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Pretty happy new XPS 13 owner
Hi. Although it's normal for support forums to contain only reports of problems, I read a couple of posts asking about the state of things, ie. whether to buy an XPS 13 DE.
I received mine (i5, 8 GB, 256 GB, FHD) two weeks ago and replaced the WiFi card with the Intel 7265 and updated the BIOS to A04.
Then I installed Arch Linux and followed the advice on the Arch Dell XPS 13 (2015) wiki page (including upgrading the kernel and iwlwifi firmware), so now I'm running kernel 4.1.2 and iwlwifi-7265D-13 firmware (25.30.13.0). I use the i3 window manager (no desktop environment).
I initially had some problems with the keyboard, which went away with the BIOS upgrade (I think) and a minor problem after waking from sleep where most keyboard input was being ignored (shift-alt-R to restart the window manager would fix it). This problem has gone away with the upgrade to kernel 4.1.2. I don't use the mic, so I don't know about that. I haven't noticed any problem with the adaptive brightness -- I mostly switch between full-screen Firefox and full-screen terminals (black text on beige background).
The only hardware (configuration?) problem I may have is palm detection on the trackpad: I occasionally find I've unintentionally moved the text input cursor.
And the only software configuration side of things I'm not yet completely happy with is the size of fonts and UI elements -- a question of tweaking a variety of settings). Oh, and that Firefox can't scroll content by tiny amounts (?)
The hardware itself is pretty good. I've had Macs the last 15 years or so, and at least the Dell isn't embarrassing. The matt screen is gorgeous, the trackpad, keyboard, case, sound etc are all fine. OK, the webcam placement is silly, but I don't use it anyway.
I'm also really happy with the battery usage. I get the 3.4 W on idle (displaying a web page) and the laptop mostly stays nice and cool and silent. I would have stayed with Linux on my MacBook Pro, but they just haven't got the power management working there.
So, after a couple of weeks of fiddling around, I think I can slowly get back to what I was doing before I decided to switch laptops :-)
I can also recommend the XPS 13 (with non-touch FHD display): it's really quite nice, and works quite well.
DELL-Jared D
350 Posts
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July 13th, 2015 10:00
Sweet. It's always nice to hear from happy customers too. :)
My understanding is that the lack of palm detection in I2C mode has to do with the lack of driver support for Microsoft's Precision Touchpad specification. I believe there are patches that mostly bring this support to Linux, but I don't know the current state of them.
colinh2o
5 Posts
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July 14th, 2015 12:00
A couple of updates to the above:
I worked out the dpi as 166.1 so I set Xft.dpi: 168 in .Xresoures and run randr --dpi 168. Fonts and UI now look really good. (168 = 96 x 1.75).
Also, with a black background (in a full-screen terminal), the power usage drops as low as 2.4 W when idling! (with WLAN on and BT off)
The only problem now is that when running 4.1.2 on battery, I get random freezes. The only key that still responds is the keyboard backlight one.
I don't seem to get any freezes when the power adapter is plugged in (or when using 4.0.6)...
I don't see anything obviously wrong using journalctl :-( Any tips on increasing the logging level? (other than setting LogLevel in systemd-system.conf to debug)
Oh, and thanks to the Barton and the whole Project Sputnik team. :-)
DELL-Jared D
350 Posts
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July 14th, 2015 15:00
Not daft at all. There's a tool produced (at least originally) by Intel called powertop. It's somewhat obscure unless you're looking for this sort of thing.
bobmcch
32 Posts
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July 14th, 2015 15:00
Hi,
This might be a daft question but how are you measuring power consumption with a physical device or are there hardware monitors for that?
Cheers,
Bob
colinh2o
5 Posts
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July 15th, 2015 01:00
I was just reporting what i3status displays.
I've just installed powertop. It reports more or less the same value.
bobmcch
32 Posts
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July 15th, 2015 11:00
Unfortunately I'm seeing around 7-8W idle on my QHD+ touchscreen model running Ubuntu 15.04. Do you think that's more likely to be the screen or the distro that affects the consumption so much?
(Sorry, I know you came here to give positive feedback, not to get stuck helping people. It would just be useful if you knew. I don't suppose you have any consumption figures for before, do you?)
Regards,
Bob
colinh2o
5 Posts
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July 15th, 2015 16:00
I installed the tlp package and set the kernel options:
pcie_aspm=force i915.enable_fbc=1 i915.enable_rc6=7
(as described on wiki.archlinux.org/index.ph/Dell_XPS_13_%282015%29)
The QHD definitely uses more, but the distribution shouldn't make any difference. Try powertop too. A bright screen adds well over 1 W, and keyboard backlight about 0.5 W. Scrolling uses much more energy than paging.
No problem. Let us know what difference tlp, kernel options and powertop make.
bobmcch
32 Posts
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July 16th, 2015 13:00
Cool,
So I've turned on those same kernel options but I'm not sure they're all relevant for 3.19. I concur that the keyboard light seems to consume around 0.5W so I've turned that off.
I don't have package tlp (?) but I've added laptop-mode-tools which seems to make 'good' most of the tunables in powertop.
The result in idle (with Firefox viewing a few pages) and idling: around 4.3W. Bearing in mind that this is the QHD+ model, I'm pretty happy with that and I can leave to my imagination what it would be like with the FHD screen or with a newer kernel in the future.
Pretty nice. I could get a bit obsessed with getting this better but I should really concentrate on using the *** thing for the grand plans I got it for. =) So I'm going to try and avoid meddling with it further (at least until 16.04 LTS comes out).
Thanks for introducing me to these things. I'm really just a Linux server and desktop person and I've never run a Linux laptop. Ever. So it's cool to learn about this.
I'd agree I'm pretty happy with it myself too. I'm running 1080p resolution (because I think HiDPI is a long way off), and other than the occasional graphics and trackpad glitch I think it's great.