[ypcx]

Writing this from my 2019 XPS 15 7590 i9 with (extended) 64 GB RAM. The OLED display quality is still the best any laptop can offer, but that's where it ends. Had countless issues with sleep, reboots after being "killed in sleep" for going over Windows sleep "battery drain limit" (can be increased in registry but hey), wifi/bt issues after wake-up, short battery endurance, fan noise (mitigated by undervolting w/ ThrottleStop). (In case I may sound too dramatic, check their forums: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/bd-p/XPS)

Then there's the classic Windows Laptop "goodness" like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface), necessity to emulate Linux/Git/Wsl/Cygwin for any real dev work, having elaborate install.txt procedures for setting up a new laptop.

I wanted to have a "beefy" machine but since I can now do my play things on Google Colab (and my work on company's Macbook), I just ordered the last year's M1 Macbook Air and I'm done with this Dante's Inferno of Windows Laptop ecosystem. Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

[zeven7]

I'll chime in as well from my 2020 XPS 17. This issue is incredibly frustrating. It's worth switching over, however I don't really know where to go for a premium laptop. I'm not very interested in a Mac. HP and Lenovo have given me tons of problems in the past (which is why I switched to Dell). From this thread it seems like several other vendors have similar problems to this Dell one. What options are there?

[Dracophoenix]

Have you considered Framework? They're laptops are almost completely modular. The problem with laptops is that they don't have a dedicated GPU yet. But they're otherwise interesting.

[BluePen8]

I'll be frank, the MacBooks are overpriced, and do have some of their own issues, but they're actually still the best choice.

At the very least based on my own experience you should avoid HP Elitebooks, and Microsoft Surfaces, also Asus Zenbooks, and Dell Inspirons.

...As you can tell from that list I've tried very hard to avoid paying the premium for a MacBook before giving in. They're still not perfect, but they're good enough that I am never going back to a Windows laptop.

[EugeneOZ]

"Overpriced" and "the best choice" can not be used in a single line. Looks like this premium goes not for nothing.

[ukyrgf]

I've been buying Dell Vostro laptops and they certainly feel premium and have decent battery life. This years model removed the SATA port where you could expand storage with a cheap HDD, but it does have an extra M.2 drive and expandable memory.

[jadbox]

These days the Microsoft laptops (v4) are surprisingly fantastic machines. Great screen, battery life, trackpad, etc. I've owned so many laptops, but MS seems to have surpassed even Dell is net build quality imho.

[fieldcny]

I really like the Lenovo X1s with Linux, no issues, great luck with hardware so far (on my second one). I also have a MacBook Pro, and I gotta say I like the Lenovo with fedora better.

[nikau]

Same, use a macbook and carbon X1.

Only thing the Macbook does noticeably better is speaker quality which isn't surprising given the size difference.

[ypcx]

How about sleep, trackpad support/configurability, battery endurance, 4k display support, external monitor support? I've seen complaints about all of these wrt Linux on X1.

Macbook now has the M1 going for it.

[nikau]

I run WSL2 on my X1, everything works perfectly.

apt-get is much nicer than brew and all its stupid cask/taps stuff that takes forever for packages to install.

With wslutils installed I have "open" and "pbcopy" equivalents configured which were the only 2 things missing from osx that I use a lot.

[bscphil]

> like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface)

Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).

Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.

Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).

[ypcx]

My 7590's keyboard is the polar opposite of the new Macbook butterfly keyboard which is considered too slim/tight/short-key-travel -- the Dell's keyboard is harder to press, they keys wiggle (this is exacerbated on the big keys like the Spacebar) -- a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard. (And even much more so after getting used to the Macbook's short travel keyboard (2018 mbp pro)).

Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)

[bscphil]

> a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard

Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.

> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.

Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.

Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.

[EugeneOZ]

My son has the same model. The keyboard is not that bad, I even like it. But issues with the sleep mode and with the trackpad - they overweight everything and I’ve bought an M1 Air for him.

[exikyut]

> Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

You may be right; I can't believe it's been 13 years since Microsoft's last go at writing the kernel for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)). So sad they gave up :(