Artificial incompatibility - a rant (Dell notebook)
As per title this is inspired by my recent problems with a Latitude 7320 notebook.
I can't use my desktop right now and so wanted some cheaper nb for normal usage and eventually settled on this model due to being able to get it at an acceptable ratio of price to age and seeing it as compatible on Ubuntu, not noticing the disclaimer until later.
The problems started right after installing Fedora KDE - the nb was running at absolutely abysmal performance and this problem affects several models.
Running passmark I've got above 2000 on cpu, on Windows I had 11000. The cpu was throttling to 1500Mhz and lower for no reason. Switching a BIOS setting of power management to "ultra performance" got me to twice the score.
Eventually using throttled from github for various Lenovo and Dell models and thermald I was able to get to twice that again, still a fifth less than on Windows. Also the repo has potential of security concerns due to how it works, also potential to just stop working due to them later.
Mainly I'm posting this to just say that there is zero legitimate technical reason why this should happen, it works on Windows and on Dell tampered Ubuntu images. The hw is fine but for some reason someone somewhere decided to artificially limit the hw for whatever reason.
Right now I am still indecided if I should write off the several hours I've spent on this and return the machine to play the dice with some other model.
Edit 5.4.: it turns out I was not using the throttled package correctly and now have roughly equivalent performace in Linux as in Windows up from the 4/5 or so after all the other workarounds. All of the points still apply though. I also heartily recommend s-tui as a nice utility for cpu monitoring and stress test.
I mean this is the Linux experience as far as I'm concerned. I know in the last thread about basically this sort of thing people were talking about how mature Linux is but man, it's just not. I don't think it's anyone artificially lowering the performance either, it's just -- hardly any manufacturers explicitly test Linux, so the support is a complete crapshoot.
It’s really not a problem with Linux insomuch as it’s a problem with Dell. Dell regularly ships computers that have broken firmware and paper over that with Windows drivers that fix the problems. I own a Latitude laptop that only worked if I disabled virtualization in the BIOS setting because the firmware table that told the operator what memory locations to use was a lie. I got it to work after overwriting the bootloader settings to manually set those pointers.
About a year later Ubuntu came up with a new version and it had some bits to fix that stuff so the user wouldn’t have to find those obscure options. And while that is a good thing, it’s not something that should have needed to happen. Dell should have not released a broken product.
Will add that while Dell in particular may have a poor reputation, PC firmware in general is an absolute trainwreck. There are numerous audio, network, etc chipsets that are notoriously problematic under Linux because their firmware is so shoddy and similarly have the worst parts duct taped over in Windows drivers.
This is why Microsoft-branded hardware actually works pretty great with Linux, I think. As an OS company they understand the pain of hardware that feeds the OS garbage and generally misbehaves, so when they make hardware they make sure to implement the specs properly.
It probably helps that they mainly stick to top tier hardware vendors too, e.g. Intel for BT/WiFi instead of some cheap offbrand chipset. Also doesn’t hurt that most MS computers don’t have discrete graphics and thus aren’t burdened with the problems Nvidia is known to bring to the table under Linux.
Generally it is really not in my experience which is why I am so frustrated with this.
This is not a problem of Linux but of Dell. For whatever reason they shipped device with broken firmware then applied hacked together hotfix for select few os and called it a day refusing to fix it in the years since. Also refusing to even make the Ubuntu image generally available. There are threads about this on Dell forums with pages of people reporting it with the response being don't care(corporate edition).
I dont know exactly what the actual problem is but from the various topics and from what I've seen it is either the firmware is reporting bad values or just sets bad defaults and there is not much the os can do by itself. The underlying sw simply does not conform to the standards and the solution is a custom hack(including dell drivers).
Except here they explicitly did on this exact model. They just restricted the availability of their solution.
How much Linux do you think was involved getting this statement from your typing to my eyes? A lot more than you think, probably.
I’ve been a linux developer for over 30 years — I’ve even run a mid sized ISP. I’m pretty aware of how important it is for servers. I’m referring to the desktop experience.
