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Man, I'd avoid anything Dell. Our whole company switched to new Dell laptops running Ubuntu, and it is a complete mess (and I've been running Linux since '96,

Man, I'd avoid anything Dell. Our whole company switched to new Dell laptops running Ubuntu, and it is a complete mess (and I've been running Linux since '96, Debian since '00, and Ubuntu since '05). There are OS issues, hardware issues, and driver issues. In terms of OS, Ubuntu/Gnome 3 still hasn't quite figured out hiDPI. Wayland isn't quite ready either. But these are relatively minor nits. The CPU constantly throttles. It has power management issues where the USB isn't providing enough power if the laptop is running off battery. One of the fans in my 3-month old laptop is making funny noises. I'm constantly fighting limited USB bandwidth on the USB-C port, where I have to decide which 4 of my 6 devices to plug in. I get lots of kernel oopses with dropped/hung PCIe transactions. And that's just my laptop. The other folks in the company are having similar problems. Basic stuff, like the camera doesn't work at all in the latest XPS 13 on Ubuntu 18.04. It is pretty frustrating dealing with this relative to my Mac laptop experience which is essentially everything just works.

gargravarr 8y ago
Part of the Mac experience has always been that, since Apple have full control of the hardware, everything Just Works. However, Dell seem to be getting there. Developers here get a choice of XPS 13's running Ubuntu, or MacBook Pros, and most choose the XPS. 18.04 gives you a binary choice of 100% or 200% UI scaling for HiDPI, but that seems to be good enough. Oddly, 16.04 Unity gave you a nice incremental slider for UI scaling. Nonetheless, Windows also doesn't handle HiDPI very well, and I think Apple are the only ones who've cracked it. Indeed, most other companies seem to be copying Apple in this regard - I prefer to have 1080 screens and just make use of the raw pixels rather than faff with HiDPI. No hardware is infallible, and we've had problems with our machines, but Dell customer service has been great - they usually send an engineer out the next day for our company. Can't deny, though, most people's machines display Ubuntu Experienced An Internal Error as soon as they log in, and we just dismiss the prompt. Doesn't seem to affect usability. Otherwise, the machines run Ubuntu very, very smoothly with all the hardware working. I upgraded one of our older XPS 13's to 18.04 with no problems.

gargravarr 8y ago

Part of the Mac experience has always been that, since Apple have full control of the hardware, everything Just Works. However, Dell seem to be getting there. Developers here get a choice of XPS 13's running Ubuntu, or MacBook Pros, and most choose the XPS. 18.04 gives you a binary choice of 100% or 200% UI scaling for HiDPI, but that seems to be good enough. Oddly, 16.04 Unity gave you a nice incremental slider for UI scaling. Nonetheless, Windows also doesn't handle HiDPI very well, and I think Apple are the only ones who've cracked it. Indeed, most other companies seem to be copying Apple in this regard - I prefer to have 1080 screens and just make use of the raw pixels rather than faff with HiDPI. No hardware is infallible, and we've had problems with our machines, but Dell customer service has been great - they usually send an engineer out the next day for our company. Can't deny, though, most people's machines display Ubuntu Experienced An Internal Error as soon as they log in, and we just dismiss the prompt. Doesn't seem to affect usability. Otherwise, the machines run Ubuntu very, very smoothly with all the hardware working. I upgraded one of our older XPS 13's to 18.04 with no problems.