Zorin OS 15 ships with bad DELL drivers

Installed Zorin OS 15 Core on a DELL Latitude E7240.

Certains keys on the keyboard would randomly "lock up" and "stick" - so, I would press backspace, for example, and it would just hold backslash and keep deleting everything.

This is not a hardware issue - this computer worked fine with Win 10.

I was able to solve the issue after reading the descriptions in this answer:

https://askubuntu.com/a/995948

This answer describes how to blacklist a `peaq_wmi` driver - so I took a guess and disabled the `dell_wmi` driver on my system, and it fixed the problem.

Supposedly this was a problem with some version of the 4.x kernel - and from what it says, the issue was resolved in a later 4.x release, but the 5.x kernel seems to suffer from the same issue.

I would merely suggest not to ship Zorin OS with the defective (or incompatible?) DELL driver, so that other DELL users won't need to have a similar bad experience with the OS. Does that make sense?

Frankly, I don't understand much of it. I'm fairly new to Linux and just trying to be a good citizen and save somebody else from the same grief.

I hope this is the right place to report the issue?

Thanks.

Hi mindplay, and welcome to the forum.
Firstly, whilst Dell do provide notebooks with Ubuntu, generally they are made for that other OS. You recognised a bug in the kernel - the linux kernel is maintained by Linus Torvalds so the buck stops with him, not Zorin.

Essentially, all distros that ship with that Kernel will have that bug,. eh?

Great catch, Mindplay and thanks for providing the solution. I am curious about what alternative driver is used with that driver disabled.

Sadly, I only thought this fixed the issue, but it occurred again later in the day. (and not after rebooting - and I did add it to the modprobe blacklist and confirmed that it wasn't loading after a reboot, so, no dice.)

Now I've upgraded the firmware of the machine. I dunno, maybe that does something?

I really, really like what I've seen so far of Zorin - and I can't say that for any other Linux I've tried. So I guess I'll keep trying.

But I understand from talking to other Linux users around the office that deliberately purchasing specific hardware known to work with Linux is usually the safer bet. Is that really still the case for Linux generally today?

It certainly is - download the Unofficial Manual I wrote for Zorin 15 listing all the hardware suppliers worldwide (to the best of my knowledge that is).

Another potential issue re Dell drivers... I'm using Zorin OS 15.2 on Dell Latitude E7440.
My issue is with trackpad. Roaming around the screen is fine, it's when fine control is needed to click a button or grab a bar - the pointer starts jittering and jumping about. Very frustrating.
Again, not just Zorin- experienced the same on several other gnome based distros but I really like Zorin so will be sticking with it for a while at least.
NB attaching a mouse resolve the issue so I can work with that, but the trackpad would be nice.