I bought an XPS13 in 2012 or so with Ubuntu preinstalled and it was rock solid for years (although I ran Fedora on it).
I remember buying it was really difficult, it wasn't listed on the UK website and in the end I had to phone their sales number and was passed through several people who'd never heard of Ubuntu.
A few days later I received an email with a link to an unlisted store item that had the same photos as the equivalent Windows model, but it was about £30 cheaper.
Snook is an apt word for my experience, hope it's improved.
Dell is definitely weird about this; I had the same experience. Perfectly satisfied with my laptop (an XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it bought a few years ago), but Dell's online store is just bonkers.
I see nothing weird here, Microsoft has been punishing OEM manufacturers for bundling Linux (or, more precisely, for not bundling a MS system on the computers they are selling) since at least 1983.[0]
I suspect this happened because when DELL first launched laptops with Linux, it gave them some surprising bad press. Certainly the most famous being the woman who apparently was dropping out of college as a result of accidentally ordering a Ubuntu DELL laptop.
This probably seems like a weird one-off, but this story went pretty viral, of course it went viral on the internet for other reasons, but I'm sure the blame being placed squarely on DELL probably did lead to them being a bit spooked about consumer confusion.
The fact that nobody at DELL or elsewhere could just tell her that she can in fact, pretty easily install Windows on the machine is... well, a little frustrating to say the least. The college's IT department was aware enough of Linux to be able to say they can handle it, but not enough to say "Y'know, just for what it's worth... You can just buy and install Windows."
I have no evidence for this but you can imagine someone at Microsoft saying "Dell has started selling laptops without Windows! We need to run an 'information campaign' to tell people why they should not use Ubuntu! Let's cough 'find' a college student who lost everything because of this operating system and then feed it to a local news channel."
I can't say if this happened, but the whole story sounds like a dark PR campaign to spread fear about Dell's choice and try to take some steam out of their rollout. Microsoft obviously had a lot of money on the line if Dell found success with Ubuntu.
Yep, gotta have windows so you can have access to WSL so you can use all of those unix-only tools that academia has been amassing for the last 60 years. Anything else would be too complex.
I also bought an XPS13 around 2012, and paid for the Ubuntu version. The receipt even said Ubuntu on it. But they shipped me the Windows one! Returned and refunded based on their phone support, they said installing Linux on it would void the warranty. Never tried again, too much hassle.
In theory, laptops from Dell should work with Linux.
In practice, not so much, especially if you like to sleep and wake up from sleep everytime without a crash + a reasonable power consumption, both during use and during sleep.
IMHO consumption during sleep far more important: if I didn't plug the computer, I expect it to wake up immediately (no S4/suspend to disk) and with less than 0.5% of battery lost per hour (so for 10h of sleep and 80% battery before sleep, at least 75% battery left), if I put it in a bag, I expect it to stay asleep and not be a fire hazard: dells run hot when closed and in a bag, to the point of battery exhaustion or thermal shutdown)
I prefer Lenovo for everything, especially the keyboard but also ECC ram, OLED displays ... things almost impossible to find anywhere else!
I've been moving to a eink tablet but I purchased a Lenovo wireless keyboard: every key being in the exact same position on all my hardware has sizeable benefits in comfort.
Also, I want PageUp and PageDown around the Up key, something impossible to find outside of Lenovo.
Bigme (10 inch color eink) but the Boox are also great if you like color eink. It's a matter of preferences: I got both, kept the Bigme and gifted the Boox.
I was asked about my setup a few days ago. I'm preparing a tutorial to help with rooting, removing unwanted apps etc.
> never been able to reliably wake from sleep. Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Windows 11- it doesn’t matter.
Same, with other Dells. There was one where I analyzed the BIOS ACPI tables and concluded it was impossible to wake from sleep on any OS, due to bugs I've found: I can't find my old post, but https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/kolf5f/patching_the_d... is a good summary.
