My new notebook

Last week I finally received my new notebook. It was a long journey, but it was worth it. If you didn’t follow my blog, you can read about it here, here and here.

Delivery

It was delivered in two pieces. The first box contained the notebook, and was delivered normally. The second box contained the docking station and an additional power supply. For the second box I had to send a copy of the invoice to the tax office. I expected Dell to place the required documents inside the boxes. But since it was a domestic delivery for Dell, they didn’t. And I forgot to tell my friend who re-shipped them to check. So when the second box was delivered, I had to pay the import taxes for the whole order in one go. That wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but an announcement would have been nice. Because I don’t usually walk around with so much money, I had to ask the whole team to borrow some cash. Yeah, cash was the only option.

First impression

As expected, the first impression was great. And I had high expectations because I owned a previous model already. The border less screen is a blast. The large bezel of some other devices is such an useless waste of space. Also the docking station works flawlessly. I had somehow the impression they had different models for America and Europe. But other than the power cord, I couldn’t tell anything that wouldn’t fit. Only one USB-C cable is between the dock and the notebook. This is enough for charging the notebook, connecting external monitors, USB3 devices and sound. Funny enough the Bluetooth LE Mouse has shorter wakeup times when the docking station is plugged in.
I don’t insist on linux being pre-installed to save the time installing. It is to make sure the drivers stay available also in the future. I want to make sure that the OEM’s are aware of the people who want to have sane operating systems on their devices. It is essentially the same reason I insisted on paying with BitCoin. It is my money that I spend, and thus I want my purchase to show up in the appropriate columns of the statistics. If people don’t care, some corrupt middle managers just make certain options harder to get and then claim nobody wanted them.
The only item that is not according to my wish list is the keyboard layout. I wanted a Swiss layout, but made the compromise to get a US keyboard because the other factors were more important to me. The plan was to get a swiss keyboard, and retrofit it myself. But when I look at the device now, I figured out that this wouldn’t be easy, as it would require a European palm rest. Thus I abandoned that plan. I had devices with US keyboards before. It’s no big deal, I just prefer the Swiss layout.

Installation

Every time I set up a new device, I follow the guides for installing with smartcard backed full disk encryption and smartcard backed ssh. I wanted to automate this process for a while. So I used the opportunity to write the scripts this time. Since I wanted the procedure to work reproducibly, I started over every time I missed something. In the end I installed the OS at least five times. The next script for installing all the software including those from personal packet archives is a classic. I probably created it almost a decade ago, and always refined it. I once tried to do something similar for Windows at work. But in the end I abandoned it.

Problems

No system is perfect, and especially notebooks are known to not always have perfect driver support for linux kernels. The Sputnik team certainly does a great job with routing all their tweaks upstream. So far, I only found two minor problems. Wifi and the touchscreen didn’t work after resuming. Since I use full disk encryption I, suspend only occasionally. The boot times are really ok anyway. This is my first notebook with a touch screen. I force myself to use it sometimes, but on such a small high res screen my fingers are just too big. So, it’s nice to have, but hardly essential.
It is also my first device with a 4k screen. Ubuntu does great with the scaling and settings. The only applications that don’t fully support high res that I found so far, are: electrum, bitsquare and openbazaar. Oh, and it would be nice if the applications used the DPI scaling of the screen they are currently displaying.
Last but not least, the battery time didn’t impress me the only two times I ran on battery so far. It hardly lasts for a full movie. But I will try terminating all my background tasks next time.

Update December 20th 2016

Here is a nice video describing the device:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvsgTJbIWNo