General Questions • Overall sluggishness on Dell Precision 3490.

Hello everyone! I tried my luck on IRC #debian this morning, I'm posting this here too just in case...

My company gave me a brand new PC (Dell Precision 3490) to replace my older 2017 machine and I have a hard time making Debian work correctly on it.

Here is the situation:

• The PC came with stock Ubuntu.

• Last week I tried to install Debian 12.6, and no wifi drivers could be found. Also, general performance was disapointing for such a powerful machine (I use i3/XFCE).

• Here is what I did about the wifi drivers viewtopic.php?p=804345#p804345.

• TLDR: tried the 6.9 kernel from backports, wifi drivers errors changed, realized the new files asked where not available in stable or backports but in debian trixie, updated to trixie => wifi OK

• but I still had the performance issue (1 second to start Thunar, slow and stuttery scroll performance on web pages even static html ones, lid temperature and fan noise going wild).

• I was using Nouveau driver (laptop has an NVidia card), I tried the proprietary driver too.

• no errors in `dmesg`

• nothing special in the `~/.xsession-errors` file (had some va-api errors, but have the same errors on my 2017 Dell Precision, without visible issues)

• I tried Fedora XFCE live iso and Linux Mint XFCE live iso (without NVidia proprietary driver), worked flawlessly.

• ended up installing Linux Mint because I had to stop losing time and get back to work eventually xD.

• tried again with the Debian 12.6 XFCE live iso (without installing), the performance drop in comparison with the other live isos is quite unsettling...

• just tried an install again (on bookworm), to check the current non-free-firmare packages installed: firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-misc-nonfree, firmware-sof-signed, intel-microcode

Do you have troobleshooting tips for this? Should I simply consider my laptop is not supported?

Statistics: Posted by fu7zed — 2024-08-02 13:25 — Replies 1 — Views 36

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