already taken more.


Now you are pushing it.


If the US did all that then it would lose its unique charm and I’d have no reason to visit.


This x1000. A co-worker of mine just switched to Mac because of a horrible experience with a $4000 Dell XPS with a discrete GPU that had chronic overheating issues that seemed to be a design defect. Dell would replace it with a refurb and they all had the issue. Forums online showed other people all had the same experience. Dell just ignored it.

Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.


To be fair though, it is physically impossible to run a discrete GPU on any reasonable workload without overheating in a chassis like the XPS. You simply cannot dissipate 100-ish watts on a continuous basis in that form factor.

I guess it's a philosophical question whether Dell should stop selling these kinds of machines, or continue to separate those who ignore basic physics from their money.

I have a semi-portable Dell Precision M6500 from 2011. It still runs and does what it should, but it weighs 4 kg and is 3.5 centimeters thick. Both those numbers are twice that of an XPS 15, and it still throttles down the quad-core i7 after about 120 seconds at full load IIRC.


> or continue to separate those who ignore basic physics from their money.

This comes off as victim blaming.

As a consumer, I would expect the hardware I buy to be able to dissipate its own heat. If it can't, that's a design flaw that Dell needs to either fix or stop selling the product.


The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time, but in this case, I think it's completely accurate - as a consumer buying a product from a large company (as opposed to a shady man in a trenchcoat in an alley), you absolutely have the right to expect and demand that your purchase works as advertised, and the responsibility is on the seller to ensure that their marketing matches reality.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that false advertising is illegal in most countries, including the relevant one here (the US).


> The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time

Going off-topic, but yup. It's not victim blaming to point out when a victim didn't even take normal precautions. For example, if you're crossing the street, then even if the walk signal says WALK, you should still be looking to make sure there aren't any drivers running the red light. While yes, if you get hit by a car, it's the fault of the driver, you still failed to take the necessary actions for self-preservation.

Hell, there's a pedestrian crossing near me that isn't at an intersection, but has yellow flashing warning lights that turn on when you press a button. There's also a speaker that says "Cross street with caution, vehicles may not stop".


Some people prefer to buy a GPU and underclock it. Maybe you need fast GPU memory more than GPU compute cores for some algorithm.

I do that with one of my GPU servers, because the alternative is switching to liquid cooling and that's more work than I want to put in right now.


Dissipating a 100W GPU isn’t that difficult in a thin laptop, you can find plenty of companies doing so. Dell presumably has an issue because they don’t want to redesign the internals to dissipate that much heat.

Back when dual GPU’s where still a thing they actually needed laptops to be thick or wide, but 100w isn’t that bad.


They shouldn't sell the hardware then.


I have one of those too out in the garage. It runs a hobby CNC router, so it's basically bathed in very fine sawdust often. I'm astonished every time it actually boots up.


What about using those cheap vacuum cooler attachments like the ones sold on Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/laptop-vacuum-cooler/s?k=laptop+vacuu...


The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have a recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because Intel refused to support it.

Also, the 2017-2019 Intel MacBook Pros are poorly suited to "professional" workloads, throttling under load or if, get this, the "wrong" (Intel) TB controller is used. There are reproducible TB bugs that are abandoned, and I still believe T2/BridgeOS was Apple's response to Intel's poor security design; they were forced to design adversarially against components they couldn't trust.


> The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have a recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because Intel refused to support it.

Intel website shows their most recent Vega M release is 1/27/22. If Dell isn't keeping their drivers up to date, that's their problem, but the Vega M drivers are out there, Dell probably just isn't putting out releases.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19269/radeo...

anyway, more broadly, this is, unfortunately, just AMD's driver support model. For the longest time they would not even put out iGPU driver updates for their own processors, instead offloading this responsibility to the laptop vendors themselves (who, of course, did not give a shit). i.e. exactly what's happening with your dell.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Better-late-than-never-Radeon-...

And I don't know what people really expect here - Intel is dependent on AMD for drivers, they absolutely cannot write and support a whole new driver stack for an AMD product, if AMD sandbags (like they did previously to OEMs) then Intel is pretty much stuck. AMD got shamed into supporting their own products, finally, but they're absolutely not going to give Intel an inch more than they are contractually obligated to. It's in their financial interest to make your experience as shitty as they can.

Of course, it was probably a mistake for Intel to attempt to collaborate with their largest competitor, and they definitely should have made sure the contract was airtight. But there's really no good reason for these not to be supported by mainstream Adrenalin drivers.


I'm facing a similar issue on a Dell XPS 15, purchased in 2020.

That, plus structural defects cause case flexing when picked up, resulting in the touchpad being inoperable and (more recently) freezing the system entirely.

This is even when the pick up is very gentle -- the case flexes under its own weight. If I type too hard or rest my hands too heavy on the system it can also occasionally cause the issue.

The issue started two days out of warranty.


Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to being flexed somehow.

Last week I was sitting in a meeting and tilted my screen up a little on the XPS 15 so I could see past some glare from lights and the hinge snapped. It has the smallest little piece of metal at the point it snapped, about 3-4mm wide and 1-2mm thick, it was no wonder it snapped, so work had to give me a new XPS 15. The hinge itself is plastic-welded to the chassis so it can't just he replaced without the whole chassis being replaced.

I was planning for my next laptop to be a Framework anyway but my (£1600) XPS 13 is only ~2 years old so I am a little way from wanting to buy a new laptop just yet.

This sort of behaviour from DELL is confirming that going Framework is probably the right choice.

EDIT: Also don't get me started on the i9 / 4K XPS 15 a friend of mine bought that seems to want to kill itself any time it's switched on, and has never worked correctly since day dot.


>>Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to being flexed somehow.

I've had XPS laptops all the way back in 2010, then 2013 and then 2016 - they all rocked on a table, it's like Dell's factory is crooked and they are physically incapable of making an even laptop.


my XPS 15 7590 is dead flat. I have encountered ones that rock, but it's because the owners would slide them across tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly. I tend to pick the laptop up and re-place it when I need to move it rather than slide, and i've had good luck.

Now, I agree that kind of thing shouldn't have to be thought about as a wear item -- but it seems to be one.


>>but it's because the owners would slide them across tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly

I assure you all of mine did that straight out of the box. When the second one did it I was like "Huh, what are the chances" but I almost expected it with the third.