Yeah, while Linux servers are incredibly mature, reliable, and feature-complete, they're different because they're headless. I absolutely love working with most Linux-based OSs as servers, and you can set up similar tooling on nearly any of them.
It's the desktop experience that's problematic. I like the appearance and UX of several desktop environments, especially with how much lighter they are than what Windows offers. But the compliments stop there.
Unless you're using hardware designed to work with a specific OS (like Pop_os on a System76 laptop, or Steam OS on a Steam Deck), you're almost guaranteed to run into an issue at some point. Video drivers, sound drivers, trackpad drivers, and/or potentially some other hardware drivers will require tinkering. If you're lucky enough that all of these work out of the box, it's still questionable if they will work after every update, especially with a new kernel version.
And while a lot of us are technology savvy enough to at least poke at the terminal a bit, the majority of the population is not. Video driver installation on a new OS install isn't as simple as on Windows (download the NVIDIA or AMD app and have it take care of the rest for you).
And of course, unless you live in a browser (which admittedly a lot of people do now), you might have to use alternative applications. Linux is a no-go for creative professionals who rely on the Adobe suite. MS Office isn't as fully featured in the browser yet. For work, I use some very specific applications that have no chance of being Linux compatible, including one that's a Microsoft Management Console extension.
For gaming, Valve is doing amazing work with Proton. But it still doesn't work across every hardware and software configuration. And I highly doubt all the incompatible anti-cheat systems will ever work, because the incentive for these game devs to support Linux is still incredibly low.
For graphics issues, going for AMD or Intel instead of Nvidia goes a long way. Intel iGPUs in particular are trouble-free in my experience.
Which is part of why I think that every laptop should have a model that’s iGPU-only. iGPUs have more than enough power for a huge swath of computer users, are dramatically better for reduced heat and fan noise and increased battery life, and are generally less trouble. While dGPUs are powerful they’re also a burden in several ways, and buyers should be able to choose their tradeoffs accordingly without having to rule out many models entirely.
I just poked at Best Buy's website for fun, sorted windows laptops by price low-to-high, and there's hundreds of laptops without a dedicated GPU. Even the sponsored results with laptops between $500-900 didn't have a GPU, only the "gaming" ones. Is there a specific hardware configuration you're thinking of that doesn't come without a GPU?
A lot of the nicer ones aren’t sold without a dGPU. For example I’ve seen a lot of praise for the last generation or two of Asus’ Zephyrus G14/G16, with some calling them “macbook-like”, but those are only available with a dedicated GPU.
More generally, there’s an assumption of sorts that the only market segments that might benefit from iGPU-only variants are bargain basement laptops and ultraportables, but Apple has proven otherwise with their 14” MacBook Pro that uses the same graphically-mediocre base M4 SoC as the $600 Mac Mini, which has been plenty popular.
Personally, I’d like to see more x86 iGPU-only laptops that are on the smaller side and don’t skimp on the battery to work around x86 inefficiency. Take a compact gaming/workstation laptop with a big battery originally intended to feed a power hungry dGPU, remove the dGPU, and watch as you suddenly get Macbook-like (15-20h+) battery life numbers on a laptop that runs Linux well.
Are you sure this is some kind of malicious lock-in from dell or just the linux hardware lottery? I don't see why Dell would give a shit what OS you run. Clearly they're fine with Linux, and aren't in the pockets of Big Windows, since they offer Ubuntu on many of their laptops.
I feel like Occam's Razor is that the Dell Ubuntu distro is just modified to ensure driver compatibility and that the ills you have are just what running software that isn't tested on the hardware is.
What would the mechanism of this lock-out even be? Feels like a lot of work just to target the 0.0001% of their customer base that would install a different Linux distro.
I suppose I can't be sure that it is broken by design instead of broken by shipping bad sw to production then hotfixing few most common sw configurations. The fault is in my opinion on Dell in either case.
