Here are a few short comments about my experiences using Fedora 28 on the new Dell XPS 9570.
See my
previous post for instructions on the NVIDIA card setup.
This system is spec'ed with a 1TB SSD, 16Gbs of RAM and the 1920x1080p 15" 400 nits screen.
PRE-INSTALL:
- Before installing, I had to modify the BIOS SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI, otherwise the SSD was not recognized.
- I disabled Secure Boot.
GRAPHICS:
The first thing to note, is that the nouveau drivers do not play well with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI which comes with this system. This means that GDM crashes when it attempts to startup and you are left with a black screen and zero control. One way to solve this temporarily is to add the following line to your kernel boot parameters:
nouveau.modeset=0
To do this, when you are prompted to choose a kernel during any boot, press the 'e' key to edit its parameters:
Next, move your cursor down to the kernel line and add nouveau.modeset=0 at the end of the line:
Boot the kernel using ctrl+x.
This will allow GDM and Gnome to run without crashing everytime.
You can then install the NVIDIA drivers as per the instructions in
my previous post.
SUSPEND:
Until I updated the kernel from version 4.16.3-301 to 4.17.2-200, suspend was working perfectly well with the NVIDIA drivers. However, as soon as I upgraded, resuming from suspend no longer works correctly and instead shows a black screen with a cursor in the top left corner of the screen. If my wifi is still connected, I can ssh into the machine and see that XORG is using 100% of one CPU; very few helpful errors are in dmesg.
As a temporary solution I've switched the power button's function from 'suspend' to 'hibernate' - which appears to work well enough. So far hibernate has failed to resume only once, out of about 30 times or so.
THOUGHTS ON OTHER ASPECTS OF THE LAPTOP:
WIFI: Great reception, Fedora 28 support out-of-the-box.
Camera: Excellent, clear, wide image - Fedora 28 support out-of-the-box. However, I have the same complaint as everyone else - Put the camera at the top of the screen. As it is now, its not too bad, but people mostly see my face from slightly below and a lot of my fingers on the keyboard.
Screen: Excellent. Great colours, great brightness and brightness control; 'the hobbit' has never looked this good.
Keyboard: Excellent. There were a lot of negative reviews regarding the XPS 15 series' keyboards. For my part I find that the keys feel good: You don't have to press them too much, but you do feel them and they respond well and appropriately.
Heat dissipation: So far I've not experienced the issues that other users have complained about. However, I don't use this machine to do any kind of serious gaming. Probably the most graphic intensive game I've run was FlightGear, which hardly gets close to other engines. I was worried about this point as I run several VMs at once, and they can get fairly heavy loads at times.
GAMING:
I use Linux exclusively on this machine and I don't use steam, so all games I play are stock Fedora or from flathub. Here's what I've tried:
Minetest - Excellent: I'm a big fan of minetest and run my own server called "Aurelium's mine" at m.impactcore.com. You can get the list of servers at
https://www.minetest.net/servers/
Very smooth on full graphics. I haven't tried running a server on it, but I would be curious to see how my "LUA script generated lag" would do with this new Intel Hexacore. Unfortunately the Mod engine in Minetest isn't multi-threaded so I'd still be running mostly on a single core. Note that Minetest is multi-threaded but the LUA mods are not.
0AD - Great: but chugs a bit when 6 players start to have up to 300~500 workers/soldiers. But this has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the fact the most of the game runs on a single thread.
FlightGear - Insane! I don't know about multi-threading or how flightgear does it, it might have to do with the fact that the GPU is doing most of the heavy lifting in this game. The graphics are on max and its smooth as can be. I never knew flightgear could look so good. The terrain could be a bit better, but some of the airplanes just look great. The dynamically generated trees are pretty good, and they fill the gaps nicely to add a touch of reality.
Here are the ones I would like to try soon:
Doom 3 - The doom 3 engine (id tech 4) was released as open source. A proper doom 3 port was then made by
dhewm and seems to work really well. I've tried it on my other PC with the wad files that I had from the original game. I will try it on the laptop and update this post.
Battle for Wesnoth - I've never played this much, nor have much time to do so, but I'd like to give it a go and what better chance than to try it on this shiny new machine.
Torcs - I've played this a bit in the past but found it nearly impossible to use with a mouse and keyboard. Yeah, I don't have a lot of time for gaming these days so I don't have a stick or steering control.
Red Alert - This game brings back memories and for Fedora its available as one of the
flathub packages. I can't wait to try it again.
OVERALL:
Apart from the problem with suspend, everything else works relatively well and I have no complaints. Other than the few items noted above, there wasn't much else that needed to be done.
The machine itself is solid, much more so than it appeared in pictures and videos I had seen before purchasing it: I was afraid that it might end up being rather flimsy, but was pleasantly surprised by its robustness.