I assure you I do no such thing, and two for two my XPS laptops "rock" on the table.

Neither laptop has any wear whatsoever on the rubber feet from sliding them on a desk, or on anything else for that matter. I'm a software engineer, not a savage.

From my rudimentary testing, the front right corner is a little bent upward compared to the rest of the laptop. If I touch that corner with one finger it rocks, on both models and on any level surface.

Both of my machines are older than your 7590 but they both did it since new.

I got a 2020 model this week when the hinge broke on my XPS 15 but I'm yet to test if it suffers the same issue.


It's a big shame. They have so many little details right but really wooshed on overall quality it appears.


Definitely.

I've been through my fair share of laptop brands over the years.

Leaving Apple out of the equation, the XPS is still the best built, thinnest (though not lightest) laptop I've had that's got the grunt to get my work done.

The XPS 13 is disappointing because of the soldered WiFi meaning I can't swap out that crap Killer WiFi for Intel.


> Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.

Unfortunately Dell is cheap, make (or at least used to) fairly robust computers for their price with spare parts that can easily be found. Mac is much more expensive and good luck sourcing parts from other brands. Lenovo went downhill when they were sold off.


What do you mean? High-end XPS laptops were about the same price as equivalent Intel Macs - judging just by features (RAM, etc), of course MacBooks have much superior build quality.

I’d reckon equivalent M1 Macs are much cheaper.


If you value your time >20$/hr macs are cheaper because you don't need to waste 20 hours fixing stuff.


And if you're OK with the "Apple" way of doing things.

The moment you deviate, all bets are off.


>> Mac is much more expensive

I think that was a valid argument before Apple Silicon.


Remember when Dell was only in the black on their balance sheet because of Intel payola [1]?

Is Corporate IT the real reason Dell continues to exist, or is it Intel?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/dells...


I started a new job recently. Previous job had me on a Dell Latitude that had such poor thermal handling that the fan was constantly at full blast even under light use, and had throttling issues. Previous Dell laptops through them had various other faults (RAM was replaced twice in one machine, went through probably 6 or 7 docks, etc). After nearly a decade of various Dell laptops at that job, the new one offered the choice of a Dell or a Macbook. Not a fan of macOS, but I don't dislike it enough to avoid getting another garbage computer causing me endless headaches.


My Inspiron 5505 trackpad stopped working and Dell sent me a replacement. That didn't fix it and they determined it needed a motherboard. The replacement motherboard had some serious issues or didn't work at all (I can't remember, that was last year). They sent me a refurb 5515 in its place, and now it has locked up several times and has some weird ghosting/artifact stuff going on with the display.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any good PC alternative to Dell.

I just ordered a Macbook.


For Linux, I recommend System76. They stand behind their product.


frame.work also gets mentioned here from time-to-time as they support Linux [1], however reviews of the product itself are mixed, so this is not an endorsement, just an observation. I would read hn history and frame.work forum history before buying one for my use.

[1] "...Framework Laptop is working without issue in Ubuntu 21.04.3+ (NOT 20.04.3) and Fedora 35"

https://community.frame.work/t/official-linux-and-framework-...


Their product is clevo rebadges.


If they support it, who cares how it's made?


I don’t know your use case, but I have been very happy with MSI.


For that matter, don't buy HP as well. As a long time Apple hater, I finally changed to Macbook pros with Apple Silicon. The hardware quality from Apple is still consistently good.


But what OS do you run on it? Is linux well-supported (regarding throttling, sleeping, etc)? I can't stand the macOS gui.


I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I feel for people being burned by these bad advices.


I've used an XPS 9370 with Debian stable for 3-4 years now. Compatibility has been good and performance more than enough for me, but my dev work doesn't require super high performance, IMO this is the wrong form factor for that anyway. I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user so ... that's how low my requirements are for a decent desktop experience.

My main gripes:

For first few months wifi driver was unstable and would randomly cause kernel panics, sometimes once per day, sometimes once per week. (yes I tried manually installing newer versions and using different kernel versions)... eventually it stabilised and I haven't had any issue since - Even though this was not unique to this machine, it was annoying considering it was supposed to be built for Linux.

The battery capacity diminished faster than anything I've ever owned... currently at 20% of original capacity. There was a very sharp drop last year from 80% to 60%, then another sharp drop from 60% to 40% which I'm guessing is the controller writing off cells. (Manually calibrating it by draining never gets it above 30%)... Speculating this is possibly from heat damage (sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot) or just crap battery quality - expecting to find some spicy pockets when I get around to replacing it.

Other than that it's been a solid Linux machine and very comfortable lightweight form factor to use. I still don't have performance issues personally, so will replace the battery soon and see how much longer I can keep using it.


> I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user

> sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot

Off topic, but how did you configure i3 to work nicely with gaming? Last time I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great.

These days I use Pop!_shell where I might want to game, and Sway where I'll just want terminals and a browser.


I'm a lightweight gamer, but i've never had any trouble with drawing gaming windows on i3... I mostly play old stuff or FOSS versions of old stuff e.g ioquake based games, openra, stuff like that.

However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not had any issues.

What kind of games have you had issues with?

Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues?

[edit]

> I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great

Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows, yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions or anything.

For games windows that start floating I usually just full screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then i've never played a multi window game.


> What kind of games have you had issues with?

Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be able to take full control of the screen, and then having a panic attack when not allowed to.

As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows, that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games, games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I do (just most things :P )


This really says something about the state of internet tech reviews. None of these reviewers ever keep their products long enough to experience long term issues. They'll keep recommending the XPS 13 (or other flawed products) to consumers, as long as no issues pop up in the week or two they review it.

I suppose one good thing about Apple and MacBooks is that just because of how incredibly common they are, and the amount of mindshare they command, if there is a fatal flaw with an Apple product, there will be widespread consumer knowledge of the issues. On the other hand, models from Dell and these other manufacturers sell in low enough volumes that they can just keep pumping out broken products, and not enough people will care to hold them publicly accountable.


Well, I still own an XPS 9360 which works wonderfully well under Linux. That's why at my current job I choose a top-of-the-line XPS 15 i9. Big mistake. That thing went through several support iterations (WiFi, motherboard ...) and it still locks up from time to time. I hate it.


Yup, I bought a Thinkpad after even 5 minutes perusing through both the Thinkpad subreddit and the Dell one revealed that Dells are plagued with issues and it is really just dumb luck if you get a problem-free unit, and their support is not helpful.


