On Wed, 2017-04-05 at 12:38 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > Me too. I guess it depends very much on whether one can afford to > buy a good laptop which works well with Linux. Not in this case. My laptop concerned is an Dell XPS 9550. It wasn't cheap and in the 12 months of ownership I'd describe the hardware as better than "good". Dell's part of the design is not big part of the total of course, Intel, Sony, Broadcom, Samsung to name a few all have their fingers in the pie, as they do in every laptop. But bits Dell did contribute are extraordinarily well done, with the exception of the keyboard layout. It's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. My pain is largely self inflicted: I covet shiny bits. Lots of companies sell new laptops with bits a couple of years old that work with Debian stable. Knowing this, I bought the XPS anyway. Although there are components in this laptop, almost of the pain come from one: Intel's Skylake CPU. (The touchpad also contributed but the libinput maintainers were fantastic, going way above and beyond the call of duty and contacting me directly when I complained on LWN. It now works wonderfully; worth the early adopter pain then some.) Getting Intel's CPU and in particular it's internal GPU working took far longer and involved more pain than that I bargained for. Just to put this into perspective: they didn't work on Windows either. Intel CPU's are not something you can avoid by buying a more expensive laptop. All this new hardware has meant I have had to run Debian Testing. Combine shiny new hardware with the shiny new software needed to drive it, and random little surprises become part of ones life. Coming close to dropping your new laptop because of a burning sensation as you retrieve it from it's bag wasn't surprising or even unexpected - not to me anyway. Anyway, this discussion prompted me to get off my bum and look at why unattended-upgrades wasn't working. Turns out the default install has "label=Debian-Security", and all these laptops are running testing. I guess the assumption that people running testing have the wherewithal to configure their machines properly isn't unreasonable.
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