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I recently got a new work laptop. I've used a Lenovo X200 for a few years and been immensely happy with it, but it was starting to show its age and the display was becoming less and less bright. The recent Thinkpads are utter crap, IMHO. Give me some fucking mouse buttons instead of going the Apple route and hiding them underneath the touchpad. The 'clit' is still there, but it's almost unusable. The resolution is too low. I initially bought a T440, but it died in BIOS on second boot, and after 2 motherboard changes and 1.5 months in Lenovo's own lab they were still unable to even put in the serial numbers (needed for the Windows license that came with it). In the end, and after much delay, the gave me a new one. I promptly gave it to an employee running Windows instead of even trying. For my new, new laptop I chose a Dell XPS 13 (9333) Developer Edition. No Microsoft tax! I'm not an Ubuntu person, so I ditched the pre-installed (though not after booting it up and noticing that Dell wanted me to sign some EULA before continuing on to the desktop). Instead I went with Debian. The monitor shows up as "Synaptics Large Touch Screen". Bluetooth and wireless works after installing non-free drivers. Suspend and resume works. It's fast. There are only two problems. One is the irritating coil whine that the series exhibit. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Usually I can remove it by toggling the keyboard backlight, but it doesn't seem to matter if it's from on to off or the other way around. The second, and somewhat worse, is that keys seem to get stuck. Sometimes, and I haven't actually found out the cause, the keys seem to get stuck and repeat until another key is pressed. It happened in emacs a few days ago and was almost catastrophic (I do keep my backups, but still..). The last issue is with Dell rather than the computer. It seems weird to offer a Developer Edition with decent drivers and a pre-installed Ubuntu, and then only offer their BIOS upgrades as a Windows and a DOS executable. I used a USB stick with FreeDOS to apply the update, but seriously, why couldn't they just give me a utility that works? My little sister, my wife and my mother-in-law all run Linux, and they'd probably be able to work a simple program that had a one-click BIOS upgrade button. Boot FreeDOS with Grub, apply the update, reboot. Why do I have to do this by myself? |