Might be worth trying Linux on that. At least you'd have more control over the sleep issues.

I have a Dell Precision 7540 that I was having issues getting sleep to work. It would panic on resuming I think because of WiFi but I couldn't fix it. So I enabled "hybrid-sleep" which is like hibernate and sleep together. Before it sleeps, it flushes the RAM to disk. When it wakes up, it tries to boot from RAM and, if successful, it deletes the hibernation data. But if it crashes before it deletes the files, you just reboot and it resumes from disk. So I never "lose" my status but 95% of the time my computer resumes normally.

There are certainly other frustrating bits with Linux, but at least the flexibility to fix the issues is within your grasp. That was my biggest gripe with OSX and Windows. You just aren't always able the fix the issue and it's very mentally painful (for me). :P

I have arch linux on that same machine and there are indeed a million knobs to tune these things. I haven't yet managed to make it work as good as a macbook, after putting in around ~100h by now into the problem.

I went back to macbooks ~1 month ago. The Dell is still brand new (4 months old, ~4000$ fully spec'ed), but my employer does not want it back, so it is now sitting in a drawer in my office.

I ended up billing my employer for the ~120h I spent on "configuring" the laptop over the 4 months. With that included, the laptop costed my employer about 14.000$.

Now I'm using my personal 2013 macbook air instead, and am finally able to get something done, yet I'm not happy with having to use my own laptop for work.

Had they buy me a macbook for 1.500$ instead, like I requested, that would have saved them ~13.000$ + my lost respect + my continued lost respect for requiring me to use my own 7 year old personal laptop for work.

Why did you use arch instead of other distro that known to work on many laptops, such as Ubuntu?

This is pure FUD in my opinion. Arch has always run better on every computer I’ve owned, especially newer ones.

The people for whom Ubuntu works usually have fewer requirements or are not as particular about things working _just right_.

That’s not to say I haven’t had issues with Arch, but there were fewer and they were easier to figure out.

Now if you want a distro where you can update packages without manual intervention several times a year, then it’s probably best to look past Arch.

I mean if he's having problems and spent hundred of hours trying to fix it, instead of giving up why not just try one of the mainstream distro and see if it works? There is a chance (however slim it is) that it'll work due to higher number of users exposing hardware support issues to the maintainers.

Well, I will point you to fluffything’s response

> Arch was the best distro I could find that used the latest kernel by default. Audio worked there.

That mirrors the experiences I’ve had. Most distros ship with broken old software and custom patches that make troubleshooting a nightmare. They also don’t have the resources to support the wide variety of hardware out there. Microsoft spends billions on Windows and vendors spend billions of their own to make sure hardware is mostly plug and play.

In Linux land, the mainstream distros ship with fragile duct-taped components that work if you’re lucky but are a complete pain to troubleshoot and are a bigger pain as time goes on and you have major upgrades.

Arch is the only sane distro with wide adoption and it’s a joy to use. I get the latest kernel with its bug fixes and hardware support. Packages are updated on a rolling basis so there are a few instances every year where I need to manually intervene, but not major breakages every 2 years.

Granted, it’s not for everyone. You have to recreate the fragile duct-taped components you get in other distros, which is an investment of time. You will know how and why your computer works though and will not have to resort to the Ubuntu stack exchange (or their other communities) for the magic formula that will fix your issues.

I’m hoping we can change hearts one by one with this message: Arch is not scary; it might solve the problems you’ve been having :D

> In Linux land, the mainstream distros ship with fragile duct-taped components that work if you’re lucky but are a complete pain to troubleshoot and are a bigger pain as time goes on and you have major upgrades.

Laughing in Fedora. Out of curiosity how much "mainstream distros" did you use?

Exactly my thoughts, Fedora should be given a try. I've had it on a number of laptops and desktops, and for the last few years for sure everything has just worked (tm).

I tried Ubuntu and the soundcard was not detected at all because the kernel used is too old (requires 5.5 apparently). I tried upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 and the kernel there was too old as well...

Arch was the best distro I could find that used the latest kernel by default. Audio worked there.