I have an XPS running PopOS and it's fine. Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones? I don't really push my laptops though as my job doesn't require it. Everythings seems fine for the two years I've owned it. Survivor bias?


I have a Dell EMC T40 that was working fine until a BIOS update caused an ACPI issue where one core would sit and spin on an inturrupt eating 60% of the CPU. The discussion on lkml is that it is a BIOS issue and they can do nothing. It's been two years now with two additional BIOS upgrades and it's still not fixed.

Because of this, my newest laptop is a Lenovo... no more Dell computers for me, sorry Dell, not sorry.


My homelab runs on two T20's. 24/7/365 without issue and they sip ~ 25 watts from the wall with Xeon E3 L-series chips.

They are pretty old though and just barely fast enough. Last year I ordered a Precision 3630 to test out as an upgrade. I was so disappointed by the engineering and build quality I requested a return the day it arrived.


I had a T30 that ran 24/7 for about 10 years but started having machine checks, but I was too lazy to see if it was fixable, so I just bought the T40 to replace it. The T30 was a solid machine and I never had a problem with it. I can start to hear some fan bearing failure now in the T40, which means they're not using ball bearing fans and that really pisses me off.


That seems like it might go too far—their XPS 13 Linux laptops have gotten good notices—but I did marvel at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952. Sleep/wake doesn't work properly on large numbers of laptops in 2021 and 2022?


This is Intel's doing, on Microsoft's behalf. There was a big push to replace the old/"normal" sleep (S3) with "modern standby" (S0ix).

In S3, the system controller powers down the CPU and nonvolatile storage while keeping RAM in a low-power self-refresh mode until you wake it up. Your operating system is not running -- the microcontroller that reads the lid sensor and power button determines when the laptop will resume.

In S0ix, the CPU is still running, and the OS kernel is supposed to put itself into a low power state most of the time, while periodically doing things like checking email and performing updates. The lowest power state still uses gobs more power than S3, and Microsoft is aggressively irresponsible about when and why it wakes up. It's more like "turning off the display and spinning down disks after inactivity" and less like a real sleep state. Windows is running the show 100% of the time, even when the laptop is in your backpack.

All this because Microsoft was jealous that Apple can check email and download updates without waking up using their T2 system controller and now their own SoCs. But Apple is way less aggressive about waking up, their firmware is generally pretty okay, and T2 still uses less power than an x86 in standby.

Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state that puts Windows in the driver's seat, and in order to make sure it gets used and people don't "accidentally" get stuck using the "old" S3 sleep, they made it so that you can only have either S3 or S0ix enabled, so all system builders would essentially be forced to switch. Some (Lenovo) offered a BIOS flag to surreptitiously switch between S3/S0ix before boot time, but even that seems to be going away or broken lately.

I have to believe that this will get better eventually, if only because the current state of things is so atrocious, but I wouldn't plan on buying a new laptop in the next 2-3 years.


> Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state

Or stuff another embedded core onto those enormous CPU dies.


And my understanding is that the Windows band-aid for bad sleep power drain is to just hibernate after a certain percent of drain, so if "modern" sleep doesn't really work well on your machine you won't necessarily notice so much.


I'm probably going to be on the lookout for an AMD based laptop next year (would be nice if frame.work would have AMDs by then).

Is AMD in a better place regarding sleep states?


Upvoting because I'm also curious about this...

As far as I'm aware, S3 and SOix both exist on AMD, but I'm not sure whether they can exist simultaneously. There seems to be just as much confused annoyance at power consumption issues on AMD laptops as with Intel, e.g. https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/P14s-Ge...

Not really sure what to make of that, but it sure is disheartening.

Separately, while AMD's better performance / watt would seem to make it a good candidate for laptops, lack of Thunderbolt across the board has also been frustrating, especially if you already have a nice TB dock setup.


I have an xps 13 developer edition from 2016. It came with Ubuntu preinstalled out of the box.

It was the worst linux experience I've ever had, and just a bad experience in general. They gave it a broadcom wifi chip which has poor linux support, no built in drivers out of the box so whenever I reinstalled I needed to connect an ethernet wire with a usb dongle to download the driver. The wifi also just had very poor reception compared to other laptops.

Sound problems intermittently where half of the time it would have no sound on boot, and I'd have to continually reboot until it decided to work.

They had an absolutely infuriating feature which adapted brightness levels of the screen so that if you transition from dark to bright it would gradually adjust. Except this feature was broken and it does the opposite of what was intended -- it instantly cranks the brightness up to 100 and then gradually adjusts down to what the beightness should be. Even if this feature worked properly it would be undesired, but it is broken in the worst way and there is no way to disable it on my model. I have spent many hours trying.

The computer also arrived with the chasis mis-aligned. I couldnt plug anything in to any ports, we had to get a dell guy come in and reasemble the machine.

The charger also stopped working after about 1.5 years. I bought a new charger but now the charging port only works intermittently.

QA issues aside, you'd think that they would choose parts known to work well with linux but they inexplicably did not.


I have a XPS 13 9370. I've never had a problem with sleep wake... except that the Wifi doesn't always wake up from sleep.

It's soldered in so can't be replaced.

This is a laptop I bought with Linux support out of the box but I've given up expecting Dell to fix it. It's easier just to kill off and restart the wifi connection when it stalls.

Given that I'm not sure I'd buy another Linux Developer Edition laptop from Dell.


Dell XPS was my worst linux laptop experience. I'll never understand why it gets such high accolades.


I've had good experiences with the XPS 13's last two or so generations with Linux... I want to say with the 10 and 11-series Intel chips? I have an older, thicker XPS 13 that only ever ran Windows which never really gave any issues either, apart from its goofy side-bottom-chin webcam placement.

But I also had several coworkers with the same newer 11-series XPS machines who got a series of lemons... Dell replaced the motherboards, but still.


I've had a bad XPS experience, but I also have really good latitude 72xx and 74xx experiences.

I think that XPS build is just the wrong machine for Linux and like someone else said the wrong form factor for poor power performance management.


Could never get sleep to work properly on 2 Dells in the last 2 years. Switched to hibernate on lid close and that seems to work.


Their USB C docks are _always_ delivered to users with a piece of clear film tape wrapped tightly around the USB plug.

