ansible 2.10.x and Fedora/EPEL

by on 2020/11/02 at 3:19 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

As some of you all may know, there were some big changes around how ansible upstream is distributed and maintained with the 2.10.x release(es). I thought I would recap for everyone who was not aware of these changes, then share my plans for the Fedora/EPEL ansible packages. Everyone is going to end up in a better place after this settles out, so there’s no need to panic. 🙂

ansible has some good problems with their community: They are very popular, very easy to work on and very widely used. This means there’s a flood of people always submitting bug reports, pull requests, fixes, enhancements, and all manner of things. In the old ansible setup before 2.10, this resulted in bottlenecks. The core ansible maintainers couldn’t review, merge and handle all the incoming flow of things. There were a bunch of things that were tried to help this (ansibot marking up issues and PR’s), making modules git submodules of ansible, making more people ‘community maintainers’ with merge and other powers over some modules, etc. Even with these measures however, that hits another problem: ansible only releases every N months. If you have fixed some big bug in your module, users aren’t going to get that fix very quickly at all.

The 2.10 changes are another stab at fixing or at least mitigating things so that ansible can surge forward with all the community energy behind it. Basically: The ansible “engine” has been split off into ‘ansible-base’. This allows it to move as quickly (or slowly!) as it needs to to be stable and improve things. ansible-base does have some modules included, but only the very base ansible modules like copy or the like. Most of the rest of the modules that used to be in older ansible versions are now shipped as ‘ansible-community’ in a group of collections that have all agreed to ship at the same time as a bundle. Each of those collections are seperate and able to be managed by people who care about that collection. Finally there’s all the other collections out there that can self manage, release when they like, etc. the ‘ansible’ collection contents can be seen in: https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/2.10.1/2.10/ansible-2.10.1.deps (for example for 2.10.1).

So now we have ansible-base (the engine and just a few base modules), ansible-community (a collection of collections that is most of the modules in old ansible +- some) and all the collections in ansible galaxy. Each can now be maintained by people who care about just that collection/thing and update on their schedule. This removes the central bottleneck and hopefully gets things cranking along at a good pace.

So, what does this mean for Fedora/EPEL? Well, for one thing, upstream is no longer going to ship rpms or tar.gz releases of ansible-base (“ansible”) or ansible-community. They have decided distributions can do a fine job there and it’s just duplicating effort (releases of ansible/ansible-base and ansible-community will be on pypi just like many other python upstreams). Next, of course, ansible-2.9.x is not going away anytime soon. It should continue to get updates for a while. I’m planning on submitting ‘ansible-base’ package to Fedora review today (it’s all ready except that you cannot build full web docs currently as it needs a stack of new packages and a bugfix/update to python-pydandic, so I will be disabling full web docs to start with). Then I am going to start on a ansible-community package. Once they are both done in rawhide and the packaging is all sorted out, I’m planning on encouraging collections in the ansible-community meta collection to packaging and maintaining their own collections along with any collections that are not part of that meta bundle that want to package up. Once thats all working, we will look at retiring the old ‘ansible’ (2.9.x) package in favor of ansible-base + collections and push that out to other Fedora branches and EPEL. Some versions of EPEL (I’m looking at you 7) may stick with 2.9.x for as long as possible as 2.10.x may start to use newer python features that won’t work on EPEL7. EPEL8 may need to switch to newer python module, but time will tell.

I’m looking forward to this new setup and the added velocity it gives ansible!

Any feedback/comments/better ideas are welcome in the tracking bug for ansible-2.10.x: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1848739

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Bugzilla and the art of package maintenance

by on 2020/10/31 at 6:15 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

The first part of 2020 (in addition to all the horrible things happening in the world) was pretty heads down in our datacenter move. Now that that is over, and Fedora 33 is out the door (hurray!), I’m slowly trying to catch up on other things I normally do that are now a bit backlogged. This weekend, I decided to try and catch up (at least some) on my package maintaining and bugzilla bugs.

In the distant past (before 2020) I basically tried to work on this stuff mostly as it came in. Update packages when release monitoring let me know there was a release, ask questions of bug reporters as they reported and try and get something actionable. Of course now I’m behind, so lets try a different process to catch up.

First, some of you may be aware that there is a python module for bugzilla (python-bugzilla), but did you know that it also includes a handy command line interface?

Lets try some initial queries and see if we can triage things to work on things in (hopefully) some semblance of their priority.

