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Get a Developer Edition XPS 13 from Dell instead, comes with Linux pre-installed. I have one and they are awesome, if manufacturers support Linux they get my $

Get a Developer Edition XPS 13 from Dell instead, comes with Linux pre-installed. I have one and they are awesome, if manufacturers support Linux they get my $.

easytiger 10y ago
I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon (most recent gen) and really regret it for a great many reasons. Wish I had gone for the XPS. Actually what swayed me was the very slightly larger screen.
- alphadevx 10y ago
  I think you can get 15" models from Dell under their "Project Sputnik" program too, well worth following Barton's blog for news on that: http://bartongeorge.io/ http://bartongeorge.io/
  - jerf 10y ago
    I bought the normal 15" XPS with Windows recently. Ubuntu 16.04 has gone on it fairly well. It does sound like that is the first version that works correctly, though; you can find a lot of complaints on the net about older versions having serious issues. Ubuntu can't seem to control the backlight, but "xbacklight" does, so it's not a driver thing. I presume other similarly recent distros with similar drivers will work. (I wanted a Windows install for gaming.) For this post I just tried the webcam for the first time; as reviews note it's sort of a nostril-cam and I also noticed if you're typing your fingers loom large, but I don't use it much. I haven't tried the Thunderbolt or "true" USB3, because I don't have any hardware for the fancy ports. I did get the HDMI out to work in Linux. I haven't screwed with the dual-graphics card setup at all, and it seems to work, in the sense that it isn't causing me any trouble. I haven't directly timed the battery but it's getting at least decent life. (I also pre-emptively replaced the wireless card with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167N9R8E/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167N9R8E/ref=oh_aui_deta... , so I guess I can't promise the broadcom works out of the box.) I did have the motherboard die on this three weeks in, though, which has been frustrating. When it works it's a nice system, a nice counter to the trend of everything being made out of cheap plastic. You can get nicer specs for the same price but it'll be a physically cheaper machine. I've actually had more trouble with the Windows side in terms of drivers. The parathetically-aforementioned pre-emptive replacement of the wireless was on the advice of a coworker who had trouble with the card in Windows. When you turn off the RAID so you can install Linux, the NVMe drivers in Windows become unstable. Some people apparently install the Samsung 950 Pro drivers, which can then have its own problems because of hardware mismatch; I accidentally resolved this problem by purchasing a Samsung 950 Pro anyhow. (I wanted a nice flash drive but didn't want to spend the $$$ upgrading all the other things in the pre-packaged configurations. Plus they don't say what their flash drive is, it's probably not as good.) Also it seems to help if you remove the Dell drivers for the headphone port and revert to the reference drivers, as otherwise the machine can hang when you plug headphones in under load. Which is sorta dumb. I recommend making the first thing you do with the system to build a Windows 10 install image and then make a clean install after turning off the RAID, but be sure to bundle the drivers on the Dell webpage onto the install media, particularly the wireless ones. (I didn't know this at the time, but apparently Windows 10 has licenses stored on the motherboard now, so you don't have to hassle with license keys. It just installs.) Apparently there's some way with fighting through the RAID setting change to repair the system but a clean install is nice for other reasons. (Not too much crapware, but, still.) I will agree that the previous is a potentially frustrating set of issues for either OS for a brand new, high-end laptop. I'm used to beating my laptops into submission anyhow since I run my own quirky XMonad install and other such things, so getting this all slick was just par for the course for me. Assuming this stays working I'm quite happy with it (I'm even really liking the keyboard which a lot of people complain about, so YMMV), but it certainly could have been a nicer experience.
- ajsalminen 10y ago
  Could you expand a little on what kind of issues you've had with it?
  - easytiger 10y ago