The tape is added by our IT department, because otherwise they'll have to replace the dock after two weeks because the plug just dismantles. Great build quality...


In my experience clear heat shrink tubing lasts a lot longer than tape.


Probably out of stock in the IT department. :-D


100% this. Have a dell XPS, laptop has been on a flat desk since the day I got it. Screen randomly starts getting distorted and is unusable now, had to buy an external display. The repair costs would be at least half the cost of what I paid for the laptop.

They’re supposed to be a premium laptop but after 2 years it’s essentially a desktop.

Windows hardware in general is junk. Saving for a MacBook at the moment.


I expected this before they shipped models running Linux, but thought I was safe now. I've learned my lesson.


This was the received wisdom last time I had to use a Windows PC, and that was 20 years ago. I'm amazed they're still going.


Once you achieve those, you have no companies to begin with. See EU.


What do you think of Lenovo or HP?


I decided to give HP another try back in 2016. I bought a Chromebook that promised Android support. As of 2022, it's still listed as "Planned".[1] It only lasted a couple years before the display completely quit working, so the Android thing was not the biggest problem.

I would not have bought it without the assurance that I'd be able to run Android apps. Never a word from HP about the issue (and obviously no attempt to make the situation right after they lied). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if you should give them your money.

[1] https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chro...


I've had 2 reasonably modern HP laptops and they've both been very solid. Currently typing this on a latest-gen HP Envy 14 (Core i5-11300H, Intel Xe, 16GB RAM, 400nit 1200p touchscreen) running Fedora 35 and am pretty impressed with it considering I got it for £550 refurb. Fedora works nearly perfectly out of the box. Performance is great, battery life is great (8+ hours in VSCode + Chromium browser with tlp), the display is bright, the touchscreen works well with GNOME and the built-in hardware camera shutter is a nice touch and, unlike my previous XPS 15, the sleep actually works fine by default and its temperatures are very good even in the "low noise" profile. No issues with WiFi/connectivity either since it's an Intel chip and those have good Linux support.

The speakers are mediocre though compared to the work Mac I used to have and are mostly in line with other Windows laptops sadly. I thought they'd sound great since there are these vents behind the keyboard that look like speaker grills but they're actually for cooling.

One of the downsides is that it has coil whine when charging off the USB-C port which doesn't bother me much as I almost exclusively use it on battery or with headphones. The fan curve is also really weird where it's silent 80% of the time but it sometimes turns on and off for 15 seconds at a time which is a bit jarring. I think there's some way to tune this though but I wish the fan were a bit quieter or that there were a way to just have it cool passively. I've also not managed to get the fingerprint reader working, mostly for a lack of trying, as it seems like there's a fork of libfprint that specifically adds support for it (Elan 04f3).

I also have an HP Chromebook 14 with an Intel Celeron N4000 and 4GB of RAM which I got as a cheap laptop to bring on trips for remotely accessing my desktop and it's only real pain point is the performance - Android and Linux apps work, sound is on par with the other laptop, display is decent, no fan and no coil whine so it's very nice to use in a quiet environment and fantastic battery. I was actually surprised when I found out it can drive 2 1440p displays off a single USB-C port which is something my flatmate's M1 Macbook Air can't do.

So yeah, I can say that the consumer line HP laptops are pretty good this gen, just be careful with the displays since a lot of their laptops still use sucky 250 nit screens and also be careful with Nvidia GPUs. In my experience those never work well and you're better off getting a desktop/console/streaming service for gaming or renting a cloud GPU for compute.


Not sure about Lenovo, but I have been thoroughly unimpressed with my HP Pavilion. Granted, I'm a Mac user so my standard may be higher, but my Pavilion just feels horribly cheap, the display flickers all the time, and the HP bloatware is a mess.


Did you buy an HP product that's on the same price range as your Mac? Feels a pretty unfair comparison otherwise.

That said, if not anything else, Lenovo provides the best laptop keyboards in my opinion. Perfectly sized, perfectly spaced, and give the best feedback out of all else. The thermals and overall build are also easily the best on my Ideapad than any other mainstream laptop I have used, though I'd concede I haven't really used as many laptops.


HP feels cheap. Lenovo business models are excellent, but their consumer models aren’t great. I would still buy one over HP or Dell though.


The Yoga Slim 7 is a great laptop for the money. (still soldered RAM)


Dell was the first pc retailer to earn my personal ban after showing their shady business practices followed quickly by Newegg a few months later. Life has been better ever since.


Somebody else might say the same thing about HP and Amazon. But it isn't much help to anybody else. If you steer somebody away from the frying pan and into the fire, what good was your help?

What have you used since then that made life better?


A helpful utility to run before you get too deep into trying to run Linux on some hardware is the 'Firmware Test Suite'; https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirmwareTestSuite

It runs an impressively large suite of checks and can help identify areas of platform insanity, such as regions of ACPI tables that are wholesale missing or otherwise don't make sense per the specs. Ideally while your laptop is under a premium support care package, you can relay this report output to the vendor and keep after them to fix things. If you do not have support or the device is older, you may have some success with back-porting sections of ACPI tables from similar platforms (e.g. the XPS and Precision lines are very similar).

In some cases the Intel ACPI Source Language (`iasl` ) compiler used in Firmware Test Suite will have false-positives/negatives if the ACPI table was initially compiled by Microsoft tooling. You'll see mention of `MSFT` in the ACPI table dump during boot (via dmesg).


Back when I managed to get OSX running on VMWare Player I recall having to edit some of the DSDT stuff to get the battery indicator to show on the desktop!

It still boggles my mind that there's a virtual machine interpreter running in kernel mode.


The post on HN got 5 points so I don't know how likely a causation is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329842


The Dell forum post was going on for months now, with more than a hundred posts from owners and some Dell input. Why delete it it today, if not to prevent spreading to a larger audience outside owners?


Wow I just ordered an refurbished E6430 to use as a Linux server, does it suffer from the same issue? that's nuts. Why the f would Dell do that?

archive of page 1: https://archive.fo/5iQCF

There are 14 pages or so, I suggest people save every page of the discussion still in google cache and archive it, for instance page 2:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JO-IqO...

https://archive.fo/9BYs4

Since Google cache might be deleted at Dell's request. Don't just use screenshots, these can be easily doctored.

edit: corrected the model's name.


Have had very good luck with all dell refurbished laptops, these last many years. Possibly they are better, because anything broken, is fixed.


