I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple.
But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
I have Thinkpad which is supposedly built to run ubuntu as well and even certified for RHEL and Ubuntu. It doesn't work so good, though. It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management.
I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.
I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell.
This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense.
I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.
Yes, standby is working fine. I don't have the machine in front of me now but I don't remember fiddling with any of the power settings either. It was all working after the install. I definitely run software update so that might explain why it's working so smooth too.
Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine, twice. What a mess.
FWIW I had similar problems with my X1, sleep on lid close was working about 50% of the time (which is probably worse than not working at all, because you genuinely don't know what is going to happen...).
As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And of course I just set it up like before, even though this one works :)
> But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
I feel like the forces around device driver development conspire to make sure this rarely happens, that is, we can’t have “commodity” hardware that has “cutting edge” device drivers because the time and expense of developing the driver isn’t justified with commodity pricing.
Here's my massive pet peeve around PCs that I don't even believe that the Dell XPS 13 has resolved:
All those computers charge over USB-C with the full force of the port. This is fine. But the second the battery is completely drained, the port cannot revive that computer. You must use the laptop's crappy barrel plug.
Only Apple allows you to use only USB-C as a charger.
huh? The current XPS 13 and many other laptops do not have a barrel plug. My Dell laptop without a barrel plug didn't become bricked when it ran out of battery.
Are they built better now? I've bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and while their support is great and their pre-built desktops are fantastic, their laptops were just rebranded Clevo trash.
I have a cheap Ideapad Pro with an AMD proc that gives me the same experience using Pop_OS.
MacOS doesn't run on anything(1) but a Mac and people seem to be okay with that, but good grief, you tell them to pick a machine that is compatible with Linux and they lose their shit.
Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu face
Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning behind this.
Personally, for a long time I disabled swap and made sure that I had an OOM killer running.
This was always in a setup where I'd have ample RAM for my everyday tasks, and was doing numerics. Running OOM would invariably mean two things:
1. I had a bug in my scripts, which typically meant I'd accidentally materialized a huge sparse matrix or some such, and thus
2. The system wouldn't go "just a little" OOM but rather consume memory an order of magnitude over the actual system's capacity. And it would not recover.
In that scenario, the system would typically start swath-thrashing so hard that I'd just cold reboot. An OOM daemon fixed that and let me iron out my bugs.
On my SBCs and VPSs I use a cache-heavy zram setup with LZ4 and `vm.page-cluster=0` being the most important changes to the default, and cache pressure and swappiness both to 200 off the top of my head, and things like only doing foreground IO when the background write buffer is full. This type of swapping is fast, and is easy on the CPU, and gives a lot of extra disk cache on this type of low performing storage. I disable disk schedulers because they haven't been necessary and would just add overhead.
This means there's a lot of available RAM capacity, that there's a hefty read cache to avoid the SD card, that when there are disk writes on writable storage it can still read from it, and with the lack of clustering and the speed of decompression there's no swapping lag whenever a page needs to be swapped back. This swap early, swap often is the complete opposite of the OOM-prevention swapping you used to use on disks, which was slow and interrupted IO whereas LZ4 in RAM is fast and doesn't interrupt IO.
I have been using this setup since 2022 and have not had any issues but I don't compile anything on those setups, though I see no reason why it would not be safer than compiling without zram at all.
Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of cargo-culted cruft lying around in various Linux-on-workstation-wiki guide sites that hasn’t been modernized since the 2000’s. I don’t normally like to rant without providing a solution, but this is a problem I see my friends bump up against all the time when I tell them it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop. When something goes wrong they land on the same search results that I did when I was a child and the advice just never got updated.
There used to be a time where swapping out meant moving cogs and wheels full of heavy rocks and RAM frequencies could be approximated by waving a stick until it made whistling noises. At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating). Advice about disabling swap and zram came from that time for “resource constrained” systems. Unfortunately the meme will never die because the wikis and now regurgitated LLM drivel will just never let it go because nobody has gotten around to fixing it.
That's because when it comes to memory management on a Linux workstation, it is an unsolved problem. I've tried every piece of advice, distro and tool, and spent hundreds of hours trying to tune it over the years, and haven't been able to find a configuration that works as reliably as Windows or MacOS do out of the box.
Linux memory management works well for servers where you can predict workloads, set resource limits, spec the right amount of memory, and, in most cases, don't care that much if an individual server crashes.
