So. Stupid. You can't choose Ubuntu and 32GB RAM at the same time.
I need 32GB. Because modern developer applications are incredibly RAM hungry. My Jetbrains IDEs eat up easily a dozen GB for indexes on my projects. gopls takes up a couple GB. Firefox fluctuates, but often half a dozen depending on how many tabs I have. Add in a few electron apps, and I'm at 27GB used right now.
You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. I want the multitasking performance.
I'm currently on the previous generation Dell XPS 13 (9310), and I'm still satisfied, I'm not actually looking for a new laptop. But it was the exact same story when I was shopping for it. Impossible to get the developer edition, so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself. Arguably it's more resellable because I can just wipe the Linux partition, re-merge the partitions, and it'll look pretty much stock. But meh. Worth mentioning that Linux Wi-Fi drivers for the model I have is terrible because they had two different chips they were using for XPS laptops and getting 32GB meant I would get that "upgraded" (but actually worse) chip. Had to fight with kernel upgrades to get a patch ahead of time to make it usable.
I have older XPS 13. I bought a M1 PRO recently, because I was tired of issues with my XPS 15 (which eventually died - won't power on).
I wish I didn't have the mindset that XPS was enough for me. For instance when I am running tests on M1, they finish in about a minute, whereas on XPS I could go on a quick coffee break. Having ADHD it was a productivity killer.
On M1 I can fire off tests, read something quickly on interwebs and then go back to developing in no time.
Best of all, no distracting fans (it has fans, and sometimes they do activate, but I wouldn't know if I hadn't installed a fan monitor - they are that silent).
> and setting up the dual-boot myself.
Only good thing about XPS is that you can replace the NVMe drive. So when I bought mine, I also bought a separate NVMe drive and simply removed the one laptop came with and just installed Linux on a new drive.
When my XPS died, I could buy a cheap used laptop (got a ThinkPad!) and put my XPS's drive in it and recover any data I needed.
I've been looking at these. The 12th gen only gets good results when connected to a charger and is dependent on active cooling. This is a deal breaker for me.
I simply can't stand fan noise anymore.
The silent operation was the main reason I decided to bite the bullet and bought M1.
Personally, I probably wouldn't mind it. I rarely use F keys these days, other than the occasional volume/refresh/brightness stuff. I'm not a vim user so I don't use ESC that much. I use DEL a lot though, so that might be annoying.
Which is why Apple replaced that visual-display-only escape key with an actual key and a slightly smaller touch bar pretty quickly, yeah. Because having zero feedback on key presses is terrible. This one will be terrible too.
Vim users don't use the Esc key either. We have remapped it to something less inconvenient. If you haven't done this yet, I really recommend remapping Caps Lock to a Ctrl/Esc combination, it's in a really convenient position, unlike the two keys you'll use it as.
I came to say exactly this. Color me unsurprised that this is the top comment. In what world is 16GB and a mobile i5 "developer orientated"? Makes my head spin.
I must say, I'm surprised that it takes that much memory. I've got a 16GB macbook pro, and it sits at a comfortable 9GB "app memory". I've got one config project open, one pretty large Vue/TS/HTML/CSS project, and two Go projects opened in VSCode, plus Chrome and Firefox, plus Outlook and Teams. And Emacs. I regularly run a Django docker project too, together with DBeaver and PyCharm, and still it doesn't eat up all my memory (although I do close VSCode in that case). Everything is memory hungry, yes, but it doesn't look like I need 32GB.
I'm using 64 GB MBP and it usually eats all that memory (mostly for caches, but it definitely exceeds 20 GB even for simple tasks like IDE + Safari). I guess applications configure themselves differently according to max memory available.
I've never understood this complaint that software uses all of the available memory and the implication that that is somehow a bad thing. That's the whole point of memory. To load up as much of the software or user data as possible into a fast-access cache to reduce wait times on paging to storage. I'd be concerned if my applications weren't using all that's available. That'd be a huge waste of money. That's a lot like buying a house then being mad when you actually use all of the rooms.