If you mean E6430 (model from about 2014), mine isn't throttling. It does get hot though.


I had a horrible experience with a Dell laptop a few years ago. I bought it because of the price/specs combination, but it had so many problems.

The problems started with the purchase. My credit card had a security feature where they texted me to ask about a large purchase, and I had to be transferred to 3 or 4 different departments calling Dell sales support trying to get them to recharge my card. Then, I had to deal with the computer itself.

The webcam was horrible, at an odd angle, and it displayed weird horizontal line artifacts that made me look like I'm on a bad 90s CRT monitor. The speakers were extremely glitchy until about a year of driver upgrades. The built-in microphone never worked without making me sound like a robot. The headphone jack never worked well, either.

The final straw was last month, when I tried to join a Zoom call from my personal computer for the first time in a few years. I installed Zoom, connected my external webcam and headphones, and Zoom crashed. Then, the Windows audio driver itself crashed. I restarted, and Bluetooth wouldn't come up for me to connect my headphones. Finally, after another restart, I was able to do a Zoom call with my external webcam and headphones.

It was comically bad. I bought an M1 MacBook Pro the next weekend, and it's the best computer I've ever had.

It's unfortunate, because I had a great experience with a Dell desktop in the mid 2000s, but their problems are really unacceptable. Stay away from Dell.


I don't think it has something to do with the post here.

For me it seems like everything except the "Work from Home" forum has disappeared. So its probably just some forum issues.


Please let us have our moment of self-importance.


How many issue that was raised in here that was solved like in day or two? seriously even twitter and reddit has this power.


The solution is

https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/

Been using it on various XPS laptops for years.

Sadly it requires support for MSR writes which are being slowly deprecated by the Linux kernel. I believe the same should be achievable with thermald be I haven't been able to be bother yet.


Unfortunately, "throttled" does not fix the problem on these particular models. See https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/issues/255


The restriction on MSR writes from the kernel people is just nuts. It's like they are saying: we know better, you're stupid and shouldn't be doing this so we just won't let you.

I'm still fuming.


Context: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...

Writes to arbitrary MSR are still allowed by linux, but it'll squawk a warning with the PID from what poked the MSR. What has been preventing writing to MSR is microcode updates (loaded via Linux via initram/firmware, or via the vendor in a BIOS update), such as the one(s) in response to plundervolt https://plundervolt.com/ Writing to the plundervolt-related MSR was particularly helpful to undervolt a thermal-throttled laptop. So! Can either downgrade the BIOS and/or rollback the microcode that your distro is loading during boot.


Thank you for providing context and some background. There are so many legitimate uses for wrmsr I still think this move from kernel devs is quite openly user hostile.


Solid utilitarian laptops seem hard to come by these days, what with the S3 removal fiasco and the desire for making an aesthetic statement over function. My work Dell Latitude (came from the factory with Ubuntu) isn't particularly stable. The machine will randomly power off (under light workloads or heavy - no obvious difference) with full battery and will not power on again until it's connected to the power brick. Once it's powered on I can disconnect the power cable again and be good for a few days to weeks. It's not an obvious thermal issue because I regularly run 100% all-core workloads and it's fine (thermal throttles, but fine). It also burns through a full battery after a weekend of sleep.

On a whim I upgraded an old hand-me-down ThinkPad T430s to the classic 7-row keyboard since I had one lying around, and I'm finding myself using that machine more and more. Planning to upgrade its screen soon. Not all older laptops are good, of course, but the T430s with the upgrade feels like... a computer fit for getting things done. Everything gets out of the way. Full of utilitarian touches. For example, the lid's profile conforms to the palmrest's downward curve, giving it a functional sunshade.


I have an XPS 15 9560, something like 4 or 5 years old. It's not great, not terrible, bug getting more and more annoying. 1 or 2 years ago, a mandatory major Windows 10 upgrade broke the USB3 port (except 1 time every 10 connection attempts if you are lucky), and also the Wifi does not always resume when waking up, in which case a reboot is needed to recover.

The thermal design and CPU freq selection is also far from perfect given it often throttles during ~10s every few minutes under constant load (sign the CPU freq under load is too high and/or the thermal dissipation is too weak)

The general mechanical hardware quality is also inferior to a MBP. The keyboard marked the screen a little (still tolerable though).

Given the XPS are supposed to be kind of flagships for Dell, I do not recommend Dell if you want a laptop that works and that is not a toy you intend to trash after 2 or 3 years. I wished reviewers talked about typical medium/long-term experience of brands and product ranges.


Someone at Dell's presumably going to get educated about the Streisand Effect quite soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect


I haven't heard anything good about Dell for at least the last 15 years. How come this company is still a thing? Even in the enterprise sector, at least from what I catch up here and there (mainly Germany), no one is contracting Dell anymore. I wouldn't say HP is any better, but it's a bit less ridiculous in most aspects at least.


The last two laptops I bought were XPS 15s and they worked totally fine for the years I used them 2011/2015?. I'm planning a refresh this year for a new one. I have a 2019 MBP sent to me for work and it crashes at least 3 time a week. Like it or not, there is no objective value to how well or long lasting these products last, and the best we can do is require manufacturers to report defects/returns so that the public are informed, so.. probably never happen unless the EU mandates it.


Years and years ago I was given a Dell (Pentium I?), it was running a bit warm, so I got a suitable fan for that (standard) motherboard. When I opened the box to install it, I found that it was not quite standard, the extra-fan power socket was not there. After some research I discovered that Dell ordered special versions of standard motherboards with only the bits that they were using in their models, shaving a few cents off the price. I determined to avoid Dell ever since (so avoided the whole "exploding capacitor" thing of the early 2000s).


My memory isn't the best but I'm under the impression that not-quite-standard or otherwise crappy solutions were fairly common in major brand desktop PCs of that era.

I'm not defending those solutions, and I don't know if Dell's builds were even more limited than some other brands or not, but I doubt those kinds of issues were unique to them.


There was another round of exploding caps in the mid-late 2000s as well. Or at least, the batch of hundreds we worked on had those issues.


I did a 4-month stint as sysadmin in a University which was exclusively Dell in the middle of the great capacitor plague, dozens of machines sent back every week, they stopped asking why and just replaced them. Happy days :-|


I had to Dremel out a Dell desktop case to fit a standard ATX power supply, circa 2005.