% bugzilla query -a kevin@scrye.com -s NEW,ASSIGNED  | wc -l      
102

So, 102 bugs. Not bad at all! Oh, but wait, those are only the ones I am directly assigned to, I am in a number of groups that get assignment and I am just CCed. How bad are those:

% bugzilla query --cc kevin@scrye.com -s NEW,ASSIGNED  | wc -l
412

Well, thats not great. But some of these might be bugs that are since solved or someone else is busy working on them or they have been made moot somehow. So, I will dump that query into a text file (The default output is to give you bugnumber, state (NEW,ASSIGNED), and the summary of the bug. Amusingly, I see the oldest bug I am assigned to was filed in 2011. 🙂 So, I have those to look through and do something with, but perhaps we can make some smaller lists:

bugzilla query -a kevin@scrye.com -s NEW,ASSIGNED  | grep CVE | wc -l
3

Cool, Only 3 CVE’s are assigned to me directly. 2 of those are tracking (fedora,epel) for a ansible bug thats not fixed yet and one is for a libntlm bug. Hurray, a CVE I can check on.

So, what I usually do is read the CVE bug, looking in particular for versions (this one affects versions through 1.5). I then look on https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/libntlm to see what versions are in what releases. All 1.5 here. Next, I look at other libntlm bugs by going to the handy: https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/libntlm In addition to the 2 CVE tracking bugs (fedora,epel), I see there’s a release monitoring bug about 1.6 being available. Great. Time to do some packaging work.

So, this is a library, so we need to be carefull about changes and what might depend on it. Looking at the NEWS file for 1.6 however, we see: “** API and ABI modifications. No changes since last version.” Great. Thats an update and 3 less bugs. 🙂

ok, on to messing with a few packages/components that more ‘system wide’. epel-release, distribution, etc.

Then, lets look at packages that are needing updates:

bugzilla query --cc kevin@scrye.com -s NEW,ASSIGNED --outputformat '%{id}: %{component}: %{summary}'  |sed -e 's|^\#||' | sort -n | grep 'is available'
1271027: python-stevedore: python-stevedore-3.2.2 is available
1757650: python-feedparser: python-feedparser-6.0.2 is available
1771091: python-mechanize: python-mechanize-0.4.5 is available
1801531: awscli: awscli-2.0.61 is available
1813734: hiredis: hiredis-1.0.0 is available
1815307: bodhi: bodhi-5.5.0 is available
1829595: python-redis: python-redis-3.5.3 is available
1839836: blueberry: blueberry-1.3.9 is available
1846161: iperf3: iperf3-3.9 is available
1848739: ansible: ansible-2.10.1 is available
1862178: python-eventlet: python-eventlet-0.29.1 is available
1862531: python-vcrpy: python-vcrpy-4.1.1 is available
1880754: calibre: calibre-5.4.2 is available
1881455: python-greenlet: python-greenlet-0.4.17 is available
1886993: mxml: mxml-3.2 is available
1888249: python-pygal: python-pygal-3.0.0.dev1 is available
1890435: koji: koji-1.23.0 is available
1890954: GitPython: GitPython-3.1.11 is available
1891597: libnftnl: libnftnl-1.1.8 is available
1891769: nftables: nftables-0.9.7 is available
1893366: wordpress: wordpress-5.5.3 is available
1893453: iptables: iptables-1.8.6 is available

Some of those are blocked (calibre needs sip5 packaged, ansible needs 2.10.x packaged (which I have done, but need to clean up and submit)), but some of the others should be pretty easy. 🙂 Lets see how far I can get today!

A few hours later… 

% bugzilla query --cc kevin@scrye.com -s NEW,ASSIGNED  | wc -l
380

Dealt with 32 bugs. Not a bad afternoon I guess. 🙂 I hope the command line bugzilla use and triage helps others deal with bugs as well.

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Nest with Fedora

by on 2020/08/25 at 2:28 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

With everything going on in the world, sadly the normal “in person” Fedora conference, flock, had to be canceled. In it’s place a ‘all virtual’ conference was scheduled for Aug 7th through 9th: “nest with fedora”

Sadly the keynotes were all way too early for me to make it to live (4-5am my time is just too early), so I am going to catch those via recordings as soon as they are up. I did manage to make it to some sessions however.

