Earlier this year I was given one of those XPS machines with Ubuntu and decided to install Debian on it. The camera driver was so bad - I can’t remember technical details but you can’t simply get it to run on another kernel, it was a mess of hacks to get it to work. I decided I won’t get a camera driver. “We ship a laptop with Ubuntu” does not necessarily mean working Linux drivers.
EDIT: To add insult to injury, the touch bar suddenly decided to stop responding to input. It’s already bad enough to not have tactile feedback for Esc / Fn keys / Delete / Print Screen.
You needed: kernel driver, closed source userspace driver, GStreamer plugin, v4l2 loopback driver, v4l2 relay daemon copying frames from the GStreamer source into v4l2 loopback. Technically I could have made it work, I just decided not to.
I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:
your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.
use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.
I had an EdgeRouter X for years before I started my job. They are solid devices, and I’d definitely put them above most consumer routers.
Because they only charge for the hardware, they will eventually run into the same disincentive to provide consistent timely updates. If you do buy an Ubiquiti or similar enthusiast brand, do still keep an eye out for the CVEs that don’t get patched.
I don’t think having a swap partition or file would be all that useful because I have plenty of memory. I’ve never had to reinstall Linux so I’m not sure why I would need a separate home. If I did bork my OS somehow I’m fairly confident I could repair it from a live distro. And even if I did end up having to save my home I could just copy the files I want to another drive if it really came to that.
In this case you could view a swap partition as a safety net. Put 20-30GB in a swap partition in case something goes wrong. You won’t miss the disk space.
I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.
Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?
A number of candidates will create their own forks and there will be a long Game of Thrones style war between different factions. After couple of weeks each distro will choose the fork they will make the default one and people will split into warring factions. After that we will enter a nuclear winter style period lasting couple of years during which 90% of post on Lemmy will be just shitposting the rival forks. After a decade or two of backstabbing, dirty politics and other drama new dictator will be selected and all will be back to normal.
The operating system in use shouldn’t be a factor. Consider opening your laptop to perform a thorough cleaning, and also consider replacing the thermal paste as well. If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, taking it to a repair shop is a viable option. Investing in a cooling stand for the laptop would also be beneficial…
Replacing the thermal paste is essential. It dries out over time and stops conducting heat effectively. Cleaning the fans and radiator fins is important too. Takes an hour or so if you don’t know what you’re doing so shouldn’t take long. I’ve kept my laptop going for years by doing that every 2 years or so.
I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).
One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.
This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I’ve installed Fedora recently and didn’t have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.
You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can’t check since I don’t have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).
Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.
Other than that, I’ve never had any overheating issues with this laptop.
I have doubts you would see any performance increases, and if you change your hardware you’ll be in for a tough time but it would be a fun learning experience!
Thats a question I have. I have two laptops, a shitty amd ryzen thinkpad t495 and a fancy soon-to-be-corebooted Clevo NV41MZ with i7-11** cpu. Pretty crazy performance difference although the chassis and keyboard suck. But if I get the keyboard I want to simply swap drives, as there is nothing fancy, this should just work right?
Swapping CPU manufacturers entirely? I’d just start my kernel config fresh. Pull up the old one next to a new (default ) one and go down line by line. Odds are there are at most a few flags that would need to be changed, but it’s a good chance to reevaluate your previous decisions too.
This used to be the norm, not a weird thing that noone has thought of before. If you do this your kernel will be a lot smaller, boot faster, and be a bit more secure. Once you’re booted it won’t make any meaningful speed difference though.
It makes a HUGE difference in compile time. Which only matters if you’re building your own kernel anyway. It’s a solution for its own problem.
I think it’s a good learning experience though. There is genuinely a lot of stuff in there that you can easily, safely remove, and reading up on all the less obvious flags is fun.
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