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I own two XPS developer edition laptops. The second one is up for an upgrade and the CPU is the one thing that is its weakest spot (Kaby Lake in my case), often

I own two XPS developer edition laptops. The second one is up for an upgrade and the CPU is the one thing that is its weakest spot (Kaby Lake in my case), often on its limit when using Zoom for example and runs hot. But I think that with such minor upgrades of the CPU, I will tell bye to Dell. This is the advantage of good competition. I still wonder if Dell would push a model with Zen in the next say 6 months before starting to look elsewhere.

varispeed 6y ago
I am going with XPS as well. Honestly I couldn't find a better laptop at the time with features that are important to me, but even so it is still a nightmare to use. It runs hot, can't play HD videos on YT (Google doesn't support hardware decoding in Chrome) and I couldn't get NVidia drivers to work properly. I am going to buy a laptop with AMD cpu next year. I hope that if more people do it Dell will finally drop Intel. I cannot support a company that wastes money they are overcharging and not doing any research to improve their products. 5 years or so of the same CPUs just with different packaging and minor tweaks is just beyond joke.
- heelix 6y ago
  I picked up one of the XPS 17" laptops. The screen is just gorgeous. If you go Centos on it, be prepared to do battle with the killer nic. (argh)
  - thekyle 6y ago
    Curious, why CentOS instead of Fedora?
    - heelix 6y ago
      All the work stuff is running RHEL, so Centos is closer when it comes to all the software I'd run. I'm tempted to say Centos 8 Streams is Fedora... but I had a couple packages where it was tricky to get that to work, so currently doing the normal Centos 8 release. Everything else was Centos, so thus picking that when setting up the XPS. As personal workstation OS, I all my JetBrain (GoLand, IntelliJ) development tools, VMWare Workstation, a mess of databases, and... Steam on my home desktop. Getting video drivers set to work nicely with proton is really what drives the laptop and I sorted that last year with the AMD cards on my threadripper last year. (now, it is silly easy, but last December...ye gods) If I can ever get my hands on a 3080, I assume the driver setup for NVidia will be similar for the 2060 in the laptop.

varispeed 6y ago

I am going with XPS as well. Honestly I couldn't find a better laptop at the time with features that are important to me, but even so it is still a nightmare to use. It runs hot, can't play HD videos on YT (Google doesn't support hardware decoding in Chrome) and I couldn't get NVidia drivers to work properly. I am going to buy a laptop with AMD cpu next year. I hope that if more people do it Dell will finally drop Intel. I cannot support a company that wastes money they are overcharging and not doing any research to improve their products. 5 years or so of the same CPUs just with different packaging and minor tweaks is just beyond joke.

heelix 6y ago
I picked up one of the XPS 17" laptops. The screen is just gorgeous. If you go Centos on it, be prepared to do battle with the killer nic. (argh)
- thekyle 6y ago
  Curious, why CentOS instead of Fedora?
  - heelix 6y ago
    All the work stuff is running RHEL, so Centos is closer when it comes to all the software I'd run. I'm tempted to say Centos 8 Streams is Fedora... but I had a couple packages where it was tricky to get that to work, so currently doing the normal Centos 8 release. Everything else was Centos, so thus picking that when setting up the XPS. As personal workstation OS, I all my JetBrain (GoLand, IntelliJ) development tools, VMWare Workstation, a mess of databases, and... Steam on my home desktop. Getting video drivers set to work nicely with proton is really what drives the laptop and I sorted that last year with the AMD cards on my threadripper last year. (now, it is silly easy, but last December...ye gods) If I can ever get my hands on a 3080, I assume the driver setup for NVidia will be similar for the 2060 in the laptop.