For workstations, it either kicks in too early (and kills your IDE to punish you for opening too many tabs in Chrome) or it doesn't kick in at all, even when the system has become entirely unresponsive and you have to either mash magic sysrq or reboot.
>At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive
Interestingly that was my experience on steam deck with its default 1gb swap. But after enabling both zram and larger ordinary swap (now also default setting for upcoming release) it became much more stable and responsive.
Swapping in any form always sucks, period. The machine starts behaving strangely and does not tell you why because it's trying it's hardest to hide the fact that it ran out of resources.
Experience has shown me over and over that you just want to feel the limits of the machine hard and fast so you can change what you're asking of it rather than thinking that there is some perf issue or weird bug.
It's the idea that swap is somehow useful that's old. It's not, it never worked right for interactive systems. It's a mainframe thing that needs to die.
I have similar experiences. I've been digging into this more over the years and my two conclusions are: (a) Linux memory management is overall rather complex and contains many rather subtle decisions that speed up systems. (b) Most recommendations you find about it are old, rubbish, or not nuanced enough.
Like one thing I learned some time ago: swap-out in itself is not a bad thing. swap-out on it's own means the kernel is pushing memory pages it currently doesn't need to disk. It does this to prepare for a low-memory situation so if push comes to shove and it has to move pages to disk, some pages are already written to disk. And if the page is dirtied later on before needing to swap it back in, alright, we wasted some iops. Oh no. This occurs quite a bit for example for long-running processes with rarely used code paths, or with processes that do something once a day or so.
swap-in on the other hand is nasty for the latency of processes. Which, again, may or may not be something to care about. If a once-a-day monitoring script starts a few milliseconds slower because data has to be swapped in... so what?
It just becomes an issue if the system starts trashing and rapidly cycling pages in and out of swap. But in such a situation, the system would start randomly killing services without swap, which is also not entirely conductive to a properly working system. Especially because it'll start killing stuff using a lot of memory... which, on a server, tends to be the thing you want running.
> At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating).
I had a machine freeze this month because it was trying to zram swap, and have hit shades of the problem over the last few years on multiple machines running multiple distros. Sometimes running earlyoom helps, but at that point what's the point of swap? So no, this isn't out of date.
This is OS-agnostic. I love the old fact that you should have twice the amount of swap as your RAM size. I could rant but, no. Just don't.
Today, don't buy a computer (regardless of size) with less than 32 GB of ram. Yes, this applies to fruity products as well. Part from making it a more enjoyable experience it will also extend the usable life of the computer immensely.
(The weird crap about apple computers not needing as much RAM comes from iOS vs. android and is for different reasons, does not apply to real computers)
I have swap, zram, and systemd-oomd enabled on my self managed kubernetes nodes. It helps dealing with JVM powered or memory leaking software at low cost.
I am not sure why you would disable those in many scenarios.
compiling clang on ubuntu 20.04, the link step used up all my ram and started swapping on the nvme.
htop froze, so i hit ctrl-c, but nothing happened. no mouse movement, no ssh'ing in, just totally hard-locked. i ended up having to physically powercycle the machine.
after that i turned off swap so that it killed the process rather than the machine (and remembered to pass -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS=1)
Don't know if it's "legitimate", but I've got 64GB of RAM.
Allocating 16/32/64/128GB of NVME storage to swap is mostly just a waste of disk space for me. When I had swap enabled, it was constantly showing 0 used. (Not "pretty much none", literally "0.0".)
Further, if I'm trying to use more than 64GB of RAM... I'm fine with things getting OOM killed. I don't know that I've ever had anything OOM-killed when something wasn't clearly misbehaving. (I count Chrome eating 50GB of RAM because I haven't closed any tabs all week as me clearly misbehaving for the purposes of this discussion.)
And as far as zram... I guess same sorta arguments. I'm not running out of RAM, so why use up CPU cycles (and presumably battery power)? why use up brain cycles setting that up?
Until I've maxed out my system's RAM, I'd rather just throw more RAM at it.
Actually, zram is great! When an "excessive swap event" happens with zram, the system stays somewhat responsive, enough to let you kill the offender even from a graphical session. Without zram, I hope you were going for lunch break anyway...
zram does basically nothing while your working set fits into memory, no performance penalty.
Similar opinion here on my destop. I was running 128gb, only exceeded 64gb a handful of times. That said, my RAM started causing lots of issues (thought my ssd was going bad). I only bought 64gb to replace it with as I felt the extra cost wasn't worth it to maintain, also likely to upgrade early-mid next year.