I have a company provided 6 month old Dell Precision 5750. It's the worst POS I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

I use it primarily to do remote desktop to my desktop at work. IOW: I don't stress it at all.

- I already had IT replace the SSD because it would boot Windows but the screen remained black.

- The trackpad is almost useless, with a lot of phantom clicks. Maybe that's because I've been spoilt by 15 years of MacBook trackpads.

- Speaking of the trackpad, when you press it to click, it started feeling weird after a few days, as if something mechanical came loose.

- After a few days of non-interrupted use (as in: not rebooting), the microphone stops working. Nothing else but a reboot fixes it, but I've just resigned to using MS Teams on my phone for voice and audio, and the laptop for screen sharing with volume set to 0.

- It never goes into a low power state. I'm only doing remote desktop and not running anything else, but if you'd go by the noise of the fan, you'd think it's mining crypto at peak performance. When you check the control panel, the CPU load is just a few percent.

- Recently it started hanging every few days, forcing another reboot.

But, hey, the 4K display is pretty good and it even has a touch screen. Which I'm reminded off whenever my finger accidentally hits it. (Touch screens on laptops are indeed useless.)


It's possible that you do have some kind of malware mining crypto. Or maybe they didn't install the thermal paste on your CPU correctly.


Not possible, CPU is barely working and I monitor it all the time. IT is managing all settings and protection with monitoring and I do work in Security field and know how to be very secure. Thermal paste is properly installed. The issue is thermal thresholds where medium-high fan noise starts at ~45-50C which is way too low.


Framework cannot expand their laptop line up soon enough ;)


PSA: Archive a link (Wayback, Archive.is) that may be controversial to a corporate image before posting to social.


Not sure whether you are aware but this issue seems to affect different vendors like Lenovo as well who can't find a solution neither.

The same issue is being reported all over lenovo linux forums as well and for example on https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/issues/255 you see lots of lenovo people reporting the same.

I personally suffer the same issue on my X1G9, the best fix so far is the unload/load all related kernel modules one which makes throttling at least only drop to 1.2 Ghz.


For those, like me, who uses Firefox + uBlock Origin + NoScript and can't see the image on imgur, because of their shitty antiblock (@hdiniz - stop using that crap for images), I uploaded to postimages. I had to open Edge (bleah!) to view the image on imgur. Here it is:

https://i.postimg.cc/1396wMSb/Dell-HN-Issue.png

LE: I had to disable both NoScript and uBlock for me to be able to see their pop-up and after clicking on it, the image loaded properly on imgur. Still a shitty site IMO.


Thank you for the effort. Unfortunately the image I see on postimg is 241x800 px. The image on imgur is 1908x6336 px. Deep link: https://i.imgur.com/IS9mH3l.png


Yeah, initially postimages was full as well, now I see it got resized


I use Firefox + uBlock and can get to everything on imgur just fine.


Like I said in the edit above, I had to disable both to see their pop-up. Clicked accept (what else to do these days, it's a joke), enabled back and can see as well.


I've been at the same company for almost 2 decades. 5 years into my tenure, some genius had a bright idea to move away from IBM Thinkpad. Each time, it's bee a failure.

IBM Thinkpad (years and years) -> Dell (3 years) -> HP (3 years) -> Back to Lenovo Thinkpad (for the past 5-6 years)

Mind you, they didn't go with cheap HP or Dell. They were pretty expensive stuff...

Thankfully, I missed the Dell and HP wave because I held onto my Thinkpad T61 for almost 8 years before they finally pried it out of my hands.


Dell visual design is great. Anything else sucks. I had to heavily mod my dell XPS 13 with heat pipes, thermal putty and thermal pads to make it not throttle. It's literally 20!!!! degrees cooler now and never throttles. It's unbelievable that an amateur like me can run circles around their design. Picture for the interested: https://imgur.com/a/SfaI0RA


Maybe we can take this post as an opportunity to discuss alternatives, specifically to the Latitude 5420/7420/7520 series notebooks. What can you recommend?


System76 provides good value, and they stand behind their product.


I bought a refurbished Fujitsu Lifebook a month ago after 7 years of using various Dells and Macbooks. The experience (on Linux) has been surprisingly smooth. Everything just works, zero overheating. The machine has thinkpad-like build quality but it looks nicer.


Zen 3 Thinkpads.


They have funky Realtek NICs though don't they?


Oh, forgot about that :/


Only somewhat related: I was provided a Latitude 5520 from my work, as they wanted everything to be done on company-owned hardware. I've had it nearly two years now, and it _still_ has two major issues.

The first is it cannot hibernate; if it goes to hibernation, the CPU will run full throttle until the battery is dead. Sleep is fine at least, so I get by with just disabling hibernation. Not a huge deal as 95% of the time it is on my desk and plugged in.

The second: you cannot unplug a USB keyboard while it is running or else the machine will hard-freeze and requiring a hard-reboot to recover. I originally set up a KVM switch for my mouse/keyboard to switch between my personal machine and work machine without having to plug/unplug a bunch of stuff, but it will automatically switch over if it detects one machine is active while the other is not, and that would usually end up freezing the Dell every night.

Absolutely inexcusable all around for these kind of issues to go on this long. I have to imagine it's either solely warranty/service contracts, or simply sheer naivete on alternatives from large businesses, keeping Dell in business.


I forget where I got this from but this is an alias you can use to check your CPU speeds

alias cpuspeed="watch -n.1 \"cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep \\\"^[c]pu MHz\\\"\""

prints out current mhz on all cores, normally you'll see in the 2,000 mhz range (2ghz) and the 400mhz would be quite noticeable. for the record i have a dell precision 7540 with ubuntu from the oem and it has been a journey to make it workable


This is the worst possible way to measure CPU frequency. Just use turbostat.

https://www.linux.org/docs/man8/turbostat.html


what about nmon? (press 'M' to see the frequencies)

for stress testing and monitoring you could try https://github.com/amanusk/s-tui


Cool suggestions, thanks for sharing!

Two reasons why Turbostat is my weapon of choice here. It's part of the kernel tools package which might be important if you don't have access to outside repos (think CoLo sites, etc).

The other reason is acces to tsc frequency which is pretty important in my line of work.

I'll definitely give s-tui a try. Looks really nice.


The link on the first post to another Linux issue is also not there. https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-7420-thrott...