    The screen itself mainly, is incredibly dull. it has a matt covering that i thought I wanted, but turns out i don't. When compared in indirect sunlight with the mRBP i can't read the text in a terminal. Practically unusable in certain situations. Often I like to work sitting outside on my balcony and couldn't. Battery life is quite poor despite considerable tweaking. Rarely get more than 2-3 hours of reasonable (low % cpu) use. Disable WiFi and decrease screen brightness and i can get 9-10 on an aircraft on a long flight. I fell it is getting worse over time too. I've also had WiFi driver issues with suspend and resume on linux AND windows. Assumed it was just Ubuntu and their horrendous lack of QA for hardware. My wife also has the same issue on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 on win 10. I just rmmod and insmod the wifi kernel module to repair. PITA. i had similar trackpad issues, these have been resolved. Keyboard is way way too soft/shallow. Could be an issue on most laptops these days. Speakers are on the base of the unit and are incredibly quiet. Quiet to the point where if you have a gentle breeze whip up you completely lose the sound. Considering the cost I'm not impressed. The screen kills it for me. even glare reflecting off windows wipes it out at max brightness.
    - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
      I had similar issues with the screen on a HP ProBook I bought last year. The matte screen was way dimmer than my Dell M6500's. When I sent the laptop in for warranty service on the screen (unrelated), the replacement screen was even dimmer. Next time I can afford an arbitrary laptop, it will me another Dell Mobile Workstation like the M6500.
- TheWindUpPirate 10y ago
  Mind sharing what your biggest issue with the X1 Carbon is? (In the market for a new laptop, and the X1 Carbon is/was on the list.)
  - easytiger 10y ago
    See the other comment below.
  - cdubzzz 10y ago
    As another anecdote, I have purchased six X1 Carbons for staff in the past year or so and they have been great. The staff all travel a lot and they appreciate how light weight it is. The only machine-specific support I have had to provide so far was the SMM BIOS vuln. updates. Despite that, I am making new purchases with Dell mostly because of price and service. Check out the Latitude E7470 in comparison to the X1.
- xur17 10y ago
  I just purchased a Lenovo X1 Yoga with an OLED screen (very similar to the X1 Carbon, but with a touch screen). I went back and forth between the XPS 13 and the X1, but the slightly bigger OLED screen, better keyboard, and touchpoint swayed me. Hoping I don't regret my decision..
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I've got a 3443CTO X1 Carbon from a few years back. Decent build quality, but low res screen and only 4GB of RAM (was all that I could get when I bought it). My "upgrade" is an XPS 9350 for 2.5x the price. Windows 10 still doesn't handle high DPI screens well, and until recent updates there were issues with the Broadcom AC wifi card. For Macbook Pro money, I expect better. There's really nowhere to go for power users who need powerful laptops under 1.5kg.
detaro 10y ago
I wish they made a convertible version, but it seems like convertible and linux friendly doesn't really exist on the market right now...
rvense 10y ago
I got one of these from work. It's pretty great. Still sticking to my ThinkPad X201s for home use, though, much better keyboard.
lol768 10y ago
I had nothing but trouble with my XPS 13 developer edition laptop. Ended up sending it back on the same day I got it. The issues I experienced were seemingly widespread too, with a lot of consumers complaining about the same problems on the forums. There were incredibly irritating keyboard debounce issues (and yes, I was running the latest BIOS version available at the time) and there were also issues with the touchpad glitching out (messing with the mouse cursor position) with X restarting every now and then due to the broken touchpad driver. Really disappointing for a laptop with Linux preinstalled, and I've avoided Dell ever since. To top it all off, it became painfully obvious that the Linux DEs weren't able to do a seamless job of supporting a high-DPI screen (I got the 4K edition) or multitouch touchscreen and interfaces like the login screen were unreadably tiny. I know this got fixed in a more recent version of Ubuntu, but I don't understand why Dell ever shipped the laptop they did.
- snerbles 10y ago
  GNOME 3 on Debian Jessie works decently well with high-DPI screens - I'm using it now on the 3K 2015 version of the XPS 13. Some controls won't scale up (Java Swing is particularly miniscule), otherwise it just works compared to most other desktop environments I tried last year.
sliken 10y ago
Dell has 2 XPS 13 options. 1) Great battery life, lousy cpu, nice matte screen, not much ram available. 2) Half the battery life, nice cpu (i7-6560), nice GPU (iris 540), and a 3200x1800 reflective screen that reduces your battery life from 22 hours to 12. The Yoga 710s (sadly with the broken BIOS that prevents linux from installing) is much like the theoretical XPS 13 without the power sucking 3200x1800 display. So I was just looking for a decent laptop, decent build quality, and wanted to avoid the pain/suffering relating to trying to get nvidia working with a laptop that sleeps, switches to the internal intel on battery, and has some stupid system for moving pixels from the nvidia chip through the intel chip to get to the frame buffer.