I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11.
Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery life was poor enough that I ended up buying something else. The iFixit repair score reflects how much of a pain it would be to replace both of those. I do miss it sometimes, I really liked the 3:2 aspect ratio.
I'm actually rather fine with what WSL can do. Hell, many of the tools I use run fine on Windows itself.
But for me, the biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is having to put up with Windows' UX. I hate every single second I have to interact with this steaming pile of crap.
This so much. I've run Linux in all my desktop machines for 10+ years. When I was younger it was mainly due to ideology, but now I really don't care.
Although most linux distros still have quirks (bluetooth issues, sleep/resume issues, no hibernation out of the box, high battery consumption, among a plethora a of other papercuts) I am sticking with it mainly because windows ux just sux so much.
Every new computer I buy I give the installed windows a try and oh my god, it becomes crappier with every version.
For me Windows 2000 was the best... 20 years ago. It's been downhill from there.
Largely the same here... I've been split windows+wsl and mac the past few years for work, and while I feel WSL makes windows usable, I'd rather run Linux directly than either. Muscle memory on a Mac is often painful to deal with (us-ansi 104 keyboard).
WSL still has a ton of issues, slow IO and CPU usage, just to name two of them. Search "WSL vmmem" and you'll see what I mean. It is nowhere near ready for serious use if you are spending 90% of time doing development in a Linux environment.
You say no support for Win 11, but my Surface 2 Pro runs Windows 11 just fine. I don't think it even asked for the license key when I installed it. I probably used Rufus to make the image and turned off some of the more problematic aspects of Win 11, but it for sure installs with little or no problems. This is also a 4GiB model with 128GiB storage. It is very usable, despite having a processor equivalent to a pre-retina MacBook Air IIRC.
I guess that works because Linux power management is almost as bad as Windows so not a lot is lost. I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. I further don't understand how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life. Even Microsoft's first party offerings which aren't infected by OEM bullshit are garbage in this regard.
> how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life
Apple’s full vertical integration from chip on up gives them an advantage here. For example, the doubling of video playback battery life from iPhone 12 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max [1] probably came from a new low-power display plus a new video decoder in the A15 Bionic chip.
> I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life.
Some people don't need all that much battery life.
For me trains and buses, meeting rooms and at home there are outlets. It's a convenience thing when I want to sit at home on the couch without a cable attacked to my laptop.
These new Snapdragon Elite X laptops compete on battery life. But I need to build for Linux/amd64 and I don't want to emulate so it's either Intel laptop or Apple Silicon laptop with Rosetta 2 for Linux.
I never liked the Surface series that much. It looks very nice, until you actually start working with them. Then they feel like a weird tablet with slow Windows on it. You can optimize it a little, but not much. Quite expensive as well and sometimes support is horribly slow.
I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn't great.
Maybe just don't expect that much from these weird computers pretending to be tablets.
My wife and I have been very happy with our Surface Pro 8 16Gb we bought last year running Windows 11 Pro. Mostly we use it with the keyboard attached.
My wife needed a personal device because her company issued laptop was so locked down that she couldn't do a lot of basic personal admin stuff on it (for example online ordering of groceries).
We considered an iPad, but in the end chose the Surface Pro because it allowed multiple user profiles. Windows Hello works super well that for either of us as we pick it up and look at it it's pretty much instantly on the correct profile and thanks to cloud sync with OneDrive and Microsoft Edge, I'm at home on either my own machine or the Surface.
Only thing to mention is that the out of the box experience wasn't as good as I would have liked, especially compared to my experience with iPhones (despite liking iOS over Android, I have no love for macOS).
Firstly, it wasn't running the latest feature update of Windows 11 and trying certain apps (like Instagram) off the Microsoft Store failed to install with a largely undescriptive error. Eventually I realized it wasn't running the very latest Windows 11 feature update which resolved the issue once installed.
The other problem was that my user profile was laggy, but not my wife's. For example the Start Menu was very slow to come up. After a few days of this and no luck Googling the issue, I just formatted and re-installed Windows using Microsoft's official ISO download image. I normally do this with any new Windows PC I get, but assumed it wouldn't be essential for full on Microsoft hardware, but even though there was no obviously extra bundled rubbish software, something was clearly not 100%.
It depends on your reference point, but IMHO there's no device right now that hits all the right point, so yes, Surface Pro is one of these flawwd machines.
On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.
