Dell Latitude 5411: the Linux compatibility sweet spot

&gt; There is a workaround to the electrical noise: try running the CPU at a lower speed... When running the CPU slower, the noise is much less severe.<p>That holds true for all my devices. And I noticed that performance for ~90% of applications doesn&#x27;t really suffer. I only run computationally intensive stuff every other day or so, and when I do I turn the setting back to &quot;performance&quot; (if I remember). The only exception is for some reason... Gmail. just doubles or triples the already slow time of opening the site. Which is not a dealbreaker for linux laptops. It&#x27;s a dealbreaker form gmail frankly.

This laptop actually has a pointing stick with three mouse buttons above the trackpad, which is nice. (Dell calls it Dual Point instead of TrackPoint.) It&#x27;s a shame that Dell no longer makes any laptops with pointing sticks and that the ones they did make used Intel instead of AMD Ryzen 4000+ processors.

&gt;I’m convinced at this point that USB-C is a cursed standard and will never “just work”. If you disagree, then please look up any article that tries to explain how USB-C works and all the things you have to keep in mind if you want to buy a damn cable for your device that does what you want. And then add Thunderbolt to the mix.<p>The solution is to purchase nothing but Thunderbolt cables, which are universal inasmuch as they support every subset of options. (Obviously this is not the cheapest approach, but NASA said it best: &quot;Faster, better, cheaper — pick any two&quot;).

I&#x27;ve stuck with ThinkPads for Linux over the last decade. Thanks to the OP, I&#x27;ll now keep an eye on used Dells. My work issued me a later model Precision a while ago (that they require me to run Windows on: the desktop engineering folks have my number, as I&#x27;m the OG who helped take us from 3270 terminals to desktop PCs at the turn of the century), but I&#x27;ve been reasonably impressed with it over time. Would like to see if something like it would actually be more useful than the X250 I&#x27;ve been running in my personal life the last 2 years.

As I&#x27;m happy with my 2020 S540 Ideapad, I&#x27;ve bought my wife the current model (IdeaPad 5 14ALC05) (which is a huge upgrade BTW) and installed Pop_OS on it, like mine. Everything just works. At times when getting out of sleep it requires a Wifi restart (by pressing the &quot;airplane mode button&quot;, waiting a few seconds, and pressing it again) but that&#x27;s really extremely minor and hopefully will be solved at some point with an update.<p>(My wife is an ordinary user : she expects to put the computer in and out of sleep 54 times a day and reboots once every 3 months or less if I don&#x27;t check myself for kernel upgrades).

I&#x27;ve had a pretty good experience with several Dell Latitude laptops running Linux. Other than a few sleep&#x2F;wakeup issues, the classic, I have rarely had an issue. Even the sleep mostly works, it just fails on a few occasions.<p>I&#x27;m looking for a good dev laptop now and looks like some kind of Dell XPS is the best choice. My requirements are basically powerful hardware, a real GPU with nvidia strongly preferred, and good Linux support. That list alone seems to mostly narrow it down to Dell or Lenovo, and between those two it&#x27;s not difficult to choose Dell.

Both Dell and Lenovo will sell you laptops with Ubuntu. The selection is admittedly (significantly) smaller than for Windows laptops, but it certainly removes uncertainty over whether the hardware will be supported.<p>My last two personal laptops came with Ubuntu pre-installed - the first a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and more recently a Ryzen-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13. I&#x27;ve been extremely happy with both.

Framework laptops are also firmly in that sweet spot, with the great repairability and flexibility being a big bonus.

&gt; Oh god, the noise<p>Time to sound like an Apple fanboi.<p>No. 1000 times no. Do not accept hardware like this. For your own health.

One version of &quot;Sweet spot&quot; is having Linux preinstalled at the factory, which at least guarantees working drivers on new hardware. Obviously costs more than an older machine, though. Dell offers this on a bunch of models, including several Latitudes -- as do Lenovo, and a whole bunch of specialty manufacturers.

I have a similar dell latitude and when I have linux problems from time to time, I usually first blame the hardware, but then it turns out to be something more mundane - network disks and network usb devices seem to be bigger problems for suspend&#x2F;resume than anything else.