Get a Developer Edition XPS 13 from Dell instead, comes with Linux pre-installed. I have one and they are awesome, if manufacturers support Linux they get my $.

easytiger 10y ago

I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon (most recent gen) and really regret it for a great many reasons. Wish I had gone for the XPS. Actually what swayed me was the very slightly larger screen.

alphadevx 10y ago
I think you can get 15" models from Dell under their "Project Sputnik" program too, well worth following Barton's blog for news on that: http://bartongeorge.io/ http://bartongeorge.io/
- jerf 10y ago
  I bought the normal 15" XPS with Windows recently. Ubuntu 16.04 has gone on it fairly well. It does sound like that is the first version that works correctly, though; you can find a lot of complaints on the net about older versions having serious issues. Ubuntu can't seem to control the backlight, but "xbacklight" does, so it's not a driver thing. I presume other similarly recent distros with similar drivers will work. (I wanted a Windows install for gaming.) For this post I just tried the webcam for the first time; as reviews note it's sort of a nostril-cam and I also noticed if you're typing your fingers loom large, but I don't use it much. I haven't tried the Thunderbolt or "true" USB3, because I don't have any hardware for the fancy ports. I did get the HDMI out to work in Linux. I haven't screwed with the dual-graphics card setup at all, and it seems to work, in the sense that it isn't causing me any trouble. I haven't directly timed the battery but it's getting at least decent life. (I also pre-emptively replaced the wireless card with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167N9R8E/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167N9R8E/ref=oh_aui_deta... , so I guess I can't promise the broadcom works out of the box.) I did have the motherboard die on this three weeks in, though, which has been frustrating. When it works it's a nice system, a nice counter to the trend of everything being made out of cheap plastic. You can get nicer specs for the same price but it'll be a physically cheaper machine. I've actually had more trouble with the Windows side in terms of drivers. The parathetically-aforementioned pre-emptive replacement of the wireless was on the advice of a coworker who had trouble with the card in Windows. When you turn off the RAID so you can install Linux, the NVMe drivers in Windows become unstable. Some people apparently install the Samsung 950 Pro drivers, which can then have its own problems because of hardware mismatch; I accidentally resolved this problem by purchasing a Samsung 950 Pro anyhow. (I wanted a nice flash drive but didn't want to spend the $$$ upgrading all the other things in the pre-packaged configurations. Plus they don't say what their flash drive is, it's probably not as good.) Also it seems to help if you remove the Dell drivers for the headphone port and revert to the reference drivers, as otherwise the machine can hang when you plug headphones in under load. Which is sorta dumb. I recommend making the first thing you do with the system to build a Windows 10 install image and then make a clean install after turning off the RAID, but be sure to bundle the drivers on the Dell webpage onto the install media, particularly the wireless ones. (I didn't know this at the time, but apparently Windows 10 has licenses stored on the motherboard now, so you don't have to hassle with license keys. It just installs.) Apparently there's some way with fighting through the RAID setting change to repair the system but a clean install is nice for other reasons. (Not too much crapware, but, still.) I will agree that the previous is a potentially frustrating set of issues for either OS for a brand new, high-end laptop. I'm used to beating my laptops into submission anyhow since I run my own quirky XMonad install and other such things, so getting this all slick was just par for the course for me. Assuming this stays working I'm quite happy with it (I'm even really liking the keyboard which a lot of people complain about, so YMMV), but it certainly could have been a nicer experience.
ajsalminen 10y ago
Could you expand a little on what kind of issues you've had with it?
- easytiger 10y ago
  The screen itself mainly, is incredibly dull. it has a matt covering that i thought I wanted, but turns out i don't. When compared in indirect sunlight with the mRBP i can't read the text in a terminal. Practically unusable in certain situations. Often I like to work sitting outside on my balcony and couldn't. Battery life is quite poor despite considerable tweaking. Rarely get more than 2-3 hours of reasonable (low % cpu) use. Disable WiFi and decrease screen brightness and i can get 9-10 on an aircraft on a long flight. I fell it is getting worse over time too. I've also had WiFi driver issues with suspend and resume on linux AND windows. Assumed it was just Ubuntu and their horrendous lack of QA for hardware. My wife also has the same issue on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 on win 10. I just rmmod and insmod the wifi kernel module to repair. PITA. i had similar trackpad issues, these have been resolved. Keyboard is way way too soft/shallow. Could be an issue on most laptops these days. Speakers are on the base of the unit and are incredibly quiet. Quiet to the point where if you have a gentle breeze whip up you completely lose the sound. Considering the cost I'm not impressed. The screen kills it for me. even glare reflecting off windows wipes it out at max brightness.
  - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    I had similar issues with the screen on a HP ProBook I bought last year. The matte screen was way dimmer than my Dell M6500's. When I sent the laptop in for warranty service on the screen (unrelated), the replacement screen was even dimmer. Next time I can afford an arbitrary laptop, it will me another Dell Mobile Workstation like the M6500.
TheWindUpPirate 10y ago
Mind sharing what your biggest issue with the X1 Carbon is? (In the market for a new laptop, and the X1 Carbon is/was on the list.)
- easytiger 10y ago
  See the other comment below.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  As another anecdote, I have purchased six X1 Carbons for staff in the past year or so and they have been great. The staff all travel a lot and they appreciate how light weight it is. The only machine-specific support I have had to provide so far was the SMM BIOS vuln. updates. Despite that, I am making new purchases with Dell mostly because of price and service. Check out the Latitude E7470 in comparison to the X1.
xur17 10y ago
I just purchased a Lenovo X1 Yoga with an OLED screen (very similar to the X1 Carbon, but with a touch screen). I went back and forth between the XPS 13 and the X1, but the slightly bigger OLED screen, better keyboard, and touchpoint swayed me. Hoping I don't regret my decision..
voltagex_ 10y ago
I've got a 3443CTO X1 Carbon from a few years back. Decent build quality, but low res screen and only 4GB of RAM (was all that I could get when I bought it). My "upgrade" is an XPS 9350 for 2.5x the price. Windows 10 still doesn't handle high DPI screens well, and until recent updates there were issues with the Broadcom AC wifi card. For Macbook Pro money, I expect better. There's really nowhere to go for power users who need powerful laptops under 1.5kg.