IMO the advantage of the Surface is that it's one of the only tablets out there which is (a) reasonably priced for what you get, (b) has a x64 processor, and (c) can have Linux installed on it without too much difficulty. So if you want a Linux tablet, the Surface may end up being one of your only viable options.
The Steam Deck is also a great option nowadays. Its a lot bulkier than a tablet, but I personally prefer it having a controller attached. Its biggest advantage is that it comes with Linux out of the box, so you don't have to go through the headache of installing an OS yourself and messing around with drivers.
I think Surface Pros are very use-case dependent. It's perfect for mine, to the point I'm astounded there is no real competitor.
Use case: While traveling or at coffee shops, be able to switch between full laptop mode (as long as you have a table; doesn't work on your lap), and use with the pen for taking notes, drawing things etc. While not as critical as pen use, being able to take the keyboard off quickly when reading or watching videos saves space, and lets me get the screen closer.
I liked the first two iterations of the Surface Pro line, but it dropped off the radar for me when they went to NTrig digitizers.
The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about the perfect computer for my needs:
- decent-size high-resolution screen
- small enough to fit in a bag for when traveling
- Wacom EMR stylus --- I find this essential for drawing, sketching, annotating, and when I'm not inclined to connect a keyboard, writing
Performance was quite good, but then Fall Creators Update crippled the stylus down to an 11th touch input which scrolled in web browsers and made selecting text quite awkward, as well as making using older applications quite difficult. I rolled back to 1703 twice and stayed there until circumstances forced a replacement --- the best option I could find was a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I have to keep the Settings app open so I can toggle the stylus between acting/not acting like a mouse.
It kills me that we had such great innovation in the tablet space once-upon-a-time (the ThinkPad was so-named because it was originally planned as a stylus computer) and my NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running PenPoint was one of my most-favourite computers and things seemed so promising w/ Windows 8... at least it's easy to write into text fields again.
Hopefully the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will be popular enough that someone will make a dual-screen device using Wacom EMR.
I disagree. I'm typing this on a nice Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 and though it's quite nice and well-built, it's the worst computer I've bought in decades, because it's stupidly designed: It's got all the compromises of a tablet, but is too heavy and thick to really be used as one. The pen is marginal (and there's no way to carry it with the laptop except in a pocket!), and it gets way hotter than any of my Surfaces have.
It was clearly designed to be used as a laptop, and never really as a tablet. This shows in myriad ways, from being uncomfortable to hold as a tablet (though its rounded edges are infinitely better than the Surface Studio Laptop's razor-sharp edges (which really can cut you when holding it as a tablet!), to there being NO GOOD WAY to adjust volume without opening it back up to get to the keyboard!
To be fair, half of what I hate about the Yoga is Win11. I'm definitely moving to a Linux desktop next time, if that's viable. The Starlabs StarLite would be perfect if I could get it with 32-64 GB of RAM and a fast ARM processor like the one used in the new Surface Pro
I'm a big fan of used Surface Go models. They tend to be for corporate use which seems to have a knock on effect of them being sold off very cheaply when people want rid and with seemingly minimal use. For use when traveling they're pretty exceptional, I even managed to get away doing a few days dev work on one while railing around Japan
Have gotten multiple people a Surface Go 1 with 8GB ram and the keyboard and have never paid more than £80.
Bizarre that they even made a 4GB model, let alone that they kept it until the second most recent version
I use a surface pro 9 for development, diagramming, note taking, media, light fusion 360 (on the iGPU), and gaming (with an egpu). it's a great machine with a few minor flaws, primarily battery life and cooling performance. at a go anywhere device, it's hard to beat. the price is obscene though, especially considering it's not OLED.
I'm keen to try the arm version though, and the Minisforum V3 is interesting tho not much of an upgrade
I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2].
I just bought a Surface Pro 11 and love it. I've jumped from mac into the surface line every few years and I totally agree with you - the fans on the old models were spinning just by having a few chrome tabs opened.
But...if you can live with Windows on Arm (Which has improved greatly in the past year) the SP11 has been great. Battery life is incredible.
For me I was never looking to fully replace my actual laptop, but more to replace my iPad with something that is actually capable of doing any sort of development work if needed. The iPad is a much better tablet, hands down, but even just updating a static website on an iPad is an absolute chore and requires multiple apps to function.
I really can't remember, but my guess is you are right. Having just 4gb of ram makes Windows 11 quite slow. Just saw a couple of desktops running insanely slow and yup, only 4gb ram.