First a quick note about the platform that was used: hopin.io. I’ve been to a number of virtual events of late, and most of them have not been that great. However, this time I was pleasantly surprised! hopin is actually pretty well done. There was a ‘reception’ area and a live chat for conference wide discussions, talks appeared a few minutes before their scheduled time to allow people to join and each talk had it’s own chat. Speakers could invite other people to join in the video chat part if they wanted. There was a conference wide ‘poll’ section with lots of silly polls in it for people to take. Mixed in the talks were some ‘hallway’ track places where everyone who joined could join via video. There was also a timed thing where you could get 5min with a random other person then it would switch everyone to the next person. Not as good as a real hallway track, but not bad given the constraints. Video and audio worked pretty well.

There was a number of nice talks I went to, as well as some fun ones (CPE put on a pub quiz and a bingo, both were great!).

Smooge and I gave a really quick talk about our recent Datacenter Move. I also thought the ‘meet your FESCo’ talk was interesting, there were some great questions.

All in all, not as good as a real conference, but a lot safer and easier and not too bad overall. 🙂 Many thanks to all the organizers!

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pinephone: initial thoughts

by on 2020/07/25 at 4:21 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

I ordered one of the ubports editions of the pine64 pinephone and after a small amount of playing around with it, I’d like to share my thoughts.

First a little background. I’m very big on open source for many many reasons. I use Fedora rawhide for my laptop day to day and in general try and use free software wherever else I can. My phone has been a annoyance to me for many years now. Being completely closed source, apple/i-phones are right out for me, which basically just leaves android. Now you might think “Thats great, android is open source”, but it’s really not. While the source is indeed available, development is done by google in secret and dumped into the open after release. This means you don’t get a lot of the advantages of open source for android. Other forks/projects do take that android source and clean it up and make it nice, but they too are at the mercy of upstream that may change things in a new release drastically, leaving them to try and catch up for months after a new release. I’ve been using /e/ on my trusty one plus 3t for the last 3-4 years. They are based off lineageos and ‘de-google’ things from there. I’ve never found myself very excited by it, they too are trapped by the android development all taking place elsewhere. I’ve looked at other possible software, but they all have their issues.

3 or so years ago, Librem announced they were going to make a phone that was as open as they could make it, with high end specs. As far as I know some few batches have been made/distributed, but it’s still not a realized product. As part of this push however, software was created that could run on most normal linux distributions that could handle phone specific workflows. See https://source.puri.sm/Librem5 for a long list.

Fast forward to late last year: The pine64 folks, who have made a number of aarch64 based products successfully announced the pine phone. They produced a prototype like developer version and then, early this year announced the ubports version (some $’s of each phone would go to the ubports folks), cost: $150. The ubports version sold out and they have now announced a postmarketos version, also with a usb-c “dock”, more memory and a circut board fix to allow usb-c to work right. cost: $200 with dock, or $150 without.

First lets talk about the hardware itself. It’s sturdy and well built. The specs are pretty low end, but thats smart (since it’s older hardware linux support is better) and not too bad considering the cost. The screen is actually pretty bright and looks nice. The back cover is a bit of a pain to take off, but I’d prefer it be that way to being too easy to remove. The phone uses a usb-c type connector for power/etc. As mentioned the ubports and braveheart (the developer release before ubports) have a pcb bug that prevents usb-c from working right. ;( There is a headphone jack, and front and rear cameras. Taking the cover off you can see: removable battery, sim and micro-sd slots and 6 “pogo” pins. These last are for future cover replacements that might have additional functions, like wireless charging or a larger battery or IR sensors. There’s also 6 dip switches allowing you to enable or disable various features. I’m not sure I would use these, but I guess it’s a nice feature for some folks. The ubports version has 2GB ram, the newer postmarketos one will have 3GB. There is 16GB internal eMMC. (32GB in postmarketos version). Bluetooth 4.0, wireless, and modem for LTE/3G/etc. You can get a serial console by switching the dip switch for the headphone jack ‘off’ and then it will do serial console. The speaker, mic, screen, wireless, bluetooth, modem, have all worked nicely for me under various software configs. Overall if the software were up to snuff, I think this would be a ok (if a bit slow) daily driver, but that brings us to software…

The pine phone has a Allwinner a64 cpu (aarch64). In theory any linux distribution that supports that cpu/arch would work. There is of course hardware specific to the pine phone that needs drivers or existing drivers that need tweaking to work with it. Due to that, most distributions are shipping a custom kernel with patches, etc. I sure hope with all the interest this stuff can get all upstreamed.