I definitely don't complain, I'm actually happy that this RAM is not wasted. Just wanted to provide data point which might be interesting for those who think how many RAM they need.
macOS is very aggressive on memory compression and swap. When I still used a Mac for work, it said 11GB for sure as app memory, with a 40+ GB swap file alongside it.
It reminds me of when the linux netbook took off like a rocket in like 2010/11 and then the next year every model was capped at 2GB because microsoft licensing...or something.
Got the 9310 dev edition as well. With 32GB of RAM, the biggest CPU and the touch screen (not 4k). However, since I wanted US keyboard layout (living in EU) & ordered via my employer, I had to go through our sales representative anyway; but I think I could configure it like that on the website (sans keyboard layout).
That said, I'm not too happy with the Linux support in our model as well. I replaced Ubuntu with Arch (was the plan anyway) and had to fiddle with the fingerprint sensor, plus the WiFi is not suitable for pentesting (but worked out of the box on Arch). Bluetooth causes lockups, so I disabled that (maybe fixed with recent kernels?). Not exactly what I expected from a laptop that's sold with Linux. Next one will probably be not Dell.
> so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself
I've noticed many laptops that come with a Windows installation often have a separate recovery partition (about 4-5gb in size, which is about the size of a Windows ISO) that is used to 'factory reset' the device.
If you have one, you should be able to safely clear the Windows partition, reformat it, and install Linux. When the time to resell the thing comes, you simply reinstall the OG system from this recovery image and get the OS in 'mint' (yet heavily outdated) condition.
Jetbrains IDEs index your entire codebase for intellisense to make instantaneous suggestions as you type, etc. Those indexes across many vectors take up a lot of space. I don't see how it could take less, for a project of this size. It's actively useful for me to have it loaded in memory.
Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data.
I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.
I'm not saying that it's not weird you can't get 32GB. I agree that's a problem.
I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk?
At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened?
Sounds like there is something wrong with your local installation. I work on a multi MILLION line code base with IntelliJ and it stays comfortably under 2 GB at all times. Maybe an errant plugin?
I have multiple projects open (5-ish), each are quite big. The biggest one is PHP with tons of vendor dependencies and also a pretty big Typescript app within it with a big node_modules.
You can still wipe the disk and install just whatever OS you want, right? Dell doesn't force you to use the pre-installed OS?
I don't understand the resale value either? You can always re-install windows? Do people pay more with the "original" Windows installation? Shouldn't you actually want to explicitly wipe before you sell??
If you buy the Ubuntu version, then you don't have Windows on it at all. No license. Which is why the Ubuntu version is supposed to be slightly cheaper.
But the general public, non-Linux users, will find it much less attractive if there's no Windows license, making its resale somewhat more difficult.
And as I said, that is what I do; I bought the Windows version of the last-gen XPS 13 and installed Linux on it (dual boot).
I'm just pointing out a potential trade-off. I don't care that much about resale, but the slightly reduced price up-front is nice.
Re dual boot, because if I do have a Windows license, I rather not just throw it away. I don't mind losing like 50GB of my storage just to keep Windows around in case I need to sell the thing or send it back for warranty. Doesn't hurt to have sometimes to test something in a Windows browser or whatever, from time to time as well (yes, VMs are a thing but meh, overhead and jank).
When I saw this, I was about to comment about how in seemingly every single case of a major laptop vendor selling a Linux model, it turns out the Linux version is unavailable in the UK.
Then at the end of the article, I saw it list the UK as a country in which the laptop is available, and was pleasantly surprised: "As of today, the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is available in the following countries (available configurations may vary by country):"
The words "United Kingdom" are even a link to the Dell UK page to buy it. I click on the words. The configure-and-buy page opens. Operating system: Only Windows 11 is listed.
Just... what? What is going on here? They explicitly said the Ubuntu edition is available in the UK, and then it isn't. Why does it feel like there's some bizarre conspiracy to deprive people in the UK of the Linux SKUs?
I had the same problem in the Netherlands with my XPS 13 with Ubuntu 20.04. The local website didn't list it, but when I gave the phone rep one of the codes they use for it on the US website they could order it (they were genuinely surprised at that). Dell's website really sucks, and it hides or shows things based either on outdated inventory data, or really black-boxy algorithms.