They released firmware that does not conform to standards, then added hacked patches, refused to provide the already existing solution to general download then shrugged and went on their way.
I don't have hard numbers but let's say based on the various online posts that only hundred people reported this problem. That puts the required sales of this single laptop line into hundred millions. Let's instead say that for every report there is hundred people who had the issue which I feel is very conservative still along with the hundred reports. That would put neccesary sales at tens of billions.
My guess, and it is squarely a guess is simply broken thermal reporting and management that is then force fixed by os layer.
This might seem a bit silly but make sure you're using the right CPU governor, ie., the performance Power Profile under the Power and Battery widget. I set mine up so it switches to
performancewhen plugged in butpowersaveorschedutilwhen unplugged. A convenient CLI interface into this setting iscpupower frequency-info/cpupower frequency-set.I've noticed that some laptops throttle a bit when unplugged despite any kernel or usermode settings. To get the full power some laptops even require specific power adapters--accepting only some of the 5A 20V-able (for example) USB-C power adapters and rejecting others.
But you probably got this person's buggy laptop: https://old.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/13tr88r/cpu_speed_drops_to_0507_ghz_on_battery_power/
I would have really liked if it was something so easily resolved by standard system tools.
Though I also got the problem both plugged in and on battery so it seems a yet different problem than the one linked.
I could make a similar rant about my Lenovo P15 Gen2.
I used to buy HP Elitebooks and then Zbooks, but this time I decided to buy a thinkpad after all these years. I've always been told they have very good linux support, and that was a huge factor for me.
That has not been not my experience. On windows, everything fucking flies, it's so buttery smooth, I can play RDR2 maxed out at 1080p or medium at 4k seems playable.
I think I first installed Pop_OS! because it has good Nvidia driver support especially for laptops. Bad news, the mouse cursor is laggy as fuck, clicking on things takes ten seconds. Switched to vanilla Ubuntu. Same thing. Installed vanilla debian and manually installed xfce. Believe it or not, same issue. Mouse is even laggy like windows 95 style.
Nvidia RTX A4000 GPU but I'm not even sure that's the problem. What I ended up doing is installing KDE, which I haven't used since the 90s, but that seems to have fixed my problem of massive lag of seconds or more, with the cursor trailing seconds or even minutes past when I moved the mouse.
I tried X, I tried waylaynd. I spent about ten hours on getting it to work, but now that it does, I have absolutely no appetite to figure out what the actual problem is.
All I know is thinkpads are not some magically supported laptop. I had waaaaay better luck with my unsupported Zbook X360 with its weird sensors and stuff. Thing was a hybrid laptop/drawing tablet, and for whatever reason switching between the two on vanilla linux was seamless. Whereas a $7000 workstation laptop the linux zealots decree as the best linux laptop brand, shits the bed here hard.
I know this wasn't the point of your post, but a couple of things that helped when I hit similar issues (although not on that specific laptop or GPU):
The open source NVIDIA drivers are now the better supported ones, and I've seen issues with the proprietary ones manifest in exactly the kind of weird UI issues you mentioned. Most docs still describe the open drivers as unstable and say to use the proprietary binaries, but that's outdated - the latest line of GPUs aren't even fully supported by the proprietary drivers, and NVIDIA's own advice is now to prefer the open releases.
Switching to NixOS was an absolute revelation when it comes to dealing with this kind of thing. Which is not to say it's easier in every respect, at all - there's a real conceptual learning curve, a lot of the docs are atrociously outdated and misleading, and the setup feels very much like a day or two of standard dev work rather than hitting "next" on an installer. But once it's done, things work! You can see how and why they work, and diff the changes; you can commit the config and be confident it'll work again next time; you can roll back if something goes wrong; you can pinpoint the change that actually did the trick in that ten hours of effort and not worry about it being undone by the next black-box update. It's not that it's any more straightforward than other distros - if anything it's the opposite - but if you're going to have to fix things either way NixOS makes you realise that doing so without state management is like debugging software without version control.