I also remember someone doing deeping ACPI table modifications to limit the power draw on the Xeon Laptops. I can't find the link right now, but IIRC it was related to the PCH powergating.
These issues plague the whole line. For another analysis (and confirmation), this time on how deep C states (very important for temperature and for sleep) can only be reached one after boot, see https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/precision-mo...
Lenovo laptops tend to be best bang for buck but ime poor build quality and support. I've sent each of the three I've owned in for warranty repair at some point. It took at least a month for all of them and two of them still died a month or two later from repair-related issues (eg glue around new lcd housing was too weak and it eventually warped / cracked).
I run two XPS 15s (2015ish 9550 workhorse / main computer, 2022ish 9250) and haven't had the slightest issue with either, although I keep the on board Nvidia disabled on both, which might explain the "reasonable power consumption" bit.
Hardware on the other hand, these things are like caring for an anorexic bubble baby with severe bone density issues. The hardware is a piece of shit, but also extremely easy to repair. Burned through at least 3 keyboards on the 2015, at least 4 pairs of speakers (new set sitting in a parcel in the room right now), 1 motherboard (mechanical stress snapped the heatsink), 2 power plugs, replacement top case because of screen latch stress snapping some tiny piece of plastic, probably more I've forgotten. Separately, the mic seems to be installed literally inside the fans, they made the screen bezel so thin on the 2022 model that they couldn't even include a web cam competitive with the 1998 Game Boy camera, it's embarrassing to videoconf from it
These old ones still had a proper S3 sleep support. The new Dells are on the "modern standby" crap pushed by Microsoft and deep sleep doesn't work on any OS. Somehow we managed to regress, it's no longer safe to just close your laptop and put it to your backpack. (few times I did that with my Precision 5550, it got so hot I was afraid the battery will explode)
The T490 is the worst ThinkPad generation to buy right now. The generation they took out the removable battery, soldered half the RAM and generally made some other anti-improvements. So you get the oldest hardware without any of the pre-redesign benefits.
I guess the T495 is worse. Those first gen Zen chips are just terrible.
Really liking my refurb t480 with Ubuntu, however the most annoying thing is that it’s seemingly impossible to get the 2 finger swipe back trackpad gesture working. Otherwise it’s been great.
Have fixed multiple hundreds of laptops over about a decade across hundreds of clients. I've literally seen one ThinkPad the whole time. It had some weird ass 1.8 inch storage drive down one of the side rails of the chassis which is why I remembered it. The machine was wack af from a repair techs pov.
Makes me feel like they aren't that popular outside of IT departments.
You'd still expect to see them in the offices. Some of these places run > 10'000 devices. All dell. Not a Lenovo on site. Maybe dell just had a better salesman up this neck of the woods. I was a Lenovo and Dell tech at the time so it's not like I wasn't sent to work on them. Just bugger all of them around here. I was the only warranty tech for like 250km.
In my last 6 years I worked on a company with 200 employees, a company with 60.000 employees, another company with 500 employees, and the last one with 150 employees.
All laptops are either Lenovo or Macbooks.
Like you said, maybe in your part of the world Dell is more popular for some reason.
Well, he didn't say recent Lenovos were poor quality. He said they went downhill after Lenovo, which was 18 years ago.
So what quality issues affect them now specifically? I will be in the market for another laptop in a year or so, and my default would always be a ThinkPad.
Aside from Dell, ThinkPad, Framework, and StarLabs are great premium laptops that can be bought with Linux and have good well-supported hardware. What is the best premium option?
I gravitate towards a AMD Ryzen ThinkPad, either a X13 or a T14s. X1C are only offered with Intel CPUs, which seem a bit inferior in terms of performance and heat / energy usage.
Macs with Asahi are an interesting option, but it is still missing support for fundamental items, e.g. sound.
Just talked with a Sales person yesterday. Indeed, from the new models, only the XPS 13 runs Ubuntu, but the keyboard looks like a nightmare. The sales person did send a link to a Precision with Ubuntu option, but it was 2022 model (Precision 5570).