I agree with you on the weirdness, but I actually got the 'Decline All' option just now. The weirdness then? The other option is called 'Everyone's the Acceptor'.
I… guess something to do with having en_GB as language set in my browser? Am I the only one getting this option to accept cookies for everyone? It feels like a huge responsibility.
The Dell website has a few of those development "left-overs" littered across the site. I saw that same "Everyone's the acceptor" at least a year back and it still hasn't been fixed.
I didn't notice to be honest, because the Dutch use the US layout with the only difference being € printed on the 5 keycap to the right of the numeral. Mine has the € on the 5, and ₹ on the 4. I suppose that might be some US international layout.
Same for France. I've been continually "impressed" by how manufacturers (this is both Dell and Lenovo, the two big ones I'd personally check) list Linux devices in their US stores but then they're unavailable in other countries.
The filtering functions of their shops insist there's no options for Linux laptops. Then you use full text search and some show up. Obviously not the dev laptops I'd have wanted, but still.
These companies need to get their act together; it's unbelievable how bad their online shops are in 2022.
Some are even worse. I'm not sure why exactly providing Linux would vary by region, I don't expect it to have any kind of regulatory issue, like say radios would.
But a few months ago, I had bought an HP EliteBook 845 G8 for work. Note the 5, it's the AMD version. We went through an intermediary to buy (our usual supplier), and I suspected there was some funny business going on, since it physically had a Realtek WiFi card while the merchant's description said Intel and I specifically wanted Intel. This wasn't some kind of shady seller off Amazon, mind, but a reputable local business.
Lo and behold, HP's site didn't have any such model. I was checking it from the computer in front of me. Not only did their online store not seem to carry any EB845, even the "models" only tangentially mentioned it. They wouldn't show any details when clicking on it.
But if I went to Google and looked for the computer's manual, it would show up, on the local HP France site, in French. The warranty check would correctly identify the product, with the correct country and date of purchase. Digging around the manuals, with my SKU in hand, it was indeed supposed to have the RTL Wifi card.
At least you live in a country where you have the official shops available.., I still don't understand to this day what's the problem in having one e-shop that ships to whole EU, even if they didn't support all the languages.
In Slovakia there's no official e-shop for Dell, Google, Apple (and presumably others), you have to go through resellers, where prices are higher and vary from one shop to another, and most of them don't have the build your own system option and/or don't list all available configurations...
> you have to go through resellers, where prices are higher and vary from one shop to another,
At least for Apple and their Premium resellers (in Slovakia: mzone, iStores, iSTYLE), they are exactly the same. They have to be. (This can be a disadvantage as well).
Check Swiss website, better keyboard layout, for some reasons, I see often newer models on the CH website than even US one, at least for lenovo. And there are often the choice of no OS (might vary of the model//Intel CPU with their new drm. ).
Although delivery might be tricky for non Swiss residents/workers.
Strange. A couple of weeks ago I ordered one on the .uk site and shipped to a UK address. It was before this announcement, but it had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed. I haven't picked it up yet so I can't confirm that it actually has Linux installed, but that's what it said on the website and the order confirmation.
It's been a couple of months when I visited the Dell website, but the experience was horrible. I could not even find out whether they sell directly (as they exclusively did many years ago) or via resellers here in Finland. They had several links to resellers, but all of them were broken. Visiting those businesses directly did not result in satisfactory results either.
We still have a Dell laptop bought as high end developer machine well over 10 years ago running Linux as surf PC here at home. The support Web site was excellent back then and the build quality obviously, too.
Nowadays they seem to be unable to sell. No idea whether it would be worth making any efforts to buy.
i18n is hard and I haven't seen anyone other than Apple do it properly.
On Dell's website, when you visit the UK store and you are not in the UK, it prompts you with a modal that covers the center of the screen to switch to your local version and when you switch, it does't take you to the product page or sorry this is not available in your country page but to homepage.
It's such a poor experience.
On the other hand, if you visit Apple, Apple will simply provide you a passive but prominent banner at the top with an option to change country store and it will take you to the correct product page. The website pages are consistent between countries and you can even guess the product page in another country by changing country code in the URL(http://apple.com/uk/iphone-13/ => http://apple.com/de/iphone-13/).