Maybe someone did a delete where post like '%Linux%'


I'm not seeing any posts in any of the community threads. Not sure what the reason is, although we could always speculate with more or less reasonable certainty. Might as well just sit back and wait :shrug:


Doesn't surprise me. We had a few Dell AIO's in our office and whenever the CPU was under high usage for more than 15 minutes the motherboard would start malfunctioning. USB ports would stop working, built-in screen would flicker or short out entirely, etc. As soon as the CPU usage let up, all the issues went away and it would work normally again even without a reboot. Same behavior, multiple identical models in our office doing the same thing. Clearly a design defect/flaw.

Dell's solution? Replace almost every part under warranty under numerous repairs. As expected, issue still persisted and support had no explanation. We had no luck trying to escalate the issue as a design flaw. We decided to cut our losses and just order new PCs that weren't AIO's since they wouldn't be thermally pushing the limits.


Given the anti-Dell pile on I wanted to give my alternative experience.

I've been a very happy Dell user for at least 15 years, maybe 20. In that time I've had at least four Dell laptops and at least one workstation. I've never experienced any significant problems.

My latest machine is an XPS 7390 that I use with Debian GNU/Linux. S3 suspend to RAM works fine. In fact, everything works fine. The build quality seems fine, though it's only one year old, so time will tell I guess.

I wrote up my experience: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...


I have a new precision with, I guess, no power management. Query pwrcfg and it offers up hibernation. Period. Windows suggests I look in the bios, but if additional sleep modes are available there, I’ve yet to find them.


As thermal budgets get pushed with more power in smaller packages, replacing the OEM thermal paste/pad is almost becoming a standard operation. Recent AMD/Nvidia GPUs have experienced thermal throttling issues due to poor or outright missing application of the thermal interface material on RAM and GPU components.

At some point after warranty expiration, as a "hail mary", I replaced the OEM thermal paste in my Precision laptop and saw peak temperatures plummet around 20C, where it was previously bouncing off the CPU thermal throttle limits with the fans on max.


> I replaced the OEM thermal paste

Have a good tutorial for that?


Sure! This old one from GamersNexus runs through some pretty good detail and even arrives at the same "20C temperature reduction" conclusion I experienced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d42PSM0CN8g Best will be to youtube for your specific model laptop to see if there are any connectors to be particularly careful of when opening. The hardest part will be finding all of the screws to remove the bottom of the laptop. In addition to the x10 around the perimeter, my Dell has a little flap which hides two easy-to-miss screws.

And bonus, here is a bit of a theatrical conclusion to changing thermal pads on an Nvidia GPU https://youtu.be/-kPUq-q8tT8?t=410 (observed memory temperatures dropped from 110C to 70C, 40C reduction, and overall GPU performance doubled)


Wow so there are a lot of comments here but uh can I just point out that every post on Dell's support forum is either 404 or 403 this morning, so I doubt it has anything to do with big conspiracy.


I've got a Dell Developer Edition Precision and I've honestly always been pretty happy with it, but I've never pushed it to the degree that I questioned its performance.

I'll be paying close attention to this going forward though. When I bought 3 years ago I was between this and System76 because I wanted to buy from a company with Linux-first options...but this certainly has me concerned. I've been mulling a new machine for a few months now so this will certainly impact whether I consider another Dell.


I ordered two Dell Enterprise Chromebooks for use in healthcare. It was pretty important that I get the managed enterprise version of this for HIPAA reasons. This was as an evaluation to order 20-30.

The machines I received had the wrong OS on them, they didn't have the enterprise version.

The "support" I received from Dell on this was easily the worst I've had in my career.

Suffice to say, I will not be ordering the 20-30 additional machines, and won't be recommending any Dell products at any company I'm a part of.


How about the precision line? It better supports Linux.

Meanwhile searching best Linux Laptops points to Dell XPS:

https://www.howtogeek.com/748445/best-linux-laptops/amp/

https://linuxhint.com/best_linux_laptops_programming/

XPS used to be heavily recommended on HN.


This is more of an Intel problem than anything. For the longest time Intel has been increasing throttling instead of improving efficiency. Now that AMD and Apple have brought competition, and thanks to TSCM, upcoming Intel designs are starting to look more efficient, but Intel laptops from between 2015-2020 are mostly garbage if you're doing anything realtime in a warm environment.


I had a similar experience with Thinkpad X1E 2nd gen (I tried both Arch and now on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, soon to jump to 22.04 LTS pre-release). It throttles heavily despite being certified as a Linux device. Before that, I used Dell precision with RHEL (later CentOS), which worked wonderfully. But the precision line is so expensive. So next time, I will try to get System76.


canned response (Feb 2021)

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000139695/balanced-...

Just move on when shopping for a laptop.


short peek at the internet:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=dell%20lattitude%20thrott...

it seems to have been a longstanding issue with not quite recent CPUs accross a number of models. the thermal throttling was not right.

there are some fixes about:

https://github.com/DivyanshuVerma/throttlestop-linux

https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/dell-fixes-latitud...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/579159/who-is-throt...


Hi, hounestly i cant say why dell does this. even as a DELL Employee some questions and some decisions are not to my liking but theres only so much you can do as the little guy.

My Policy is: Displays, sure i can go with DELL Servers (if i would need), why not

Clients: i rather not (allthough i have a 5420 as my Company Provided Device and i kinda like it)


My 5420s (~50 of them out of a ~200 laptop fleet) with an i5-1135g7 on Fedora Rawhide and CentOS 7 (with mainline kernel) don't seem to be affected by this, BUT I have a couple 5490s with 8656u CPUs that are.

I should note that the 8656u CPUs have been nothing but trouble (multiple mobo replacements and still have suspend issues).


The posts weren't removed- the entire Dell forum had issues that day. The entire thread is still up and it's still active, though with rather depressing results. Dell is too comfortable sucking at the teat of huge corporate purchases to really care about people who buy 1 or 2 machines.