Will probably get XPS 15 and put Ubuntu on myself. Annoying to fork money over to Microsoft for nothing.
Be careful, and do your research when buying Windows XPS's. I had to send my last one (2019 I think) back because the fingerprint readers weren't supported and the Developer editions with Linux just omitted the fingerprint reader. No interest from Dell to get drivers made for them.
I have no idea if there are bits on the 2023 Windows edition that aren't supported. It might all be fine.
- first salesperson said: "We are anticipating the Newer XPS 15 laptops to be launched by Dec last week or by Mid Jan that comes with 14th Gen Processors and preinstalled Ubuntu OS on them".
- Second salesperson said they don't have an ETA yet.
- Third salesperson said "The product development is working on these 2 models, we are soon expecting them to launch in next 3 to 4 weeks [Nov 13-20] but the exact date of launch has not be shared with us ... the Precision models will have these options [Ubuntu] ... the XPS 15 will not have the Ubuntu options".
- Fourth salesperson said "by early 2025".
- Fifth salesperson said "we don't have a date"
- Sixth salesperson said "we dont have eccurate date, you may see it XPS laptop with 14th gen chip in the end of December ... and it may not come with unibuntu option ... You will see Precision laptops with Ubuntu option"
Oh and they do have a Precision from 2023 pre-installed with Ubuntu[1], somehow wasn't visible before.
Dell sales and support is pretty, so have to ask multiple times.
It seems like these days, the X1 series is considered the ThinkPad flagship. That's where I've seen the best chances of getting hardware that's compatible with Linux OOTB and performs well with it (e.g. Intel WiFi/BT).
For components to work OOTB with Linux yes, but perform well is a different story. There's plenty of parts that technically work with Linux but in practice have sub-par performance and it's easy to wind up with them if one isn't careful.
Honestly, these days, I would be surprised to not have Linux hardware support with any PC I might buy.
At least, in my experience with the 3 brand new computers I got (T460s in 2016, T14s in 2021, Custom Desktop (Ryzen 5, ATI 7900 XT)), everything worked out of the box.
It's been ages since I had a real issue (like the dreaded Broadcom wifi cards back in the days).
When I first starting using Ubuntu 10+ years ago, getting a new laptop was like going to battle. My patience has gone down for this stuff as I've gotten older, but fortunately it's gotten commensurately easier every year.
I have the Gen 9 X1 Carbon running Ubuntu. It has been my daily driver for years without any issues. Whether it is developer focussed can probably be discussed, but it has to be considered high-end.
Same here. Linux was $100 cheaper. Which makes me wonder ... why is an OEM Windows license still ~$100? And not only that, you'd think Dell could negotiate a lower rate.
… I do wish people could just use some round price tags like $1,400 so that I could easily price what the various features are. Nothing says "we value the customer" (/s) like a 0.08% discount and a website that won't tell me straight-forwardly what the cost of the components is.
ThinkPads, at least in EU, offer the option of no OS or Linux. And the discount is €60 if you opt out of any OS and €30 if you choose Fedora or Ubuntu instead of Windows Home.
With a little subsidy, Dell's pricing you report doesn't seem too far off.
3 days ago my system76 oryx pro 4k 2023 just died dead.
i had 2022 dell xps with 17 4k touch screen. i thought, okey, will plug encrypted nvme system disk. i was doubt it will boot at all, not speaking about sound, wifi and touch.
but magically, after reboot, some firmwares installed. it all worked perfectly. sound, voice, touch, sleep, keyboard, camera.
I’ve been rocking a Latitude 7370 for around 5 years now. Picked it up used in 2018 for $475. It has been a great machine. Works great under Fedora. 3200x1800 touch screen, 16GB ram. Swapped the m.2 SATA SSD for an NVMe drive. It’s not a super powerful machine, and the battery life could be better, but overall I really like it.