I guess, unlike Apple, Dell and others use fancy optimisation and analytics to provide the best and most optimised local experience which leads to inconsistencies and complexities.
I remember the last time Dell did the whole Ubuntu on Dell about 15-20 years ago. They claimed it was available in the UK but it wasn't really.
Have they stopped gimping the Linux versions by removing hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers like the fingerprint reader rather than doing a Lenovo and writing the drivers for them?
It's amazing to me that they didn't learn from Apple's mistakes. All we heard about for months was how annoying not having a physical escape key was. It even forced Apple to change the keyboard on newer models, with a physical escape key and then the touchbar to the right.
But here we go, Dell has decided to put a capacitive escape key. They really need to know their market better.
Anyway, it looked like a nice laptop. Totally unusable to a developer without a physical escape key.
Dell will learn the hard way and backtrack, or will abandon Dev edition XPSs due to low demand (due to idiotic keyboard). And no, remapping keys to Esc or whatever isn't acceptable, just as it wasn't on Apple's touch bar notebooks (RIP).
It is the developer edition. The important thing is that developers cannot escape.
It really an immense design flaw in my opinion and honestly the problems here should be predictable enough to not even make the mistake in the first place.
It is a flaw that can be overcome by mapping escape to caps, which everyone does anyway, or by using ^[ which is more conveniently placed anyway. That doesn't seem so immense.
I solved this by having large hands. I usually also use function keys which seems to be difficult as well with such a layout. The arrow keys could also induce nightmares for me. Especially up/down being smaller than left/right.
That got my interest. Why companies are trying to do this? Isn't the ESC key one of the commonly used keys on the keyboard? What's a net gain by replacing it?
Dell claimed that physical keyboard is too thick to put in enough cooling for 28W Alder Lake-P chip in thin-and-light form factor. The touchbar is much thinner allowing more room for the heat spreader.
Having seen benchmark number from XPS 13 Plus compared with other notebook equipped with Alder Lake-P, it looks like it's working.
I remapped caps lock to control many years ago in Tweaks, Keyboard & Mouse, Additional Layout Options, Caps Lock Behavior. I can enable caps lock by pressing both shift keys and disable it by pressing any shift.
Remapping a combination of the windows key + another key like a backspace to Caplock gets the job done for me. Even shift + caplock would also solve the problem
I have the last Intel i7 Macbook Pro which has the physical escape key and capacitive bar. I still miss the rest of the keys being physical, having the choice between either having to tap multiples times to change volume or lose the "extra features" of the bar is a no-brainer.
There is literally nothing I use or seen that meaningfully uses that bar. I've not even seen a useful implementation by Apple.
Considering that the Macbook Pro also is generally about 40 degrees at the back of the keyboard when I do work on it, I'm not really inclined to put my hands back there anyway.
Not only that - the touchbar is dynamic and adapts to the program that has the focus. This is a set of almost fixed-function spots. This is beyond stupid.
> It even forced Apple to change the keyboard on newer models, with a capacitive escape key and then the touchbar to the right.
The capacitive ESC was part of the touch bar on older models. After that, they added a physical, scissor ESC key like the rest of the keyboard. Thankfully on newer models they got rid of the touch bar altogether.
Personally, I don't want laptops that look like glass.
We've spent over $75K at Dell this year. We buy all our kiosks, laptops, monitors, docks, webcams, speakerphone equipment, servers, and more through them. And we love all of the gear, it's beautifully made, and it all just works (tm) together.
But personally I long that they would give up on trying to push out hyper modern laptops or macbook clones and just push out robust business laptops that look like ThinkPad T/P-series.
One of the reasons we don't buy Lenovo is because the quality of Dell's software, support, BIOS, recovery etc. is all lightyears ahead of Lenovo. For example, our business laptops don't ship with recovery partitions that can be wiped. We can open SupportAssist in the BIOS, connect to WiFi in the BIOS, and it will automatically download the latest factory image and re-install the OS from the cloud. The images don't come with any bloatware or ads baked-in and from there we can just deploy everything with InTune. Fantastic.
