HCL - Dell Inspiron 7577 Laptop "New Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming"

[Joe Thielen]

Intel i7-7700HQ 2.8Ghz quad-core.  16GB RAM.  256GB SSD.  1TB HD. 

Qubes 4.0-RC4 runs great.  Install was just a bit tricky.  Mouse/trackpad did not work during install (worked fine after reboot), had to use keyboard navigation.  Also used legacy mode in BIOS to get installed.

I had installed Qubes 4.0-RC3 first (before RC4 was out).  I seem to remember going the UEFI boot route on that and it worked, but when doing RC4 I either didn't do the same thing or just went with legacy mode and it worked so I left it at that.

My machine has a 256GB SSD and a 1TB HD.  When I installed RC3 first I let it use both drives during install.  However, while it ran OK, it was not super speedy, and I could hear the 1TB HD when in use.  Not loud or anything, but I was aware of it.  And some operations seemed to take more time than I would have liked.  However, when I installed 4.0-RC4 I only specified the 256GB SSD, and that really made a positive difference, especially during boot time.  Very snappy now.  I have not yet tried to get the 1TB partitioned and going for storage.
 

Wi-fi & ethernet work no problems, out-of-the-box.

I'm not able to use dual-screens via the HDMI just yet.  On 4.0-RC3 it didn't recognize it at all (xrandr shows HDMI but shows "disconnected").  4.0-RC4 does recognize it, and I was able to get screen mirroring to work, but not extended desktop just yet.  At one point I was able to get the mouse pointer to seamlessly move from screen to screen, but the display identifier function did not work, nor would anything but the mouse pointer show up on the screen.    So there is some hope here I'm thinking with further tweaking.

When I loaded 4.0-RC3 I spent a bit of time playing with the nvidia drivers (as explained in several articles).  I was able to get them compiled and installed (very painful), but then the machine could not be used, ended up having to blacklist both the nvidia and nouveau drivers.  That brought it back to life.  With 4.0-RC4 I have not yet tried to mess with any of this.

Bootup takes about 90 seconds from the time I push the button to the time I can use it fully.   This includes pushing the power button, entering a BIOS user password, disk encryption password, and Qubes login password.  The USB keyboard/mouse connect almost instantly after that (within the 90 seconds).

I was able to create and run a Centos 7.4 HVM with no issues.

I've had the one HVM, two F26 PVH AppVMs running simultaneously (plus sys-usb, sys-net, & sys-firewall) with no issues.  Both running Firefox (multiple tabs), GIMP, Libreoffice, and terminal simultaneously.

I only tested sleep mode once (closed the lid).  While it did go to sleep, and was able to wake up, ethernet and attached USB keyboard/mouse never came back.  I unplugged ethernet and re-attached and still no-go.  Same with mouse/keyboard... even physically unplugged and plugged back in, did not come back.  I did not pursue it further as I don't use that function very often.  But if sleep/suspend is important to you, you may have to do some tweaking, unless you don't use wired ethernet and USB devices.  Wifi did come back by itself however.  Sound too.

All in all a very snappy machine so far.