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by jhallenworld 2323 days ago
If you want something cheap: For Linux 18.04 / Windows 10 dual boot, I just bought an HP 15-cs2073cl: $450 refurb from Microcenter. Everything works and I think the price is pretty good for a Core-i7 / 16 GB / 1920 / 1TB laptop.

Here's a link, but I see the price already gone up a little:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-pavilion-15-cs...

It has a slot for an M.2 card that does not interfere with the rotating SATA drive, so I'm about to try that. I'd like to have both installed. SSD is nice for Linux but is absolutely required for Windows.

One nice thing about Dell XPS: they have the Thunderbolt port. I theorize that this is potentially very useful for a corner case that I have: you can add a PCIe box and add a parallel printer port card that accepts ancient security dongles required by certain engineering software that I invested in the past.
1 comments
paulcarroty 2323 days ago
> NVIDIA GeForce MX250

NVidia, no way to working fine on Linux: you will wait for new drivers after each kernel update and tons of another issues.

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jhallenworld 2322 days ago
You are not wrong, this is what I've found:

As installed: 18.04 works, but long delay when you login because nouveau driver is having problems (a bunch of timeouts from it in dmesg). But it does seem to work (I didn't understand the reason for the delay at first).

Install Nvidia closed-source "435" driver: the above problem is fixed, but now it does not recover from suspend.

Force it to use the Intel GPU with "nvidia-settings". Now all is good. Intel driver is supposed to be lower power anyway.

It's interesting that the there are two GPUs that can share the same video port.

There is also something going with the WIFI driver:

     iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: FW already configured (0) - re-configuring
     iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: BIOS contains WGDS but no WRDS
But it does work.

I've found that installing a 1 TB M.2 EVO 860 SSD works, and you can also have the mechanical hard drive at the same time. However, the BIOS is stupid: it always wants to boot from the 2.5" drive, so you need to install grub on it. I used a Samsung migration tool to move Windows 10 to the SSD, but Windows itself is stupid- it's random whether it boots the new SSD partition or the old 2.5" partition.

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