It looks like Dell took all the mistakes Apple made in recent years and turned them up to 11 in a single package.
That keyboard will be a nightmare to touchtype on. The arrow keys will require looking down to use every single time. The trackpad without clear borders will be a usability nightmare. Or perhaps they mean it spans the entire width of the laptop, which is probably much worse. Capacitive things have no place in a developer's computer.
We use a few Precision 7560 and they are fantastic, although we do miss the second set of buttons above the trackpad and also the nib mouse that your model has.
It’s a shame the Precision 3000 series shares nothing design-wise with the 7-series. The 7-series is quite frankly unaffordable for the general case. And the recent revisions are slowly losing their ruggedness.
We would buy a 7-series chassis with an i5 and no GPU if it had a price point around $2200-ish.
I've had 2 Dell XPS's running Ubuntu, a 9300 and 9370. I very recently switched to an Air M2.
The build quality between the XPS and the air is night and day.
The 9300 flexed so much that when I picked it up with a single hand, the trackpad would click from the flex.
After a couple years, the keyboard stopped working, the shell started to physically split and I had to tighten the case screws every week or so (there was a ~2-3mm gap in the case, to a point where the USBc wouldn't line up). My camera started to turn off at the slightest vibration/breeze.
I find OSX painful. But between a mildly frustrating OS and crap hardware...for me, the air is an obvious better buy.
He is also using a Macbook Air, probably not his main machine. From the release notes of the latest kernel release [1]
> On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the
release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. [...]
> Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been
doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But
I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with
this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.
To having to _buy_ access to drivers; Dell support told me I had to pay to get access to the Windows 7 drivers of a Dell laptop I explicitly bought because of the Windows 7 compatibility.
My XPS 15 got a faulty HDMI port suddenly after a forced Windows 11 update. It caused permanent problems for my HDTV as well that I had it plugged into.
The battery went bad after 2 years, and it is running hot regularly.
Right now I just will use it to stream videos until it dies. Most of the Dell computers I've purchased in the past 8 years have had major issues just after purchase which conveniently occur just after warranty expires. I got an R13 earlier this year prior to my laptop failures, it's still sitting its box unused for when my 8300 fails.
My previous non-ssd XPS 16 still runs, after 10 years. That's the reason why I once was loyal to the brand.
I have the same swelling issue. I had to order an expensive screw kit to get the fire hazard battery out. Their machines aren’t just bad, they’re dangerous
My company has about 40 laptops, roughly 50-50 Mac and PC. In the last 3 years or so we've had two Mac batteries swell up and one PC one. We've had one Mac battery no longer hold charge (but not swell), and 3 PC ones.
(Doesn't the XPS have normal crosshead screws? My fairly old one does.)
Apologies, you are correct. I didn't notice the problem since I have a set of Torx screwdrivers at home and another at work.
They're fairly common in some European countries. Here's sets for sale in the UK[1] and Denmark[2], just the first I found. There are larger (T20?) Torx screws in my apartment in very boring places.
Be aware that "Ubuntu" doesn't mean "Free software"!
9 years ago I bought a new Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Everything has been fine until one month ago when I decided to natively install Guix OS.
The wireless card "Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (2x2 b/g/+ Bluetooth Combo Card)" has non-free, proprietary firmware. So no native(!) Guix on my Dell XPS. (Only hosted)
Ubuntu did pioneer easy proprietary driver integration into their distro AFAIK.
About wireless that is to be expected with most (all modern?) Intel Wifi cards...
I mean there is proprietary firmware running on most/all modern Laptops, the difference is that many controllers have their own flash and don't rely on the os to feed them their firmware...
That is a distinction without difference in regards to proprietary definition. If you are a purist that doesn't like proprietary firmware, it doesn't matter were that firmware is located.
However, on other issues internal flash means the controller is more expensive and more difficult to update on bugs or security issues, so putting firmware on in the filesystem makes it much more visible, easier to manage and cost-effective. This is not possible for many controllers, like the boot rom, keyboard, touchscreen, hdd/ssd controller, because they are needed to work before there is a filesystem available in many cases. But in case of Wifi and Bluetooth, doing it like this is possible and preferred for most people I guess.
