Escape from Apple: Trying a Linux Laptop

For quite a few years my only computer has been a 12″ Macbook. Apple, for reasons unknown, discontinued that model which had the perfect form factor in terms of weight to size tradeoff. While my  machine still works (with different keys getting stuck on occasion), I had been on the hunt for a non-Apple replacement for some time. Apple’s hypocritical stance on why they need to completely control their phones has long annoyed me and I would rather not buy their products.

I am writing this post on what will hopefully be my new machine for a few years, a DELL XPS 13 laptop running Ubuntu (I wasn’t going to leave Apple for Microsoft, even though they are at present the most benign of the big tech companies)

Here are my first impressions of the setup. On the plus side, the hardware is excellent with a super crisp screen (that looks good in several different resolutions), an amazing keyboard (I forgot how much I actually missed that on the Macbook) and a fingerprint reader in the power button. Also all the software that I really need is “readily” available: a web browser (the machine shipped with both Chrome and Firefox pre-installed), plus Zoom and 1Password. I put “readily” in quotation marks because both Zoom and 1Password required installation.

For both Zoom and 1Password that meant downloading a .deb file and finding the right command line incantation (”sudo dpkg -i package_file.deb”). Of course in both cases there were some missing dependencies (Zoom needed Curl and 1Password a bunch of things). I discovered that there is now a much easier way to fix this then when I had last mucked around with Linux, simply use “sudo apt –fix-broken install” (or maybe that was always a possibility and I just found it yesterday). All in all this part literally took less than half an hour before I was fully up and running. I am grateful that both Zoom and 1Password make Linux versions as I couldn’t have pursued this route otherwise.

But then I encountered what looked like a potential showstopper: the machine would not properly wake up after sleeping for more than a few minutes. If closed the lid for a short period everything was fine, but after more time something happened and it would not wake up requiring a power cycle instead. Given that I like to leave a lot of tabs open in the browser (who doesn’t?) that wasn’t going to work. So I spend a bunch of time searching for an answer, which is of course exactly what nobody really wants to do when setting up a brand new machine, certainly not a mainstream user.

Unless you have the same problem you can simply skip the following section. I  discovered that a bunch of people had this issue and since I wasn’t going to be defeated this easily, I decided to delve in more deeply. The machine is a DELL XPS 13 9310 running Ubuntu 20.04. I first checked the kernel and BIOS versions and both were completely up-to-date. I also found that it only supports one kind of sleep mode at present which is a lighter sleep (meaning consumes more battery) but while a bit annoying that turn out not to be the cause of the problem. Finally, a bunch of people referred to being able to fix the problem by turning off the “sign of life” settings in the BIOS. Because I am a dinosaur, I actually knew what the BIOS was and wasn’t afraid of tweaking it, which on this particular machine requires pressing F2 repeatedly during startup until you get to a BIOS configuration screen. Then you need to click around using the arrow and Enter keys until you find the options, which are now under the “Boot” section. I have no idea what these options do, but turning them both off actually fixed the problem for me.

So while this works for me (for now), the simple summary here is: so close and yet so far. So close to a terrific combination of software and hardware and yet for the average enduser a complete nonstarter in terms of getting it to work. This strikes me as a terrific business opportunity. Laptop hardware has largely entered the flat part of the curve so that there isn’t a rush for faster processors, more memory, higher resolution camera, etc. every year. It would seem that the focus instead should now be on stability and ease of use. Someone (apparently not DELL so far) should focus on that.