[Nottingham] New laptop

[VM]

On 08/11/2018 10:41 PM, Daryl via Nottingham wrote:
> I have a new Dell XPS 15 laptop (i7/32GB/HiDPI screen) which came
> pre-installed with Windows. I had to utterly blast the drive and
> re-install Win 10 as the BIOS was configured in a way as to make Linux
> installation impossible (RAID versus ACPI for instance).

Microsoft signature... RAID for 1 drive just to complicate Linux users'
life.

> 
> I then managed to achieve a happy(ish) Ubuntu/Win 10 dual boot until
> today when the Wi-Fi card has utterly disappeared from Ubuntu. Slightly
> stumped, I can use a Wi-Fi dongle to connect now but not ideal.

This proves that Win10 is malware :) Are you sure it works in Windows or
another Live Linux distro?
Some proprietary system's manufacturer's (e.g., those that sell bitten
off fruits) leave peripherals not initialised to 100% in UEFI leaving
final steps to the proprietary OS.

> 
> I had no real choice over the laptop incidentally, but icky BIOS/NVIDIA
> (with awkward fall back to Intel graphics to save power) and many apps
> not supporting HiDPI well has made it a slightly annoying set up so far!
> 
Graphics switching does make sense on laptops, especially ultrabooks.
Some people are happy with implementations in Linux, some really hate it
:) I guess Nvidia is also to blame for this.
It's 2018. GTK+ and Qt can all properly scale text and graphics. Some
applications don't provide hidpi graphics elements though and thus look
pixelated. I would guess that Gnome and KDE take proper care of setting
the right configs and environment parameters. I struggled a bit with my
VMs that are rather slimmed down to get consistent output but it works
now without gnome or KDE dependencies.

> I shall persist as always and I'm sure will end up in Linux nirvana :-)
> 
> Daryl.
> 
> 


-- 
vadim at mankevich.co.uk PGP key fingerprint
0xC046022A3A91455AF0C9BB2404BF882B1905C772
Retrieve from hkps://pgp.mit.edu