Going to add myself to the list of people Dell managed to successfully piss off. Bought a top-of-the-line XPS 15 2018 model and once the initial "wow" factor of owning a premium laptop faded away, I was bombarded with numerous issues such as:

* Lack of S3 sleep state leading to battery drains and heating up while inside my bag; modern standby was trash back then * Piss-poor thermals leading to piss-poor performance with an Intel i9 processor * Horrible support service with copy-paste answers and ZERO resolutions even though I had their premium support; a lot of solutions are community initiatives * Horrendous trackpad

I've since monitored future XPS releases and found it got even worse. For example, there was a common trackpad double-clicking issue that plagued the later models. The thing that really pisses me off is tech reviewers not calling out Dell even though they faced these issues with their review/retail units. This applies even for Alienware—where's the outrage on the m51 scam?[1] The times they complain, they aren't loud enough and Dell just gets away with it.

I've told my friends and family to avoid buying Dell for the foreseeable future. I'd advise the folks here to do the same unless your company is expensing it.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522265/dell-alienware-ar...


How much you wanna bet it's nothing nefarious? Just the performance of the forums is so terrible that the extra traffic was clobbering them and they just deleted the post to get load back under control. :)


Today, Lenovo Support also confirmed on the phone that there is a throttling issue affecting the Thinkpad X1 Extreme Generation 3. They currently don‘t seem to have a clue what is going on…


Maybe https://github.com/erpalma/throttled can help


I was thinking about buying a Dell XPS, glad I found this thread. Probably going back to a ThinkPad (the Acer I have now is ok but the build isn't as nice as my previous ThinkPad).


I am a huge fan of XPS laptops. Sad to see, this kind of reaction.


Same here too, I'm on my third XPS. This is the same crap that gets pulled with non linux supported laptop and I sort of understand. But these are specifically Linux supported.


Is this an issue with Dell, or an issue with Linux...?

If the system shipped with Windows, I don't really think it's dells issue if Linux doesn't do proper thermal management.


In 2013ish I had the XPS 13 "Developer Edition". It always felt extremely underpowered for the specs, so I wonder how long they've been doing this.


My company provided Dell Precision 5750 i7-10875H 8core, 4K, is a beauty beast from the specs and looks.

However I HATE IT with a PASSION because there is no way to make it quiet as it is LOUD!?

In my opinion the whole thermal managing team should be fired as incompetent and I speak from my indepth knowledge of working for Intel in a central Arch team in the past. I even meet a number of Dell key people presenting them what is coming and shared best practices how to do each part of the design. They used to do decent job before, but now seems incompetence has won. I am sure there are still lots of good engineers and people there, but result-wise team that did thermal management on 5750 SUCKS TO HEAVEN! In 5750 there is massive cooler, yet fans start going loud (mid-jet sound) when any audio conferencing or any ~5% CPU only load happens and CPU temperature is still well below 50C most of the time, yet this junk goes Wuuuhuhuuuuuusshshshshsss ALL OF THE TIME with rare bit quieter moments! I tried all setting such as Quiet in BIOS and in Dell Power Manager and no setting can help, just make it worse. CPU is 45W TDP one of a later gens. On top of all of the misery with this laptop, in BIOS they locked control of voltages, so ThrottleStop can not work!!! So they can "protect us" from Plundervolt, how ironical. There is no known bypass :-( I also tried turning off different number of cores and turbo, etc, nothing worked well enough. The only point when it started be more quiet for longer periods is when I left it with 2 active cores, turned off turbo, but that makes this machine stupidly slow!

For god's sake, add if needed in BIOS option to disable dGPU and add "real Quiet" option that will make it lower TDP or whatever. Please ease off temperature thresholds as keeping it below 50C to start ramping fans to mid-jet-sound is RIDICULOUS, as with this massive cooler you can comfortably have thresholds ~70C or so and even allow undervolting.

I ended up using it as a "decoration" and still use my personal T460p which has 6th gen i7 45W TDP CPU + dGPU, but BIOS still allows ThrottleStop and even without it T460p is waaaay more quiet than 5750, but with ThrottleStop nice stable setting I got it to whisper quiet and even faster.

I contacted Dell on their forums but their arrogance seem not to allow them to do anything, but leave it as is! Sick situation and now I have to live with 5750 at my work next ~2.5y until next refresh and one thing is certain Dell NEVER AGAIN! I'll keep sharing this experience everywhere as this really made my life miserable. The only thing that can change that is that Dell either fixes this problem with public apology and/or fires the responsible team.


From our Discord that specializes in laptops. We always joke about Dell XPS and and Latitude under the 7000 series.


Dell did this for years with my Alienware and has never been able to produce a working laptop


Streisand effect in full swing


Yeah I'm in the market for a laptop and had memories of people vaguely posting positively about the XPS line I was gonna look into. But I'll probably pass and stick with a Thinkpad.


Why is this ranking up so much? I see a number of mistakes in the assumptions and claims from the posts in the original link (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PFSFF4...), for what it's worth.

That claim that the xps13 is also being throttled, for example.

Product Name: XPS 13 9310

minimum CPU frequency - maximum CPU frequency - governor

CPU 0 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 1 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 2 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 3 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 4 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 5 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 6 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

CPU 7 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance

3.83 GHz

580 MHz

3.12 GHz

1.68 GHz

3.63 GHz

3.13 GHz

2.82 GHz

875 MHz

These posts are showing up too quick for people to even consider the situation at hand. Instead, just eager to air their own grievance and jump on the bandwagon. Not to say that I don't have my own negative experiences with them in the past. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating development to see in real-time (more or less).

I'm not seeing any posts in any of the community threads. Not sure what the reason is, although we could always speculate with more or less reasonable certainty. Might as well just sit back and wait :shrug: rather than jumping to conclusion right away.

Maybe I'm just too cynical when it comes to trusting mob mentality.


Note to self: Stay away from Dells and stick to ThinkPad.


Whoa, this has 95 points after only 20 minutes.


I'm sure it will mysteriously return shortly.


CC chargeback.

Zero f*cks given. Sell me crap, pay for it yourself.


Is this a conspiracy? Or is the mod team on Dell's forums just ignoring their job and browsing HN front page all day :D


torch & pitchfork store...


if only the userbase of ubuntu users and people who paid more for the XPS linux edition cared.

But, no. I agree, it's not good but Dell has a history of doing this and other dodgy updates/implementations for their EFI.

But I did have a similar issue with Dell XPS 13's 9350, 9360 if I used a non -oem battery, on ubuntu and windows 10, immediate throttle even if I disabled speedstep. Only going to an OEM battery did it fix the issue - though I know 100% this is not related as the users are new laptop purchases.

Still my 9350 experience was great outside that.




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