The Dell Precision M3800 Laptop

[E.S. Rosenberg]

2015-12-22 21:48 GMT+02:00 Omer Zak <w1 at zak.co.il>:
> As I said few weeks ago, I am considering the purchase of a new laptop
> to replace my current desktop PC and also serve me on the road.
>
> It was suggested to me to consider purchasing the Dell Precision M3800
> laptop.
>
> Before ordering it, I'd like to know if anyone else bought it and if
> yes, what is his/her experience. Specific questions appear below.
>
> From the reviews that I read, the laptop suffers from a battery life
> deficiency (which does not bother me). Also, the 4K display option
> causes a lot of software to display too small graphical elements.
> (see, for example:
> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2897199/opensource-subnet/review-dells-ubuntu-powered-m3800-mobile-workstation-is-a-desktop-destroyer.html).
Usually the DE has somewhere where you can tell it how high the DPI is
for your screen and it will scale elements accordingly, however this
usually won't work across the board.
DTRs aren't expected to have good battery life, they'd need to double
their weight to accomplish that.
>
> The above review also claims that the laptop works with all Linux
> distributions the author tried.
>
> The laptop has the Nvidia® Quadro® K1100M, w/ 2GB GDDR5 display card.
> According to
> http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/69378/en-us, it works
> well with the NViDia proprietary driver.  Should I be on the lookout for
> any problems with it?
Once they support it the nVidia propriatary drivers are generally very solid.
> Is the card strong enough to drive three displays simultaneously?
The card in the CPU is strong enough to handle 3 screens, the discrete
card is a lot stronger the question is does Linux support the docking
station that you'll need to be able to accomplish a triple screen
setup.
>
> And finally, when I install Linux on the laptop, should I be careful
> when dealing with UEFI?
UEFI tends to be a pain in the *ss because it tries to 'help' you, my
most recent 'adventure' saw it emulating BIOS when booting from the
usb-disk install media which of course triggered a bios compatible
install of Linux, however it refused to boot from the harddisk in
'legacy' mode.
It took a while before I figured that out and redid the install while
booting from the usb-disk in UEFI mode...
HTH,
Eliyahu - אליהו
>
> --- Omer
>
>
> --
> My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory;
> and its display device is grievously short of pixels.  Can anyone help?
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>
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