Same on a 7490. My favourite thing about it is that I was able to cheaply upgrade it to 64G memory! Plus it's fairly sturdy and cheap to replace if it ever does die on me. Very happy with it.
I have had a couple of minor Linux specific (I assume) issues, but nothing too hard to resolve.
The camera doesn't work on the current XPS13 if you upgrade to a 6.X kernel (which, to be fair, means moving outside of Dell's packaging.) Technically this is Intel's fault, as they haven't released firmware for it yet. Still, hopefully the Dell team avoid similar issues in future configs by ensuring better driver support.
Whichever distro you use, there will be a selection of kernels to choose from. Even Arch has an elderly LTS option. Gentoo obviously offers all kernels since 0.97 (dig out egcs) including several that haven't been released and a couple that will never exist outside of a parallel reality!
I've owned several Inspirons and have no issues but then I use Arch (actually). Have a look into what kernels are on offer and consider a different one. However you may have another issue because I seem to recall that cams are now all basically standards based.
Try grabbing a couple of live "CDs" of other distros and boot them. See if your camera works. Try something like OpenSuSE "tumbleweed".
The switch from one mutex back in the day broke so many drivers... we had one expensive pci card that was niche enough and old enough no one would be fixing it, but they had provided the source for the module and it wasn't that bad a fix.
Honestly I'm shocked Intel has been this dodgy for this long. I feel like overall Intel today huegly gets it. They have enormous dedication to getting drivers out there & making systems work well, in a way very few companies compare against. But they are hit or miss across different divisions. I'm not sure what the IPU6 folks see as their path to getting upstreamed, or whether they intend to keep just floating along out of kernel for a bit.
It does look like there is support for pretty modern kernels out-of-tree, & there is a repo with binary firmware, so I wouldn't be shocked to hear that XPS13s and most IPU6 systems work pretty ok.
Yeah, I think it’s best to keep them on the installed Ubuntu LTS and not upgrade, if you want the seamless OEM experience.
Granted, I’ve still had some random issues with mine, even on the stock version. (The wifi card is glitchy and I have to systemctl restart NetworkManager sometimes, apparently this is a known hardware/firmware issue).
This is a bit surprising for a Linux-oriented range such as XPS. I haven't had any broken devices due to an update in more than a decade, despite always using the latest kernel.
But I try to avoid buying any machines that require drivers that have not been mainlined or are a bit unstable. In 2011, I got burnt by the infamous b43 Broadcom card / driver which, while supported, had disastrous performance. So never again.
Aside, with NixOS, you can lock a particular kernel ABI or rollback if your update breaks. Aside, mainstream distros usually provide LTS kernels.
Nah, it is the usual Year of Desktop Linux experience.
My Asus netbook was also sold with Linux (remember those days?), and if I want to have stable hardware video acceleration and OpenGL 4.1 support, I would have to keep using the original Ubuntu version that came with it in 2009.
Because the AMD open source drivers downgraded the GL suppport to OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video acceleration is yet to work as smoothly as it used to.
> Nah, it is the usual Year of Desktop Linux experience.
Which OS allows you to upgrade a major version and never break drivers? I guess Darwin does okay if you stay on the narrow happy path of first party hardware, but even then it's not exactly a feat of software engineering.
It’s also sad that this is basically the only Linux-preinstalled and supported hardware from a mainstream company. When I have a choice it’s between one of these or MacBook Air and I’d choose the Mac at this point and forgo Linux
They do however support Linux, and have the best upstreaming support that I've seen getting fingerprint readers, webcams, etc all with working kernel drivers.
Huh. I wondered why there was an extra 20 second boot time after last restarting my XPS 13 for updates. Wonder if that has anything to do with it.
[ 39.112819] Freezing user space processes
[ 43.053644] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.00 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:5682)
[ 48.173464] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 2 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 53.293290] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 3 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 58.413471] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 6 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 59.114437] Freezing user space processes failed after 20.001 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0):
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Dell is high end hardware. The specs may be good, but it’s cheaply manufactured and frequently fails. And if you’re not a business customer, support is terrible.
