[glogla]

I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues:

- Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen

- Coil whine

- Shitty battery life

- Shitty touchpad

So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.

[tokenizerrr]

I'm using my XPS13 for like a year now.

> - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen

Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.

> - Coil whine

None of that.

> - Shitty battery life

What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve longer battery life? I don't want that.

> - Shitty touchpad

Not at all. It works nicely. Much better than most touchpads I've used.

And as an added bonus, it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off. And it was like 1.5K EUR vs 3K EUR for a macbook pro.

[lloeki]

>> Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen

> Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.

I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen. Drag an app from HiDPI to non-HiDPI and notice how the overflow is wrongly scaled. There's no way to render at 200% on a non-native resolution then downsample to native, you have to set a non-native resolution, upsampled by the GPU/panel, which results in a useless blurry mess.

> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off.

Early '13 and mid '14 13" rMBP here, VMs don't lag, slightly warm, but in no way "burning hot". Early '13 is dead silent thanks to dual fan design, mid '14 slightly less so, and only when I peg all cores for long enough.

[sli]

> I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen.

I have quite literally both sides of this problem on my Windows laptop at work. Either the 4K display on the laptop renders everything really tiny, or the 1080p displays make everything huge. I haven't found a decent solution, so I just end up using the 4K display only for Conemu because it's the only thing that doesn't render in some goofy way. Even then, the toolbar icons for it are tiny, and any windows it spawns (e.g. warning that I'm about to paste something with newlines) have tiny icons.

I stick to 1440p displays at home for now. Those work great with everything.

[ta2233123]

I had a lot of issues with my XPS on Windows, particularly Swing apps.

One handy feature you can use though is to place a manifest file [1] next to the exe with a bit of XML in it tellings Windows to render it at a bigger scale.

1. https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/054c1d49-9f24...

[komali2]

I was trapped in HiDPI hell for a while as well, especially because I was dual-screened with a 4k monitor.

The world became a better place when I swapped ubuntu for Debian and Unity for Gnome. Shit just works now...

Yea, I did have to set scaling at 200%, and tweak font scaling once. But it's been set and forget.

[tokenizerrr]

Well, I'm not really sure what to say other than that I don't have any of those issues. Sitting here right now with my HiDPI XPS13 screen and a regular HDMI monitor. Things look good and I have no scaling issues. Haven't messed with any of the settings, it's just an Ubuntu install with i3.

I don't know any specific macbook models as I'm not an apple user and there is like no visual distinction between them. All I know is that I have two coworkers who use macbooks, and theirs are incredibly loud & warm.

[bpicolo]

> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it

The latest generation of Macs definitely run cool, fwiw. I've never once noticed the heat

[misja111]

I don't understand why this was downvoted. This has been consistently my experience whenever I tried switching to a non-Mac notebook. On paper the specifications look great, but in practice the hardware configuration is better tested for Macs and everything just works smoother.

[gambiting]

Same here. Mine has an idiotically loud coil whine and sometimes fails to go to sleep(the screen switches off but the computers stays on, resulting in a scorching hot laptop when you pull it out of your bag). The touchpad is horrendous, frequently jumping the cursor when you click on it. I've had the motherboard replaced 3(!!!!) times now, and all of those issues are still present, and from what I heard they are not exclusive to just one generation of the XPS - it's almost like Dell engineers can't make a small laptop without coil whine.