To begin with, I am not familiar with any Dell device so far. Actually, I am a long time Lenovo laptops user and for the last two years I run only Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I would like to ask you for advice. I expect to receive my new Dell Vostro 3530 (i5 processor with iGPU – no Nvidia) which comes with an installed Ubuntu 22.04, and it seems that the laptop will have a Dell-specific Ubuntu installation with option for recovery of the factory Ubuntu 22.04 image if there is a problem with the device/operating system (seems like a standard for the Dell machines with Linux). As far as I know, changing the OS by myself, it would possibly violate the 3 years warranty.
My questions are the following. Does anybody from the community have experience with Dell Vostro 3530 and have you ever tried to install Fedora on it? How was the installation process established – were there any issues, problem with the secure boot and BIOS, etc.? In addition, if someone is running Fedora on this Dell, could you please share your experience in terms of stability and performance – are there any problems, issues, proprietary drivers headaches, network card pains, etc.? Last but not least, have you ever tried to update the BIOS after the installation of Fedora? If the answer is yes – how did you perform it and were there any difficulties?
I would expect Fedora to work on the Vostro but would test it using a live USB Fedora install image. You can use the Gnome or KDE plasma images for this testsing.
They will provide you with a desktop environment that you can use to check out the laptop hardware. Just the fact that you have the graphical desktop running will show lots is working. You can then test sound is working, Wifi etc.
Many companies that offer pre-installed linux use hardware that is too new to have drivers in any distro, so include their own drivers. You could use the LHDB to check
for hardware components too new to have distro support.
Some people remove the original mass storage device, then install the “non-supported” OS in a new device. If they need warranty support, they just put back back the original mass storage device. Some will temporarily switch back every few months to keep the vendor-supported device from getting too stale. I have encountered issues with systems used for multi-month processing jobs and went so long between updates that you couldn’t just apply the current updates. If the vendor supplies a “recovery” image they should be used to seeing broken systems running a recovery image from user efforts to restore a broken system.
I am typing on a Dell Inspiron that came with Ubuntu preinstalled.
It works better with Fedora.
Two things:
Like Barry A Scott wrote above you can test ANY major distro using the “live” image. You download the image, write it on an USB key, boot from the USB key and play with the distribution to see if everything works as expected. It doesn’t guarantee 100% against problems but you can check the most important things without installing anything.
My Dell laptop came with an old release of Ubuntu. So I had to upgrade. The upgrade DID NOT come from Dell so whatever they did on the preinstalled system was overwritten by “vanilla” Ubuntu. Then I did not like it and installed other distributions. I don’t know if nowadays Dell provides a repository for updating/upgrading Ubuntu installations but I really doubt it. In general I would say if it works with Ubuntu it should work with any other distribution.
About the 3 years guarantee, if you want to be 100% safe you should call Dell support and ask about it. IMHO it doesn’t work with “linux”. Not only because of the need of advancing Ubuntu but because “distro hopping” is what everybody does.
Switching distros (along with re-installing) is an all to common response when a linux system misbehaves and doesn’t help the community improve linux because they usually discard information needed to understand an issue.
Professionals outside computer science or programming often rely on specialized linux applications. There are clusters based around the distro used to develop and run such applications, but some leakage where a particular distro is supported by the user’s employer or the user requires more than one specialized application. Well designed an implemented applications often work well across multiple distros, but it is often easier to help users on the distro that developers use. Many of the issues experienced by users are things that differ across distros such as finding and installing packages for libraries and tools used by the application.
Before COVID isolation, I often recommended that new users ask colleagues which distros they use and start with one that is being actively used by colleagues so they could ask questions around the coffee machine. Now I advise them to check with developers of their mission-critical applications.
George I guess we are thinking of completely different things.
My idea of “linux” is I go to the local store, buy a cheap printer, get home, connect the printer to the PC, it gets recognized and I can print my three pages.
If “linux” doesn’t recognize the printer or even worse it crashes, I do like the ancients, I look on forums to see if there is some workaround.
In most cases the easier solution is to try another distribution, which is exactly what I did when I first moved from Ubuntu to Fedora.
I guess if I had to think of a “professional” environment with very focused requirements, I would go for an exact hardware/software combination, to the point of making it on my own. Pretty much what big corporations like Google do. They have their own hardware and their own software, designed and made in-house.
I could call Canonical or Red Hat and say “see, I do have these requirements, can you provide the needed hardware/software?”. At that point I pay for the service.
But that is not “the community”, it is exactly the opposite, it is more like NASA building a probe. Each single time it is a single, special, case. The “community” cannot be about a single “mission critical” printer, it must be about as many printers possible, ideally all the printers that have ever existed. Ironically when NASA cannot have its own special hardware/software and must rely on “from the shelf” stuff, it isn’t “mission critical”, it is “whatever works”.