Since, as I announced some time ago, I’m moving to London in a few months, I’ve been spending the past few weeks organizing the move, deciding what I’ll be bringing with me and what I won’t. One of the things I decided to do was trying to figure out which hardware I would want with me, as I keep collecting hardware both for my own special projects and just out of curiosity.
I decided that having so many laptops as I have right now is a bad idea, and it is due time to consolidate on one or two machines if possible. In particular, my ZenBook has been showing its age, with only 4GB of RAM, and my older Latitude which is now over seven years old does not have a working battery anymore (but with 8GB of RAM it would actually been quite usable!), plus it’s way too bulky for me to keep travelling with, given my usual schedule. Indeed, to be able to have something I can play with on the road, I ended up buying an IdeaPad last year.
So thanks to the lowered value of the Sterling (which I won’t be particularly happy about once I start living there), I decided to get myself a new laptop. I decided for the Dell XPS 13, which is not quite an Ultrabook but it’s also quite handy and small. The killer feature of it for me has been having a USB-C connector and being able to charge through it, since my work laptop is a HP Chromebook 13, which also charges over USB-C, and that gives me the ability to travel with a single power brick.
I ordered it from Dell UK, delivered it to Northern Ireland then reshipped to me, and it arrived this past Friday. The configuration I bought is the i7, 16GB, QHD (3200×1800) display with Ubuntu (rather than Windows 10). I turned it on at the office, as I wanted to make sure it was all in one piece and working, and the first surprise was the musical intro that it started up with. I’m not sure if it’s Ubuntu’s or Dell’s but it’s annoying. I couldn’t skip it with the Esc button, and I didn’t figure out how to make it shut the heck up (although that may have been me not figuring out yet that the function keys are bound to special meanings first).
I also found myself confused by the fact that Dell only provided the BIOS (well, EFI) update file in MS-DOS/Windows format. Turns out that not only the firmware itself can read the file natively (after all EFI uses PE itself), but also Dells is providing the firmware through the LVFS service, that you may remember from Richard Hughes’s blog. The latest firmware for this device is not currently available, but it should be relatively soon.
Update (2017-07-26): The new firmware was release on LVFS and I tried updating it with the fwupd tool. Unfortunately the Arch Linux package does not work at all on my Antergos install. I’m not sure if it’s because the Antergos install changes some subtle parameter from the EFI install of Arch Linux itself, or because the package is completely broken. In particular it looks like the expected paths within the EFI System Partition (ESP) are completely messed up, and fwupd does not appear to identify them dynamically. Sigh.
The hardware of the laptop is pretty impressive, although I’m not a fan of the empty space near the top, that looks to me like an easy catch for cables and ties, which make me afraid for its integrity. The device is also quite denser than I was expecting: it’s quite heavier than the Zenbook, although it packs much more of a punch. The borderless screen is gorgeous but it also means the webcam is in the bottom corner of the screen rather than at the top, likely making it awkward to have a videocall. The keyboard is a bit tricky to get used to, because it’s not quite as good as the one in the ZenBook, but it’s still fairly good quality.
By the way, one of the first thing I did was replacing the Ubuntu install with an install of Antergos (which is effectively Arch Linux with an easier installer). This did mean disabling Secure Boot, but I guess I’ll have to live with it until we get a better idea of how to do Secure Boot properly on Linux and full-disk encryption.
Once I got home, I did what I do with my work laptop too: I connected it to my Anker USB-C dock, and it seemed to work alright. Except for some video corruption here and there, particularly on Konsole. Then I started noticing the lack of sound — but that turned out to be a red herring. The answer is that both the on-board speakers and the HDMI audio output are wired through the same sound interface, just appear as different “profiles”.
It wasn’t until I was already compiling webkitgtk for an hour that I noticed that the laptop wasn’t actually charging, and I thought the problem was with the dock. Instead the answered turned out to be that the HP Chromebook 13 charger is not compatible with the XPS 13, while the Chromebook Pixel charger worked fine. Why the difference? I’m not sure, I guess I need to figure out a way to inspect what is seen by the USB-C bus to figure out what the problem is with that charger. It should not be a problem of wattage, as both the HP charger and the original Dell charger provided with the laptop are 45W.
Speaking of the USB-C dock, there is a funny situation: if the laptop boots with it connected, and the lid closed, it does not appear to return the monitor on (all is fine if it boots with it disconnected). Also, it looks like the default DM provided by Antergos only shows the login page on the laptop’s screen, making it hard to log in at all. And in the usual mess that multi-screen support is with modern Linux desktops, Plasma needs to be killed and restarted to switch between the two monitors. Sigh!
As for the screen corruption that I have noted earlier, it seems to be fixed by one of these two options: upgrading to Linux 4.12 (from Arch Linux testing repository) or changing the compositor’s setting from OpenGL 2.0 to OpenGL 3.1. I think it may be the latter but I have no intention to try this out yet.
It looks like I’ll be very happy with this laptop, I just need to figure out some new workflows so that I don’t feel out of place not having Gentoo on my “workstation”.
Also, to keep with my usual Star Trek host naming, this new laptop is named everett after the (non-canon) USS Everett, which is the same class (Nova-class) as my previous laptop, which was named equinox.