Once every N years I give Linux a try. I’ve been a great supporter in the past and I always enjoyed tinkering with my OSes. I gradually lost the appetite due to jobs always requiring a windows PC, making the use of Linux a pain.
For my previous attempt to use Linux, in the summer of 2017, I used my Dell XPS 13 (9350) machine. This model is touted by Dell and Ubuntu as “Linux developer friendly“. I used an Ubuntu 16.04 as my distribution of choice. In short — I was disappointed. Nothing was working properly, the system was crashing and overheating. I gave up after a couple of days.
Well, since it has been a year, time for another try – this time using Ubuntu 18.04. It’s been a week so far and I am still using it, which says a lot (for me at least).
The bad:
- Wayland was not fixed, but simply, not used.
- The default session is based on Gnome 3, which is buggy and slow. CPU usage on minimal interaction was extremely high. Even things like glxgears was jerky every few seconds.
- Hibernation needs to be enabled manually, and a lot of Googling has to be done prior to that point.
- Mouse cursor high DPI issues still unresolved for applications such as Firefox or Spotify (I use Chrome so that is less of a concern to me).
The good:
- Hardware is fully supported (who remembers the days when you had to figure out whey the sound is not working?)
- X11 works great, no more half-working Wayland.
- KDE works great.
- Battery lasts as it should.
- No crashes so farm, even with all my tinkering.
- High DPI is better than in 16.04.
- Most of the stuff can be fixed if you follow Google!
- It is getting better.
I will keep trying to improve my experience in the next weeks. But, so far, these are some of the articles that helped me:
- Enable hibernation using uswsusp.
- Fix the Wi-Fi issues after resume.
- Enable the High DPI settings for SDDM (DPI of 192 is the best for XPS’s monitor).
- More High DPI tweaks.
- And, tweaks and packages you can install afterwards.
- Whoops, Gnome sucks, now install Kubuntu.