Got an XPS 13" with Linux pre-installed on it like 5 years ago. I put in a bigger HD and it ran for quite a while. It started showing it's age. I didn't upgrade to another one. I mean, it wasn't bad and it did what I wanted, but I was ready for a change.
Not a high end device (Dell Vostro 15 3515), but it comes with preinstalled Ubuntu as well. It has some serious problems with wireless (10ec:c821). The default driver frequently loses connection on some wifi networks (it has issue with many networks though surprisingly not all of them). Sometimes reloading the driver helps, sometimes it just hangs my system. https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw88 seems to work a bit better though still has the same problem sometimes. It turns out that rfkill block wlan && sleep 3 && rfkill unblock wlan works better than reloading the driver. At least this way I haven't hanged my system yet. And wifi does not seem to be able to work at the same time as bluetooth.
I am considering doing that. I also considered replacing the wireless card though I was unable to find reliable information if the BIOS has some kind of whitelist that would prevent me from doing that.
Lenovo definitely has blocklists for its laptop upgrades (otherwise I’d have repurposed the empty WWAN slot on my X1 Nano for a second SSD), but I’ve not heard of Dell doing the same. At the very least my old 2008 Dell laptop has no hint of anything like that.
I got a recent Precision at work, and it's OK re: Linux support. Even with an up-to-date Fedora install, the fingerprint reader and official Dell peripherals have given me some trouble. The support is good but not worth touting IMO.
But, it's better than it was! I had a highish-end XPS 13 from '18 that refused to ever sleep with the lid shut, despite my best efforts.
If Dell wants to get serious about this stuff, they need to test and fix all of these issues before they release a laptop.
Been using XPS 13s since it was called XPS m1330. Linux has been fine on all of them, but the latest XPS 13 Plus with 13th gen i7 and FHD screen has terrible battery life. Only getting ~4,5 hours battery life coding in Intellij or browsing with under 50 % screen brightness... I have XPS 13s that are nearly 10 years old with 2x the battery life...
I have an XPS 13 running the Dell-installed version of Ubuntu. There was jankiness with my Dell docking station (I still had to mess around with DisplayLink drivers by hand) and early screen-sharing problems (which I blame on Wayland, but have been resolved.) Otherwise, it's been pretty rock-solid for me. Camera, network, sound, etc. all work as expected now.
Is it for everyone? No. Even with explicit support by Dell on their hardware, it is not seamless, as my two anecdotes above illustrate. The time you waste on tinkering isn't going to make up for the extra money you pay to Apple or Microsoft.
But I just couldn't take any more telemetry and ads, and I think it is only going to get worse from here on out.
Writing this from a Dell XPS 9343 from 2015 running Fedora. It still works, still does what I need it to do. Only real downside is that the battery life is about 4 hours, but I've basically had it in permanently docked desktop replacement mode for 11/12 months of the year, so, not really an issue.
Honestly, my biggest concern is that I only reboot it about once a month to do updates, so, I do worry that, like an old server that has been kept on for 10+ years, it will be one of those reboots that finally kills it.
116 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI remember buying it was really difficult, it wasn't listed on the UK website and in the end I had to phone their sales number and was passed through several people who'd never heard of Ubuntu.
A few days later I received an email with a link to an unlisted store item that had the same photos as the equivalent Windows model, but it was about £30 cheaper.
Snook is an apt word for my experience, hope it's improved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-13-plus-dev...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI
This probably seems like a weird one-off, but this story went pretty viral, of course it went viral on the internet for other reasons, but I'm sure the blame being placed squarely on DELL probably did lead to them being a bit spooked about consumer confusion.