Note this is the lowest spec Surface Pro 4, it had a low power Intel Core m3-6Y30 so that it could run without any active cooling, making it a 'true' tablet. Most of the 'proper' Surface Pro 4s had an i5 or i7 processor with active cooling (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 ) and were roughly comparable in performance to other PC ultrabooks at the time. I've been using the Surface Pro line for about 10 years to do everything I need to do, they are pretty solid.
I also use the surface for everything I need: I like it a lot and I’ve never had a problem with it. I don’t get the hate, nor why the inaccurate idea that you cannot run things on it persists.
About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora.
In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year...
Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject).
Why fedora is problematic on low end hardware? Because well, Fedora uses packagekit, which is a ram hog, and this is pretty known. Is not the only reason though, I believe there's some other defaults that make it slower than arch on my HW, like zswap vs zram.
In my experience with weak CPU and low ram, was that zswap was actually the best choice. On such low RAM like 4gb, you'll really need a swap, you can't run from this. And zram won't be enough, in my experience.
Which I guess is one of the reasons why Arch go very well here, as is one of the few distros right now that does a nice default for zswap.
With Fedora, and most other distros, I get constant freezes when the RAM is full (which is pretty easy to do with 4gb), and this never happen on arch based distros.
yeah, I took the Ubuntu / Fedora perf for granted as well. Recently switched back to Arch on a whim across one low-end machine, one high-end machine, and both run like lightning compared to Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora 40.
Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desktop etc. with Arch.
Generally, though a rolling release it also has fewer moving parts as well - only having to deal with the main repo + flatpak (and a select few AUR pkgbuilds) is nice compared to Ubuntu where I had to layer deb repos + PPAs + flatpak + brew to get my tooling in place without having to script my own git-driven installers.
One thing that tripped me up on any distro - the defaults for TLP (vs power profile daemon) seem hyper conservative wrt performance, probably by design. I never bothered digging in, just switched back to PPD, but it definitely prioritises power savings above all else.
I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for a few years now. I only ever installed it once and regularly update it. I've had some minor issues over the years but was able to resolve them. Mostly updates are without issues and when they aren't usually the fix is a google search away and pretty straightforward.
And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed.
It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly.
I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton.
I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.
I'm using a Surface Pro 7 to run Fedora, and my experience is mostly the same, although it runs a bit faster and without the ghost touches. The main annoyance I face is probably the fact that touch in Firefox occasionally breaks.
Can you share a bit more about your experience here, in particular setting the system up?
I have a bashed up Surface Pro 7 I took traveling with me. I upgraded my main PC to a Surface Pro 9 when I housed up and have been wondering what to do with with the Pro 7 because it's so battered from being thrown around and used outdoors for a year that it's not really sellable. I was thinking of turning it into a dedicated outdoor/travel computer, installing Fedora and Steam for point and click adventures, and maybe some MIDI/DJ controller software to play tunes. But I no longer have a keyboard for it, so I would need to be able to do the full Linux install by touchscreen. My other Surface is 100% bluetooth input devices to avoid cables, docks and dongles, so I could potentially pair one of those if it would help during install phase, but I wouldn't want it permanently paired. It seems like the advice online is generally "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother", though. Do you think it's worth a shot?
> "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother"
I think you should be able to hardware reset without a keyboard - but in my experience - you really want console access when messing with bootloaders and alternative os'. Even if it is just to get to a point where on-screen/Bluetooth keyboard works... Often an USB Ethernet dongle can be useful as well (avoiding the catch-22 of needing network access to download wifi driver).
I don't think anything could go wrong just booting into the live distro, but I did my setup with a keyboard and I don't know how it would work without.
I like the hybrids/detachable form factor, as a mean to merge tablets and laptops in a single device, but the whole software/hardware stack was not yet ready then, especially for those attempting to use Linux.
List of problems:
1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack
2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi)
3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux
The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall.
Nowadays:
1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode
2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot
3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators
I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users.
In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug
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But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.
I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.
Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine, twice. What a mess.
As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And of course I just set it up like before, even though this one works :)
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I feel like the forces around device driver development conspire to make sure this rarely happens, that is, we can’t have “commodity” hardware that has “cutting edge” device drivers because the time and expense of developing the driver isn’t justified with commodity pricing.
All those computers charge over USB-C with the full force of the port. This is fine. But the second the battery is completely drained, the port cannot revive that computer. You must use the laptop's crappy barrel plug.
Only Apple allows you to use only USB-C as a charger.