“Normal” desktops work, but they have drawbacks. For instance running Gnome on a Fedora install, many of the dialogs or windows appear too large to use and there’s no way to scroll around them. One help here is the librem software mentioned above. There’s a replacement for gnome-shell called ‘phosh‘ and a replacement for mutter called ‘phoc‘. They are more suited to small screens and have features like forcing everything to resize to screen, etc. There’s also phone and messaging apps of various stages and types. It’s really nice to be able to ‘dnf install’ something from rawhide, all that software ready to use. 🙂

The pine phone will try and boot from the micro-sd card first, then the eMMC, this allows you to pretty easily try other distros out without really committing to them. 🙂 Of course the eMMC is faster, and if you like you can overwrite it with a tool called jumpdrive. Just boot a micro-sd with jumpdrive, connect your laptop via usb and it will let you flash the eMMC.

Here’s a smattering of the ones I have looked at:

  • The phone shipped with ubuntu touch on the eMMC.
  • The first one I flashed to a micro-sd was of course Fedora! (more below)
  • Mobian (debian for mobile)
  • postmarketos (I actually couldn’t get this to boot for some reason)
  • Arch
  • Manjaro
  • Probibly others I have now forgotten…

There’s some places some do better than others, but mostly they seem all at the same place: some things working, others not yet and pretty rapid changes.

The Fedora (unofficial) image is linked off the pinephone fedora wiki page, I did a few local tweaks here after setting up a micro-sd card with it. The image uses lightdm, but that makes gnome or phosh use X11 instead of Wayland, so I switched back to gdm and set it to autologin as the pine user and use phosh. For some reason you have to run ‘pineaudio’ from the command line once before the phone speaker will work right. I think it’s just in the wrong mode by default. dnf works fine. gnome-software works fine to install things.

In order for me to use a pine phone as my daily phone I need at least these things (your list might be completely different):

  • Phone calls (this in general works, even bluetooth headsets seem fine)
  • SMS and MMS (sms works, mms doesn’t)
  • ebook reading (works fine, number of apps to choose from)
  • RSS feed reading from my tt-rss setup. (Newsflash works nicely!)
  • picture taking/upload (Some folks claim to have working camera, but I have yet to see it with any of the images I have looked at).
  • Battery life a least a day (This is claimed now depending on what you do of course, see more below).
  • maps/gps for when I travel (pretty rare these days). Gnome maps works surprisingly well here.
  • Twitter (I should stop doomscrolling… but cawbird has a bug to be better on mobile sized screens).
  • Light web browsing (check something, settle bet in bar, look up some info). Firefox is a bit sluggish, but it works.
  • OTP app ( There has to be one right? right? I guess OTPClient if someone wants to package it for Fedora)
  • Music playing (usually in car over bluetooth to the car speakers)
  • Alarm clock (I think this should be doable, but not sure there’s a good linux app to manage it)
  • Podcasts (also usually while traveling which… yeah. gPodder seems to work fine though)
  • Weather (lots of options here, too bad about darksky tho)
  • Very rare email checking (I would think most any email app would work here)
  • IRC (oddly, hexchat has horrible problems resizing and input in dialogs is all messed up, I am not sure why. If nothing else, irssi would work fine in a tmux)
  • Encryption support. The only distro I tried that had mention of this so far as postmarketos. It supposedly has a installer than can encrypt. Of course there’s workarounds here too. Could boot/use the eMMC for the os and encrypt a micro-sd for data. Then in the event of theft, at least the data could be safe.

Then current blockers for me are: MMS, camera working, OTP app, possibly battery life and possibly encrypted storage.

MMS needs development work. The librem folks asked ModemManager to implement it, but they feel it should be a seperate app that interfaces with MM. Hopefully this will move forward. In the US at least, lots of things are MMS (anytime it’s more than 1 person, anytime it’s over a size limit, etc)

The camera is clamed working, but It obviously needs more work. Cheese can’t get anything from it. Also it would be very nice if we had something like opencamera for linux. It has tons of adjustments and ability.

For OTP apps I did find OTPClient. Looks like it might fit the bill, but it’s not in Fedora yet. Any packages want to take it on? 🙂 If not, I might when I get some time.

I haven’t really run the phone with a sim in it and using it off power so battery life is a bit of a question. On the plus side however, folks have gotten crust ported to it. As I understand it, this is software that runs in a secondary CPU that can handle power management outside the main OS/cpu. So, it can suspend on idle, power things off that aren’t being used, etc. With this folks are claiming 100+ hours of complete standby and less of course with modem active. Suspend/resume does seem to work fine on most all of the distros I tried.