The fact that nobody at DELL or elsewhere could just tell her that she can in fact, pretty easily install Windows on the machine is... well, a little frustrating to say the least. The college's IT department was aware enough of Linux to be able to say they can handle it, but not enough to say "Y'know, just for what it's worth... You can just buy and install Windows."
I can't say if this happened, but the whole story sounds like a dark PR campaign to spread fear about Dell's choice and try to take some steam out of their rollout. Microsoft obviously had a lot of money on the line if Dell found success with Ubuntu.
Someone who dropped out of college because they bought a Mac and couldn't run their Black Friday copy Office would just get mocked.
In practice, not so much, especially if you like to sleep and wake up from sleep everytime without a crash + a reasonable power consumption, both during use and during sleep.
IMHO consumption during sleep far more important: if I didn't plug the computer, I expect it to wake up immediately (no S4/suspend to disk) and with less than 0.5% of battery lost per hour (so for 10h of sleep and 80% battery before sleep, at least 75% battery left), if I put it in a bag, I expect it to stay asleep and not be a fire hazard: dells run hot when closed and in a bag, to the point of battery exhaustion or thermal shutdown)
I prefer Lenovo for everything, especially the keyboard but also ECC ram, OLED displays ... things almost impossible to find anywhere else!
I've been moving to a eink tablet but I purchased a Lenovo wireless keyboard: every key being in the exact same position on all my hardware has sizeable benefits in comfort.
Also, I want PageUp and PageDown around the Up key, something impossible to find outside of Lenovo.
That's my fetish! Which one did you go for?
I was asked about my setup a few days ago. I'm preparing a tutorial to help with rooting, removing unwanted apps etc.
Same, with other Dells. There was one where I analyzed the BIOS ACPI tables and concluded it was impossible to wake from sleep on any OS, due to bugs I've found: I can't find my old post, but https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/kolf5f/patching_the_d... is a good summary.
Error on Dell ACPI tables are usual: for the 5510, see https://gist.github.com/jamal-fuma/17d2d605280a52376326384c4...
I also remember someone doing deeping ACPI table modifications to limit the power draw on the Xeon Laptops. I can't find the link right now, but IIRC it was related to the PCH powergating.
These issues plague the whole line. For another analysis (and confirmation), this time on how deep C states (very important for temperature and for sleep) can only be reached one after boot, see https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/precision-mo...
Agreed: in the current lineup, don't buy anything that's not from the X series.
At least with lenovo you can buy second laptop, and swap SSD before shipping it away. Repairman will not go through your selfies ;)
Hardware on the other hand, these things are like caring for an anorexic bubble baby with severe bone density issues. The hardware is a piece of shit, but also extremely easy to repair. Burned through at least 3 keyboards on the 2015, at least 4 pairs of speakers (new set sitting in a parcel in the room right now), 1 motherboard (mechanical stress snapped the heatsink), 2 power plugs, replacement top case because of screen latch stress snapping some tiny piece of plastic, probably more I've forgotten. Separately, the mic seems to be installed literally inside the fans, they made the screen bezel so thin on the 2022 model that they couldn't even include a web cam competitive with the 1998 Game Boy camera, it's embarrassing to videoconf from it
I disagree: technically, it can be made to work, at least with some effort.
On my Lenovo X1 fold, I do get 0.5%/h of sleep, cf the slope of the sleepstudy curve on Windows https://csdvrx.github.io/X1_Fold_(20RL_20RK)_Optimization/pa... ; the root cause of most of my problems were the Intel drivers, more details on https://csdvrx.github.io/
Just turning off wireless with a powershell script before sleep helps a lot, on Linux of course you have more leeway with systemd-suspend hooks.
> my Precision 5550, it got so hot I was afraid the battery will explode
We've got very similar experiences with Dell
You'll be relegated to using Linux in a VM for wireless, or downgrading to old hardware.
Not a good ol' ThinkPad T-series?
On the last 4 companies I worked straight, they were either the only option, or an option between ThinkPad or Mac.
I own both and I'm happy I switched back to ThinkPads.