detaro 10y ago

I wish they made a convertible version, but it seems like convertible and linux friendly doesn't really exist on the market right now...

rvense 10y ago

I got one of these from work. It's pretty great. Still sticking to my ThinkPad X201s for home use, though, much better keyboard.

lol768 10y ago

I had nothing but trouble with my XPS 13 developer edition laptop. Ended up sending it back on the same day I got it. The issues I experienced were seemingly widespread too, with a lot of consumers complaining about the same problems on the forums. There were incredibly irritating keyboard debounce issues (and yes, I was running the latest BIOS version available at the time) and there were also issues with the touchpad glitching out (messing with the mouse cursor position) with X restarting every now and then due to the broken touchpad driver. Really disappointing for a laptop with Linux preinstalled, and I've avoided Dell ever since. To top it all off, it became painfully obvious that the Linux DEs weren't able to do a seamless job of supporting a high-DPI screen (I got the 4K edition) or multitouch touchscreen and interfaces like the login screen were unreadably tiny. I know this got fixed in a more recent version of Ubuntu, but I don't understand why Dell ever shipped the laptop they did.

snerbles 10y ago
GNOME 3 on Debian Jessie works decently well with high-DPI screens - I'm using it now on the 3K 2015 version of the XPS 13. Some controls won't scale up (Java Swing is particularly miniscule), otherwise it just works compared to most other desktop environments I tried last year.

sliken 10y ago

Dell has 2 XPS 13 options. 1) Great battery life, lousy cpu, nice matte screen, not much ram available. 2) Half the battery life, nice cpu (i7-6560), nice GPU (iris 540), and a 3200x1800 reflective screen that reduces your battery life from 22 hours to 12. The Yoga 710s (sadly with the broken BIOS that prevents linux from installing) is much like the theoretical XPS 13 without the power sucking 3200x1800 display. So I was just looking for a decent laptop, decent build quality, and wanted to avoid the pain/suffering relating to trying to get nvidia working with a laptop that sleeps, switches to the internal intel on battery, and has some stupid system for moving pixels from the nvidia chip through the intel chip to get to the frame buffer.