So, I am encouraged. I went ahead and ordered one of the postmarket os ones too, since I don’t think I am up to the soldering fix for the usb-c and another GB memory is likely to be nice. I really hope over the next months we see things get upstreamed to the linux kernel, things like MMS and camera get sorted out, and always performance and battery life could be improved. Once the kernel stuff is mostly worked out, I wonder if there is interest/desire to make a official image for the phone? With that we could curate a selection of apps we know works and get things setup right and additionally down the road ship a version based on a stable release instead of rawhide. 😉 It will be a lovely day I can run Fedora on my phone day to day.

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The dell xps 13 9300 (2020 edition) hyper-detailed Fedora linux review

by on 2020/04/24 at 6:06 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

First a bit of background before we get into reviewing. I’ve used a laptop as my primary computer for 20+ years, and since I do things on-line most of my waking life, this means I spend a lot of time in front of my laptop typing or reading away. So, it’s pretty important to me that my laptop works well, is nice to use and is under support in case anything happens.

For the last 3.5 years or so, my laptop has been a Lenovo Yoga 920. It’s been a great laptop and I have enjoyed using it. Unfortunately, it’s support is going to be up in a few months and I really don’t like my primary laptop to be out of support. In the last 3.5 years, Lenovo has: replaced the LCD panel when it fell off a table and broke, Replaced the motherboard when a sound connector became loose, replaced the keyboard when it became mushy, and most recently replaced the battery because it started to swell up. So, warentee is pretty important to me.

I was starting to worry that none of the current crop of laptops would really be any better than my 3.5+ year old yoga 920, but dell managed to announce their xps 13 9300 and it had some better stats, so I decided I would jump to it and see how things went. One kind of anoying thing was that dell announced the new laptop in January, but the model with the good specs I wanted wasn’t available to order until April, and the “developer” edition still isn’t available with the high end specs (I got the normal windows one).

On to specs. My old yoga 920:

  • 16GB memory
  • 512GB nvme ‘disk’
  • 13.9″ 3840×2160 display
  • ~3lbs
  • 2 usb-c ports, 1 usb-2 port
  • intel i7 8th gen cpu (8 “threads”)
  • intel UHD graphics

The new dell xps 13 9300:

  • 32GB memory
  • 2TB nvme ‘disk’
  • 13.3″ 3840×2400 display
  • ~2.8 lbs
  • 2 usb-c ports
  • intel i7 10th gen cpu (8 “threads”)
  • intel Iris plus graphics

So, you can see, the specs are all a little bit better (except for number of usb ports). Ordering on dells site was fine, and it took almost exactly 2 weeks from order to arrival, which isn’t too bad overall. Unboxing was fine. I don’t really understand why people spend a lot of time talking about that, you only do it once. 🙂

In order to install linux, you have to go into the firmware (power on and hit f2) and set the disk interface to AHCI from intel raid. Doing so will of course make windows unbootable, but in my case I had no reason to keep windows around so I just wiped it out. If you need to preserve windows, you may want to look at how to boot it in safe mode so it can boot with AHCI or come up with some other solution. I switched that and then booted the latest Fedora 32 RC that I had already laying around. Wiping windows and installing went fine with no issues. After booting up on the install, I then upgraded to to rawhide with ‘dnf -y install fedora-repos-rawhide; dnf -y –releasever 33 –disablerepo=\* –enablerepo=rawhide distro-sync’. No problems with that either and a quick reboot later I was on rawhide. A check in gnome-software and I see a firmware update ready to go. Applied and the laptop rebooted, updated firmware and rebooted back to rawhide. Everything went very smoothly and the upgrade lookd great (progress bar, explained what it was doing, etc). Next was a copy of /home from my old laptop and then I could switch over to using the new dell day to day.

Here’s that disk pref in the firmware
The system specs screen. There’s lots of crazy firmware options

I’ve only run into 3 linux related issues so far, and one of those is now solved:

  • Doing a shutdown/power off doesn’t fully work. systemd gets everything shut down and the screen goes blank, but you can see it’s still on and the fans usually come on. This is being tracked in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1825298
  • I wasn’t able to get bluetooth headsets ‘headset’ profile to work. I have 3 bluetooth headsets here and they were all doing it. a2dp worked fine, but ‘headset’ would appear to switch the profile, but no sound would come out or input. I looked around on this one for a while until I noticed:

Apr 20 05:45:20 mandor.scrye.com kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Found Intel DDC parameters: intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc
Apr 20 05:45:20 mandor.scrye.com kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to send Intel_Write_DDC (-22)

Turns out it was a firmware file issue, a check upstream found a commit that fixed it: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc?id=677930a7d7422930df71adace36f17e996658f45https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc?id=677930a7d7422930df71adace36f17e996658f45

Copying that ddc file in and all my headsets started working in headset mode. 🙂 The Fedora linux-firmware package has an update with that fix in it now in rawhide/testing for stable branches.