MacOS doesn't run on anything(1) but a Mac and people seem to be okay with that, but good grief, you tell them to pick a machine that is compatible with Linux and they lose their shit.
(1) Please don't be pedantic, I get it.
Then it is really an apple to orange comparison.
Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning behind this.
This was always in a setup where I'd have ample RAM for my everyday tasks, and was doing numerics. Running OOM would invariably mean two things:
1. I had a bug in my scripts, which typically meant I'd accidentally materialized a huge sparse matrix or some such, and thus
2. The system wouldn't go "just a little" OOM but rather consume memory an order of magnitude over the actual system's capacity. And it would not recover.
In that scenario, the system would typically start swath-thrashing so hard that I'd just cold reboot. An OOM daemon fixed that and let me iron out my bugs.
This means there's a lot of available RAM capacity, that there's a hefty read cache to avoid the SD card, that when there are disk writes on writable storage it can still read from it, and with the lack of clustering and the speed of decompression there's no swapping lag whenever a page needs to be swapped back. This swap early, swap often is the complete opposite of the OOM-prevention swapping you used to use on disks, which was slow and interrupted IO whereas LZ4 in RAM is fast and doesn't interrupt IO.
I have been using this setup since 2022 and have not had any issues but I don't compile anything on those setups, though I see no reason why it would not be safer than compiling without zram at all.
There used to be a time where swapping out meant moving cogs and wheels full of heavy rocks and RAM frequencies could be approximated by waving a stick until it made whistling noises. At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating). Advice about disabling swap and zram came from that time for “resource constrained” systems. Unfortunately the meme will never die because the wikis and now regurgitated LLM drivel will just never let it go because nobody has gotten around to fixing it.
Linux memory management works well for servers where you can predict workloads, set resource limits, spec the right amount of memory, and, in most cases, don't care that much if an individual server crashes.
For workstations, it either kicks in too early (and kills your IDE to punish you for opening too many tabs in Chrome) or it doesn't kick in at all, even when the system has become entirely unresponsive and you have to either mash magic sysrq or reboot.
Interestingly that was my experience on steam deck with its default 1gb swap. But after enabling both zram and larger ordinary swap (now also default setting for upcoming release) it became much more stable and responsive.
Experience has shown me over and over that you just want to feel the limits of the machine hard and fast so you can change what you're asking of it rather than thinking that there is some perf issue or weird bug.
It's the idea that swap is somehow useful that's old. It's not, it never worked right for interactive systems. It's a mainframe thing that needs to die.
Like one thing I learned some time ago: swap-out in itself is not a bad thing. swap-out on it's own means the kernel is pushing memory pages it currently doesn't need to disk. It does this to prepare for a low-memory situation so if push comes to shove and it has to move pages to disk, some pages are already written to disk. And if the page is dirtied later on before needing to swap it back in, alright, we wasted some iops. Oh no. This occurs quite a bit for example for long-running processes with rarely used code paths, or with processes that do something once a day or so.
swap-in on the other hand is nasty for the latency of processes. Which, again, may or may not be something to care about. If a once-a-day monitoring script starts a few milliseconds slower because data has to be swapped in... so what?
It just becomes an issue if the system starts trashing and rapidly cycling pages in and out of swap. But in such a situation, the system would start randomly killing services without swap, which is also not entirely conductive to a properly working system. Especially because it'll start killing stuff using a lot of memory... which, on a server, tends to be the thing you want running.
I had a machine freeze this month because it was trying to zram swap, and have hit shades of the problem over the last few years on multiple machines running multiple distros. Sometimes running earlyoom helps, but at that point what's the point of swap? So no, this isn't out of date.
Today, don't buy a computer (regardless of size) with less than 32 GB of ram. Yes, this applies to fruity products as well. Part from making it a more enjoyable experience it will also extend the usable life of the computer immensely.
(The weird crap about apple computers not needing as much RAM comes from iOS vs. android and is for different reasons, does not apply to real computers)
I am not sure why you would disable those in many scenarios.
htop froze, so i hit ctrl-c, but nothing happened. no mouse movement, no ssh'ing in, just totally hard-locked. i ended up having to physically powercycle the machine.
after that i turned off swap so that it killed the process rather than the machine (and remembered to pass -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS=1)
Allocating 16/32/64/128GB of NVME storage to swap is mostly just a waste of disk space for me. When I had swap enabled, it was constantly showing 0 used. (Not "pretty much none", literally "0.0".)