I guess the T495 is worse. Those first gen Zen chips are just terrible.
Makes me feel like they aren't that popular outside of IT departments.
All laptops are either Lenovo or Macbooks.
Like you said, maybe in your part of the world Dell is more popular for some reason.
Yeah but he was talking about modern Lenovos, not 8 year old ones.
6 year old T series that the kids adopted is also taking abuse well.
So what quality issues affect them now specifically? I will be in the market for another laptop in a year or so, and my default would always be a ThinkPad.
I gravitate towards a AMD Ryzen ThinkPad, either a X13 or a T14s. X1C are only offered with Intel CPUs, which seem a bit inferior in terms of performance and heat / energy usage.
Macs with Asahi are an interesting option, but it is still missing support for fundamental items, e.g. sound.
Will probably get XPS 15 and put Ubuntu on myself. Annoying to fork money over to Microsoft for nothing.
I have no idea if there are bits on the 2023 Windows edition that aren't supported. It might all be fine.
I was thinking to go for the XPS 15 since it's rated as the best overall Linux laptop in 2023 by Zdnet[1] and xda-developers[2].
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/best-linux-laptop/ [2] https://www.xda-developers.com/best-laptops-linux/
I went back to Lenovo and their fingerprint reader worked fine, including being mainlined by Lenovo.
If you don't care about that, then go for it.
- first salesperson said: "We are anticipating the Newer XPS 15 laptops to be launched by Dec last week or by Mid Jan that comes with 14th Gen Processors and preinstalled Ubuntu OS on them".
- Second salesperson said they don't have an ETA yet.
- Third salesperson said "The product development is working on these 2 models, we are soon expecting them to launch in next 3 to 4 weeks [Nov 13-20] but the exact date of launch has not be shared with us ... the Precision models will have these options [Ubuntu] ... the XPS 15 will not have the Ubuntu options".
- Fourth salesperson said "by early 2025".
- Fifth salesperson said "we don't have a date"
- Sixth salesperson said "we dont have eccurate date, you may see it XPS laptop with 14th gen chip in the end of December ... and it may not come with unibuntu option ... You will see Precision laptops with Ubuntu option"
Oh and they do have a Precision from 2023 pre-installed with Ubuntu[1], somehow wasn't visible before.
Dell sales and support is pretty, so have to ask multiple times.
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/precision-3581-...
At least, in my experience with the 3 brand new computers I got (T460s in 2016, T14s in 2021, Custom Desktop (Ryzen 5, ATI 7900 XT)), everything worked out of the box.
It's been ages since I had a real issue (like the dreaded Broadcom wifi cards back in the days).
Edit: It looks like just a Canadian thing. 1899 for windows home and 1984 for Ubuntu.
https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/laptops/xps-13-plus/spd/xps-...
I'll assume some retail magic, Microsoft subsidy, and the life-in-Canada tax.
With a little subsidy, Dell's pricing you report doesn't seem too far off.
i had 2022 dell xps with 17 4k touch screen. i thought, okey, will plug encrypted nvme system disk. i was doubt it will boot at all, not speaking about sound, wifi and touch.
but magically, after reboot, some firmwares installed. it all worked perfectly. sound, voice, touch, sleep, keyboard, camera.
I have had a couple of minor Linux specific (I assume) issues, but nothing too hard to resolve.
Edit: this was one of the minor issues: https://paperstack.com/fixing_the_freeze/
At least there are some gaming laptops available now.
https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/dell-notebooks/sr/laptops/ub...
It's a nice laptop otherwise.
It's one of the reasons I'm not buying the Inspiron 16 plus in this moment.
I've owned several Inspirons and have no issues but then I use Arch (actually). Have a look into what kernels are on offer and consider a different one. However you may have another issue because I seem to recall that cams are now all basically standards based.
Try grabbing a couple of live "CDs" of other distros and boot them. See if your camera works. Try something like OpenSuSE "tumbleweed".