Of course many people would prefer having only FOSS firmware, but even in that case they would prefer having as much firmware as possible visible on the filesystem instead of hidden away on some flash for those reasons.
firmware for Intel's wifi cards is hosted in the linux firmware repo with a redistributable license. Any wifi card made in the last 10+ years requires firmware.
This applies to anything based on Linux, where they've made the choice to support proprietary hardware like this. It's only platforms that explicitly choose to strip that proprietary firmware support that are affected by this. The Free Software Foundation's view is that this type of support should be avoided, so I guess that applies to Guix, too?
Is this a joke? I mean what's the use of this laptop for a developer if it has a typical consumer keyboard not designed for typing code?
Also having been a user of couple of generations of XPS, I wouldn't wish this laptop upon an enemy. These laptops were the most unreliable I have a ever had.
I also never heard fans so loud in any other laptop like in my XPS 15. They were louder than a hairdryer. Imagine this during a meeting.
Plus typical issues like coil whine or if you power it off, pray that it will turn on...
When my XPS 15 died, while not being a fan of Apple I bought M1 MBPRO.
Now I am not sure why other manufacturers like Dell even bother making their laptops.
Do yourself a favour and don't bother with Dell. You can run Linux on Mac just fine (through virtualisation).
So sad, what used to be a groundbreaking laptop (an ultraportable that you'd actually buy with official Linux support!) is now copying the worst from Apple, while degrading in almost all aspects from the predecessors. No headphone jack, no USB-A? 13" 4K screen which sucks the not-so-small battery as fast as the first version did ~10 years ago? Touchbar? Glass screen? A charger that can't actually charge the device while you are compiling your code? And this is a "developer" machine? I'm so disappointed.
In much of Europe Dell will end up cheaper because it will be sold within the single market, meaning no customs tax and import levies, and warrantee doesn't cost you hundreds of Euros in shipping costs. System76 is really only an affordable option if you live in North America.
That's if this comes out in whichever European country one lives in of course, because Dell is exasperatingly vague about their specific offerings, and in my case (the XPS 13 with Ubuntu 20.04 with Dell Netherlands) I could only offer it via telephone. That part sucks. The laptop is fine though.
For the record: for my work laptop over the past ten years I've had two System76's and now a Dell XPS 13.
Just in time for my Ifixit kit to arrive so I can take my swelling, fire hazard Dell battery out of my old xps after the swelling or electrical issues broke my old charger and made my trackpad stop working.
Dell claims it’s not a known issue, so they won’t fix it for free, but if you google it, it seems fairly common on my model
It always had suspend issues with Ubuntu too, it wouldn’t wake up 100% sometimes and would lag until I restarted it
I bought like 5 XPSs and 1 workstation from dell with ubuntu preinstalled, starting with the original release. Only one model was relatively problematic.
So what do you mean? Are there better laptops with Linux preinstalled from major oems?
Worksations and laptops are not really the same thing, are they?
Every XPS15 we had in the office had some sort of issue. Either motherboard cooking itslef, battery dying prematurely, trackpads getting stuck, display flickering, laptop cooking itslef in the backpack, HDMI issue etc.
Unacceptable for such expensive devices.
>So what do you mean? Are there better laptops with Linux preinstalled from major oems?
Read my comment again. I mean XPSs are very badly designed and built devices. I never said others are better.
I have a Dell XPS 13 provided by my employer.
I don't understand what's so supposedly good about them.
- It won't boot when battery is empty. I literally have to wait for like 10min until it decides I can now use it. Have fun explaining why you are late on your morning meeting after forgetting to charge it over night. You just sit there, looking at your laptop.
- No graphics at all by default, in Debian Buster. Had to install some drivers from Unstable.
- Touchpad is barely acceptable.
- Only a single Jack port on the laptop itself, so you have to bring the whole heap of wires and boxes with you if you want to use a mouse or plug in a USB; so much for a "portable laptop"
- Pointless touch screen. Never used it.
- Sometimes fans are going crazy for absolutely no reason. I think there has to be a mechanical fault, the noise is not something you d expect. It got suddenly better tho, without me taking any action.