Further, if I'm trying to use more than 64GB of RAM... I'm fine with things getting OOM killed. I don't know that I've ever had anything OOM-killed when something wasn't clearly misbehaving. (I count Chrome eating 50GB of RAM because I haven't closed any tabs all week as me clearly misbehaving for the purposes of this discussion.)
And as far as zram... I guess same sorta arguments. I'm not running out of RAM, so why use up CPU cycles (and presumably battery power)? why use up brain cycles setting that up?
Until I've maxed out my system's RAM, I'd rather just throw more RAM at it.
zram does basically nothing while your working set fits into memory, no performance penalty.
Dead Comment
My laptop has 64GB RAM and 1TB NVME, I run with swap off because I want all storage usable should ideally not be pressed for memory.
I also have memory and storage allocation in my task bar to easily monitor the situation.
On a machine with FOUR GIGABYTES OF RAM at that.
Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery life was poor enough that I ended up buying something else. The iFixit repair score reflects how much of a pain it would be to replace both of those. I do miss it sometimes, I really liked the 3:2 aspect ratio.
But for me, the biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is having to put up with Windows' UX. I hate every single second I have to interact with this steaming pile of crap.
Although most linux distros still have quirks (bluetooth issues, sleep/resume issues, no hibernation out of the box, high battery consumption, among a plethora a of other papercuts) I am sticking with it mainly because windows ux just sux so much.
Every new computer I buy I give the installed windows a try and oh my god, it becomes crappier with every version. For me Windows 2000 was the best... 20 years ago. It's been downhill from there.
https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737
Apple’s full vertical integration from chip on up gives them an advantage here. For example, the doubling of video playback battery life from iPhone 12 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max [1] probably came from a new low-power display plus a new video decoder in the A15 Bionic chip.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ppevl6/streamed_vide...
Some people don't need all that much battery life.
For me trains and buses, meeting rooms and at home there are outlets. It's a convenience thing when I want to sit at home on the couch without a cable attacked to my laptop.
> Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking
I don't know why you would be surprised that Microsoft hardware fails to run Linux well.
I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn't great.
Maybe just don't expect that much from these weird computers pretending to be tablets.
My wife needed a personal device because her company issued laptop was so locked down that she couldn't do a lot of basic personal admin stuff on it (for example online ordering of groceries).
We considered an iPad, but in the end chose the Surface Pro because it allowed multiple user profiles. Windows Hello works super well that for either of us as we pick it up and look at it it's pretty much instantly on the correct profile and thanks to cloud sync with OneDrive and Microsoft Edge, I'm at home on either my own machine or the Surface.
Only thing to mention is that the out of the box experience wasn't as good as I would have liked, especially compared to my experience with iPhones (despite liking iOS over Android, I have no love for macOS).
Firstly, it wasn't running the latest feature update of Windows 11 and trying certain apps (like Instagram) off the Microsoft Store failed to install with a largely undescriptive error. Eventually I realized it wasn't running the very latest Windows 11 feature update which resolved the issue once installed.
The other problem was that my user profile was laggy, but not my wife's. For example the Start Menu was very slow to come up. After a few days of this and no luck Googling the issue, I just formatted and re-installed Windows using Microsoft's official ISO download image. I normally do this with any new Windows PC I get, but assumed it wouldn't be essential for full on Microsoft hardware, but even though there was no obviously extra bundled rubbish software, something was clearly not 100%.
On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.
It'd be glorious, not that I'd ever happen - for multiple reasons. One of which being that ipadOS is essentially iOS, so no overlap with MacOS
All I can see right now is that it has a battery bump that people might object to.
My goals with any device is to be as slim and as vanilla Android as possible, which means Samsung can go to hell.
A friend said he liked the OnePlus tablet.
Use case: While traveling or at coffee shops, be able to switch between full laptop mode (as long as you have a table; doesn't work on your lap), and use with the pen for taking notes, drawing things etc. While not as critical as pen use, being able to take the keyboard off quickly when reading or watching videos saves space, and lets me get the screen closer.
The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about the perfect computer for my needs:
- decent-size high-resolution screen
- small enough to fit in a bag for when traveling
- Wacom EMR stylus --- I find this essential for drawing, sketching, annotating, and when I'm not inclined to connect a keyboard, writing
Performance was quite good, but then Fall Creators Update crippled the stylus down to an 11th touch input which scrolled in web browsers and made selecting text quite awkward, as well as making using older applications quite difficult. I rolled back to 1703 twice and stayed there until circumstances forced a replacement --- the best option I could find was a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I have to keep the Settings app open so I can toggle the stylus between acting/not acting like a mouse.