There are no drivers for the webcam.
But right now there's just some hacky out of kernel drivers for the no-longer-even-recent Intel IPU6 camera controller, which is on a lot of laptops.
Intel's been slowly working on this. Here's an update from May: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Progressing . Fedora has this out of kernel tree in driver. But it's been like this for a long time. Here's a well known kernel maintainer warning people off last August: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop
Honestly I'm shocked Intel has been this dodgy for this long. I feel like overall Intel today huegly gets it. They have enormous dedication to getting drivers out there & making systems work well, in a way very few companies compare against. But they are hit or miss across different divisions. I'm not sure what the IPU6 folks see as their path to getting upstreamed, or whether they intend to keep just floating along out of kernel for a bit.
It does look like there is support for pretty modern kernels out-of-tree, & there is a repo with binary firmware, so I wouldn't be shocked to hear that XPS13s and most IPU6 systems work pretty ok.
Granted, I’ve still had some random issues with mine, even on the stock version. (The wifi card is glitchy and I have to systemctl restart NetworkManager sometimes, apparently this is a known hardware/firmware issue).
But I try to avoid buying any machines that require drivers that have not been mainlined or are a bit unstable. In 2011, I got burnt by the infamous b43 Broadcom card / driver which, while supported, had disastrous performance. So never again.
Aside, with NixOS, you can lock a particular kernel ABI or rollback if your update breaks. Aside, mainstream distros usually provide LTS kernels.
My Asus netbook was also sold with Linux (remember those days?), and if I want to have stable hardware video acceleration and OpenGL 4.1 support, I would have to keep using the original Ubuntu version that came with it in 2009.
Because the AMD open source drivers downgraded the GL suppport to OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video acceleration is yet to work as smoothly as it used to.
Which OS allows you to upgrade a major version and never break drivers? I guess Darwin does okay if you stay on the narrow happy path of first party hardware, but even then it's not exactly a feat of software engineering.
It’s also sad that this is basically the only Linux-preinstalled and supported hardware from a mainstream company. When I have a choice it’s between one of these or MacBook Air and I’d choose the Mac at this point and forgo Linux
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
They do however support Linux, and have the best upstreaming support that I've seen getting fingerprint readers, webcams, etc all with working kernel drivers.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/operating-systems/how-to-i...
The XPS's I've tried in the past have always ended up with unsupported hardware after a while, so I've written them off.
Otherwise a fine device.
> It's a nice laptop otherwise.
These have always reminded me of:
Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,
Tout va très bien, tout va très bien,
Pourtant, il faut, il faut que l’on vous dise,
On déplore un tout petit rien:
Un incident, une bêtise,
La mort de votre jument grise,
Mais, à part ça, Madame la Marquise,
Tout va très bien, tout va très bien!
Everything is going very well, everything is going very well,
However, it must be said,
We regret a tiny little thing:
An incident, a foolishness,
The death of your gray mare,
But, apart from that, Madam Marquise,
Everything is going very well, everything is going very well!
https://fr-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Tout_va_tr%C3...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn28uEI4_4c
But, it's better than it was! I had a highish-end XPS 13 from '18 that refused to ever sleep with the lid shut, despite my best efforts.
If Dell wants to get serious about this stuff, they need to test and fix all of these issues before they release a laptop.
Is it for everyone? No. Even with explicit support by Dell on their hardware, it is not seamless, as my two anecdotes above illustrate. The time you waste on tinkering isn't going to make up for the extra money you pay to Apple or Microsoft.
But I just couldn't take any more telemetry and ads, and I think it is only going to get worse from here on out.
Unless I was truly a FOSS zealot I don't get why I would select Dell over Apple here.
The features I actually interact with the most are going to be very different even if the lower level stuff is the same.
Honestly, my biggest concern is that I only reboot it about once a month to do updates, so, I do worry that, like an old server that has been kept on for 10+ years, it will be one of those reboots that finally kills it.