Overall, it brings headaches, without any advantage. No way I am getting this for myself.
Let me reiterate - i can buy a Dell XPS running Windows (with windows tax baked in). But I cannot buy a Dell XPS Developer Edition running Ubuntu in India. So I cannot buy the cheaper variation of the same laptop..but the more expensive version is freely available.
- terrible battery life (battery almost completely unusable after a few years) + standby mode eating all battery quickly (and sometimes doesnt wake up from hibernation on linux)
- annoying coil whine when charging battery that is almost full
- wont turn on if battery is low (<5%) + connected to a charger (will trigger "ssd can not be found bios error")
- issues with wifi speed when bluetooth headphones are connected at the same time (might be a linux driver problem for killer wifi)
- touchscreen is pointless (but there was no other way to get the 4k display)
- low quality trackpad
- only 3 ports and all are usb c (not even HDMI on a laptop???)
First and last Dell laptop I will every buy. If ARM is not an issue for your use case there really is no reason why you should not buy a silent macbook air in current year instead.
I bought latitude 3410 last year as a cheap back up computer and couldn't be happier. Acceptable performance, very solid Linux support, everything just works in Fedora. Just few days ago wife's macbook stopped working, so I installed Windows 11, again very smooth experience, all drivers were installed automagically, everything works just fine.
Everyone's got his own experience, my experience with Dell was very good. I also used their display, can't say anything bad about it either. No dead pixels.
Can't comment about their support or something, we don't have such thing here, no matter whether it's macbook or dell. We support ourselves and pray it does not brake.
To bring some positive news, I bought this computer last month and up to now I'm quite happy with it.
TouchPad feels very good but is a little buggy when the computer rest on some surfaces.
The function keys are not a pain to use, and the keyboard feels very good otherwise.
I installed Fedora and Windows 10 on it. Bought with Ubuntu for the price reduction.
Oled screen is marvelous, battery life is okay: 5h when developing using vscode and tons of extensions. It does get quite hot when doing some 3d stuff but that's expected I guess.
Battery life can be improved by choosing the LCD screen.
It has some flaws, but I find them minor and I value much more the possibility to have a windows Linux dual boot.
XPS13 is my go-to choice. Serving me for many years, although I have to admit that the camera placement (bottom-left) corner in the older models is funnily frustrating.
What is a fresh install Ubuntu experience with XPS laptops with two GPUs? In the Dell store only single GPU models allow to select Ubuntu preinstalled and I wonder if this is due to software problems with handling two GPUs well.
I'm looking for a new laptop. My current one has two GPUs (not Dell), but due to stability problems I ended up using only integrated GPU on Ubuntu Linux. I wonder if with Dell the Ubuntu support for such setups is better.
I have owned a Dell XPS, for an intern, in end-of-2020, and never again:
- The first experience was trying to open the thing, the hinge is too strong, so the bottom comes with the top instead of staying on the table, and because of the loose grip it drops and slams on the table,
- Fans are just as noisy as all PCs,
I was told the XPS experience was the closest to Apple in the PC world, barring System76, that was a marketing-by-lies.
They are MacBook-like if you consider thickness, weight, screen resolution and battery life (pre-M1 Mac that is).
It's a shame the build quality is so bad. The Dell on-site support tech is a regular at my company due to the amount of breakage and we refuse to buy the XPS line anymore.
I have an XPS 15, the power management is so bad that I had to tell it to hibernate rather than sleep when I close the lid. Otherwise it was using 3x more CPU 'sleeping' with the lid closed than under normal use. I tried to figure out what was going on with performance recorder/analyser but eventually I gave up.
Mine wouldn't "wake up" from hibernation and having experiencing it wake up from sleep while in my backpack, I learned the hard way, that only safe way was to shut it down.
I applauded this Dell developer thing until I got my first Dell laptop ever (not an XPS) and learned that laptops can have audible coil whine (apparently many XPS also have this). I also learnt just how annoyingly buggy docking stations can be.
So nope, gonna stick to Thinkpads for personal laptops I have to buy myself.