  • Finally there’s a fingerprint reader on the power button, but there’s no linux driver (yet). Dell has promised that there would be something later this year (I guess they are leaning on the vendor). I sure hope it’s upstreamed / usable on Fedora and not just some binary only Ubuntu driver/application. 🙁
yoga 920 on left, dell xps 13 9300 on right

So, overall so far I am pretty happy with it. In the happy list:

  • The screen is lovely! Its smaller than the one in the yoga and higher resolution. I find myself switching between 150% and 175% in gnome scaling, it’s a bit easier when my eyes are tired at the lower resolution, but it’s really nice to have more things on screen at the higher.
  • Firmware updates with no windows! fwupd is awesome. I had to keep a windows install on my yoga for firmware updates. It’s really nice to not have to do that now.
  • The keyboard is pretty large and easy to type on. It might take a small adjustment time to get used to, but it’s not a bad keyboard at all. It’s actually a bit bigger than the yoga one since it goes almost from edge to edge.
  • It’s fast! Things are quite zippy with the 10th gen cpu and better intel graphics.
  • The wireless seems quite nice and fast. The yoga came with a really crappy atheros wireless card that I had to replace with an intel. This dell just has a good card out of the box. It’s a “Killer(R) Wi-Fi 6 AX1650i 160MHz Wireless Network Adapter (201NGW)”
  • Battery life seems ok. I ran it for about 3-4 hours on battery doing normal stuff (ssh sessions, reading news feeds, irc, etc) and it dropped down about 1/2, so 6-8 hours actually doing work seems not too bad considering the 4k display. The estimates did jump around a lot while I was using it, so I took the ‘real world’ measurement to mean more than whatever estimates it came up with.
  • There is a micro-sd card reader on the left side. It seems to work just fine out of the box. I am not sure what I would use it for normally, but I suppose its a little bit of extra storage and perhaps some use making cards to boot arm devices or something.
The stock dell charger seems to let it charge at 20V / ~0.5A (at least when it’s mostly full)
You can see the microsd card sitting right down from the usb-c connection.

Advantage yoga (or at least things that seem better in yoga land):

  • The dell xps 13 is a regular laptop, not a 2-in-1/convertable like my yoga was. To be fair however, I almost never used this on the yoga. It’s gigantic and unwieldy as a tablet. I did from time to time tilt the screen way back, which perhaps I will miss a little. I do wish the xps did tilt back more than 45 degrees or so.
  • Also related to 2-in-1 vs regular, the yoga had sensors so it could rotate the display if you rotated the laptop. The xps doesn’t have those. You can however do it manually, and I didn’t really rotate the yoga much anyhow, so no big loss there.
  • The “home” and “end” keys are on f11/f12 on the dell. This is going to take some getting used to, as the yoga sanely had them on the right and left arrow keys. This made sense to me since the up and down arrows are up and down a page. Perhaps I can remap those.
  • There doesn’t seem to be any way to monitor the fans. They aren’t too anoying, but sometimes I wonder if they are on or not and it’s hard to tell.
The xps 13 9300 on top of the yoga 920. It’s about 1.5″ smaller in either direction.

Misc things:

  • There’s a nice light at the front of the laptop where you open it to indicate when it’s charging. It also can blink to show various hardware faults (no idea what that looks like yet, thank goodness). The light goes completely off when it’s fully charged, white when it’s charging and battery level is about 5% and amber if the battery is down to 5%.
  • I don’t have any thunderbolt-3 devices, but 2 usb-c docks I have seem to work fine (ethernet, various display adapters, usb, etc).
  • The intel “i7 10th gen” sticker is easy to remove. 🙂 Does anyone who uses their laptop at all keep those around?

Finally there’s a few minor ways dell could improve things (IMHO):

  • home and end should be on the Fn right/left arrows. 🙂
  • more usb-c/thunderbolt 3 ports. Even one more would have been nice.
  • A way to get fan speeds would be nice.
  • A brightness level even lower than the minimum one they offer would be nice. (For dark rooms, etc)

So, to sum up: I hope this will be a nice, reliable laptop for me to run for the next 3-4 years. 🙂

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