I have this one. I did not use it for a long time but after I moved into it, the touchpad was very shaky. Once in a while the cursor jumped all over. I found I could disable it with an xinput disable command, but that was just a temporary relief. After research I came to the conclusion that it was a hardware problem, but as I found it after the warranty expired I could not return it.<p>There are descriptions on the interwebs how to solder a wire to better ground the touchpad so I did that. It improved it but it still goes bad once in a while.<p>Apart from that, I like it.

I now run Kali Linux on my 2012&#x2F;13 Lenovo T430u, and it works fine without any upgrades. I bought it in Macau when I was living over there from late 2009 until end of 2015. I used it in the field in harsh environments for all sorts of work, and it never failed. I was running the latest version of Windows at that time. I switched to Ubuntu on it to replace my older linux box.

there are few PC vendors (Dell included) offering first class Linux support for some of their products. You can order a laptop with Linux installed out of the box. No need to use old and outdated hardware.

I’ve had good luck with just-released Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu preinstalled (the “developer edition”). Everything works out of the box and Ubuntu provides upgrade paths while retaining all drivers and compatibility. No need to wait for a 3-year-old laptop. It is more expensive of course :(

I have a Dell Latitude 5490, which was cheap refurbished from Amazon, and it works great with Ubuntu.

How much does the processor play into the battery life of the laptop when running Linux? I seem to remember not too long ago people speculating that laptops with the little big CPU style will get much better battery on Linux. Did that come to fruition?

Dell Inspiron 7415 also works OK-ish, except for the digital pen (reported: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marc.info&#x2F;?l=linux-input&amp;m=168275886027392&amp;w=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marc.info&#x2F;?l=linux-input&amp;m=168275886027392&amp;w=2</a>). No coil whine, but bad sRGB coverage and poor-quality (low level + hiss + non-zero DC offset) internal microphone. But at least Windows users suffer from the same issues. So pick your poison.

I was wondering about the &quot;sweetspot&quot; of laptops to use with Linux and doah, of course, it&#x27;s because the community has had a chance to update the drivers and make sure things work.<p>Which dovetails into my curiousity of Linux computer makers selling hardware well matched to Linux and make sure Linux works out of the box vs using a new Windows PC. I wondered why it would make a difference and this also explains that.<p>Thanks for the explanation.

The linux sweet spot is the 3 year old laptop: most of it has the drivers worked out by now, but it’s not broken yet again.

In case anyone is interested in other Linux-friendly laptops: after reading Joshua Stein&#x27;s review I got a MateBook X and have been really enjoying it for the past year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jcs.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;matebook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jcs.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;matebook</a>

I bought cheap Latitude 3410 with Ubuntu preinstalled and its Linux compatibility was perfect. I installed Fedora and without further configuration everything just worked.<p>If anyone looks for Linux laptop, my recommendation would be Dell Latitude or Precision laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled with Intel GPU.

If you want to:<p>A) use the latest hardware<p>B) spec it down to the kernel boot parameters<p>C) enjoy great support<p>I can cheerfully recommend <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emperorlinux.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emperorlinux.com&#x2F;</a> which has been a vendor of the finest nerd gear for a very long time. I&#x27;ve owned two.

The title is more optimistic than the article...<p>Not to sound like a contrarian, but how can it be a sweet spot if you write an article on making it better and doesn&#x27;t even want to use the laptop?

The 10th gen mobile CPU’s are notoriously hot and power hungry. They behave similarly under windows. I mostly tried to purchase mobile Ryzen based laptops during that time.

Note to the author or anyone else having similar problems with a Thunderbolt&#x2F;USB-C dock on a Dell running Linux:<p>Try hard-resetting the dock. (Just yank the power and put it back in.)

No issues on my t470 with Ubuntu 22.04

I have used Linux on multiple Dell Latitude laptops (6510, 6540, 7380) and it has always worked out of the box and completely flawlessly, including all integrated peripherals (even WWAN cards, smart card reader and dual GPU setups), EXCEPT for the fingerprint reader. Sleep and Hibernate both work fine, external monitors just work, docking station with its peripherals just works, ...<p>The missing fingerprint reader is no big deal for me since I didn&#x27;t plan on using that anyway.<p>tl;dr: I can vouch for (at least these) older Latitude models being very fun to use with Linux. I&#x27;m using Manjaro exclusively though, other Linux (or BSD) variants may or may not work as well....