Both Fedora and Opensuse Tumbleweed ship a very recent Kernel though.

> I absolutely hate it. It throttles constantly even after undervolting it. I had to do a bunch of black magic to get it to sleep properly (which is evidently happening to every Dell) and eventually gave up on that and just set it to hibernate any time the lids closed (it's 32gb so that adds about 30 seconds to the start up time). I've spent more time tweaking this thing, reading forums and reddit about how to make it perform DECENTLY than I did building my last hackintosh and I don't enjoy that experience ever. When you get past all these issues it's still Windows 10 which I just find to be the most annoying OS I've ever used.

Really? I love my XPS 7390 2-in-1, it's the best laptop I've used and owned by far and that includes Macbooks. Combined with a WD19TB dock (and a useful trick of flipping it around so it's an inverted L) it makes a great work from home setup. Its thermal profile is relatively aggressive by default but it should stay at 15W (and ~65 degree temps) indefinitely. Upping the power limit to 25W (like the Windows / Dell "Ultra Performance" mode does) and it appears it can maintain that too. I mean, Crysis can even run on the thing [1].

That said, I'd probably lose my mind if I had to run Windows on it. A suggestion for getting good old S3 sleep to work: enable the hack for reenabling S3 sleep in the Windows registry, then disable "Early Signs of Life / Dell Logo" in the BIOS [2]. I'm not sure if this will work on Windows, but it works flawlessly on Arch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXS_KJf_M0 [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_2-in-1_(739...

It seems like we're just waiting on bios updates for Ice Lake to have a proper thermal profile. I'm not sure. What happens is the laptops thermal profile is way under the Intel recommended profile. I believe it starts to throttle around 80* instead of the 100* or so Intel says Ice Lake should be able to run at.

It's been awhile since I played with this but I don't believe I was able to bump my voltage to 25w on Ice Lake. Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I'll do a fresh install and give it a try again. I've heard a few comments where peoples 7390 2in1s were running great but on /r/dell I've seen a lot more with complaints like mine.

I did get some improvement by dropping the thermal/power plan from High Performance down to Quiet. That seems to keep the thermals down so it triggers throttling less.

My problem is it throttles constantly and has other issues where if you move it (lift it up) while it's under load it will immediately throttle and I trigger it sitting on my lap a lot.

I bought it hoping I could run a bunch of VMs (thus the 32gb) and do light development work on it but I can barely even draw in Figma without having a rough experience so I completely gave up on developing on it.

This is a really good article https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerz...

I've heard that most of the Xps lineup has cooling issues. On the other hand I've got an Aero 15 (2018 I think), fan noise is decent and after a small undervolt it can indefinitely sustain max single core turbo speeds (4.1GHz) with respectable all core turbo (3.7GHz), while sitting at 70C. There are laptops out there with adequate cooling solutions out there.

A lot of high end laptops have cooling issues because it's the kind of thing you have to buy the device and actually use it for a while to find out, but everyone sees "i9, ultra slim, 'pro'" straight away.

To give some numbers to the comment I made previously in this thread, with an XPS 7390 2-in-1:

Single core turbo 3.9GHz, maintains indefinitely, temperature hovers around ~75 degrees, fans around 5000RPM

All core turbo: Keeps 3.4GHz and ~45W TDP for around 10 seconds, before dropping to 2.7GHz and ~25W TDP indefinitely. Temps still around ~75, with the fans around 8000 RPM.

That's without any undervolting, but with the processor set for 25W TDP (like the Windows "Ultra Performance" mode). Adding in some undervolting gets the all core turbo up to 2.9GHz.

This is Ice Lake?

Ice Lake, yeah. It's the i7 1065G7 [1]

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/...

Can you tell me what you did to set it to 25watt? I swear I've tried this a few times going through Throttlestop tutorials with different usb-c chargers (from the stock 67w up to 97w) and either that option was greyed out or I never got it to actually do 25w.

I know what you mean - had my share of random issues with Lenovo, HP, Dell - but at the end of the day Windows/Linux/Android are more customisable and I'm missing that a lot when I switched ecosystems.