Using a distro version as a selling point is so weird to me. Do a majority of linux users really care that the baseline, pre-installed OS is now 22.04? Is it not more appealing to just come out and say "hey, we have shiny new hardware, all components work great as of kernel x.xx"?
Yes it matters. Just knowing that it works with one of the most popular LTS distro versions is a major selling point. For me it was the reason I bought the XPS 13 with Ubuntu 20.04 a while back. I use Ubuntu myself, so not having to reinstall anything saved time too.
You buy one of these, and then 2 months later call up Dell and say the Wifi on laptop is not working, then it can go one of two ways.
If you're running Ubuntu 22.04, then you'd be justified in demanding they support it, and repair/replace as appropriate.
If you're running $SomeOtherRandomDistro, then their support team you're dealing with may not have the right tools/processes to test and diagnose the issue. It would, I would argue, be justified for them to reject your support request until you can show it failing in Ubuntu 22.04. Assuming it wasn't something obviously physically wrong with the device.
My problems installing new Ubuntu releases on (at the time) latest XPS hardware were due to the version of the wifi drivers packaged in Ubuntu. Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't recall the kernel version helping, I had to grab newer driver debs from the testing repo until the next Ubuntu version was released.
But you make a fair point because I can't find a similar announcement last month for the certification completion itself. There is probably a strategy behind that, we might simply not understand what Dell is trying to achieve with their developer edition.
Nah! Folks, get the Lenovo Z13 instead. Exact same size, OLED or IPS, LTE modem, up to 32GB LPDDR5, Ryzen 6800 with similar perf numbers and better battery to 12th Gen i7 1260/1280 and way better graphics. No capacitive function row! And is running Linux no problem.
Lots of complains about reliability here. I’ll just offer the counter-anecdote that I’ve been using an XPS 13 Developer Edition since 2016 and it’s been fine.
Ironically I already don’t even use its physical escape key, in preference for a more ergonomic mapping.
The memory is still soldered on I guess, even after the framework laptop proved that you can have a compact laptop and memory slots (and other stuff), something we were told wasn't possible.
I have 3 brand new XPS 13 Plus machines sitting right in front of me, the trackpads are unusable. You have no idea where it starts and ends, the click is super finnicky etc.
Dell XPS’s are superficially nice machines but the power management is comically broken. They overheat and drain their battery while sleeping. You’re lucky if you close the lid in the morning and there’s still juice left by 5pm.
Not just Dell :(. I had a Lenovo T14 AMD. The battery would drain overnight in S3 sleep. To add to the offense, if that'd happen it often wouldn't charge with the supplied Lenovo USB-C charger anymore. However, a borrowed MacBook USB-C adapter would bring it back alive within a few minutes.
The first time I was pretty sure the laptop turned into a brick. Of course, this happened hours before I had to give a lecture.
Chalk HP up there, too. Had a ProBook 430 for work, with an 8th gen Intel, so before the S0 circus. It would eat through the battery in S3 like nobody's business.
It was only marginally better than my current joke of a computer, an EliteBook G8, but this one at least doesn't even pretend to sleep (no support for S3 at all).
The Dell XPS laptops are the worst crap Dell makes. They're like Toshiba Satellites. Why anyone would take a perfectly servicable distro like Ubuntu and ruin it on an XPS is beyond me.
I need 32GB. Because modern developer applications are incredibly RAM hungry. My Jetbrains IDEs eat up easily a dozen GB for indexes on my projects. gopls takes up a couple GB. Firefox fluctuates, but often half a dozen depending on how many tabs I have. Add in a few electron apps, and I'm at 27GB used right now.
You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. I want the multitasking performance.
I'm currently on the previous generation Dell XPS 13 (9310), and I'm still satisfied, I'm not actually looking for a new laptop. But it was the exact same story when I was shopping for it. Impossible to get the developer edition, so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself. Arguably it's more resellable because I can just wipe the Linux partition, re-merge the partitions, and it'll look pretty much stock. But meh. Worth mentioning that Linux Wi-Fi drivers for the model I have is terrible because they had two different chips they were using for XPS laptops and getting 32GB meant I would get that "upgraded" (but actually worse) chip. Had to fight with kernel upgrades to get a patch ahead of time to make it usable.