It kills me that we had such great innovation in the tablet space once-upon-a-time (the ThinkPad was so-named because it was originally planned as a stylus computer) and my NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running PenPoint was one of my most-favourite computers and things seemed so promising w/ Windows 8... at least it's easy to write into text fields again.
Hopefully the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will be popular enough that someone will make a dual-screen device using Wacom EMR.
It was clearly designed to be used as a laptop, and never really as a tablet. This shows in myriad ways, from being uncomfortable to hold as a tablet (though its rounded edges are infinitely better than the Surface Studio Laptop's razor-sharp edges (which really can cut you when holding it as a tablet!), to there being NO GOOD WAY to adjust volume without opening it back up to get to the keyboard!
To be fair, half of what I hate about the Yoga is Win11. I'm definitely moving to a Linux desktop next time, if that's viable. The Starlabs StarLite would be perfect if I could get it with 32-64 GB of RAM and a fast ARM processor like the one used in the new Surface Pro
Have gotten multiple people a Surface Go 1 with 8GB ram and the keyboard and have never paid more than £80. Bizarre that they even made a 4GB model, let alone that they kept it until the second most recent version
I'm keen to try the arm version though, and the Minisforum V3 is interesting tho not much of an upgrade
I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2].
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2... [2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issu...
But...if you can live with Windows on Arm (Which has improved greatly in the past year) the SP11 has been great. Battery life is incredible.
For me I was never looking to fully replace my actual laptop, but more to replace my iPad with something that is actually capable of doing any sort of development work if needed. The iPad is a much better tablet, hands down, but even just updating a static website on an iPad is an absolute chore and requires multiple apps to function.
Was yours a 4GB ram model like the article author's?
At that price it should be exceptional not just good. That is not "hate" but disapointment.
In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year...
Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject).
Why fedora is problematic on low end hardware? Because well, Fedora uses packagekit, which is a ram hog, and this is pretty known. Is not the only reason though, I believe there's some other defaults that make it slower than arch on my HW, like zswap vs zram.
In my experience with weak CPU and low ram, was that zswap was actually the best choice. On such low RAM like 4gb, you'll really need a swap, you can't run from this. And zram won't be enough, in my experience.
Which I guess is one of the reasons why Arch go very well here, as is one of the few distros right now that does a nice default for zswap.
With Fedora, and most other distros, I get constant freezes when the RAM is full (which is pretty easy to do with 4gb), and this never happen on arch based distros.
Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desktop etc. with Arch.
Generally, though a rolling release it also has fewer moving parts as well - only having to deal with the main repo + flatpak (and a select few AUR pkgbuilds) is nice compared to Ubuntu where I had to layer deb repos + PPAs + flatpak + brew to get my tooling in place without having to script my own git-driven installers.
One thing that tripped me up on any distro - the defaults for TLP (vs power profile daemon) seem hyper conservative wrt performance, probably by design. I never bothered digging in, just switched back to PPD, but it definitely prioritises power savings above all else.
And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed.
It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly.
I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton.
I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.
I have this on the two touchscreen laptops I use (HP and Lenovo). So I guess that's not hardware related.
I have a bashed up Surface Pro 7 I took traveling with me. I upgraded my main PC to a Surface Pro 9 when I housed up and have been wondering what to do with with the Pro 7 because it's so battered from being thrown around and used outdoors for a year that it's not really sellable. I was thinking of turning it into a dedicated outdoor/travel computer, installing Fedora and Steam for point and click adventures, and maybe some MIDI/DJ controller software to play tunes. But I no longer have a keyboard for it, so I would need to be able to do the full Linux install by touchscreen. My other Surface is 100% bluetooth input devices to avoid cables, docks and dongles, so I could potentially pair one of those if it would help during install phase, but I wouldn't want it permanently paired. It seems like the advice online is generally "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother", though. Do you think it's worth a shot?
I think you should be able to hardware reset without a keyboard - but in my experience - you really want console access when messing with bootloaders and alternative os'. Even if it is just to get to a point where on-screen/Bluetooth keyboard works... Often an USB Ethernet dongle can be useful as well (avoiding the catch-22 of needing network access to download wifi driver).
List of problems:
1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack
2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi)
3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux
The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall.
Nowadays:
1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode
2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot
3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators
I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users.
In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug