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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to throw my money at Dell last year. I wanted the top of the line XPS laptop with Linux. But I needed it quick. At that point, at least, Dell were building them to order in China. Two weeks plus shipping for the UK market.

I'm not sure if this is the same for their other models but I bet there's a big pile of Windows machines sitting in an EU warehouse.

To add insult to injury, I asked if they could improve the price in a web chat and the guy botched it so hard he added an extra £93 onto the price. Outsourced, off-shored support at its very worst.

In the end I dropped a fraction of the money on a next-day-delivered Thinkpad 13, tore Windows off it and raised another flag for glorious penguin.

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No, same with Win10 machines.

Bought an XPS13 maxed out from Dell. Website deceivably back then said 2 days shipping, but I didn't realize it meant 2 days to deliver it to the carrier and the 3 weeks to Germany from China. Website made it look like it was in Europe when I ordered. BIOS gives smoke detection loudness (!) level alarms at night when some hardware part fails and laptop reboots.

Beside that, hardware is crappy, get's too hot, also hardware gives load pitching and buzzing noises when under load. Keyboard has problems too. I can't run Linux b/c I've stupidly ordered NVMe.

Would never again buy Dell, I'm back with Apple for my next laptop.

FWIW, my Lenovo T460s also has NVMe and it works just fine via /dev/nvme*. Eg. my boot partition is /dev/nvme0n1p1

Yeah I'm using nvme on a few machines. No issue.

How is NVMe preventing you from running Linux? Linux has had NVMe support since 2012 (3.3). I use NVMe on a Dell XPS 13 9350 Developer Edition as my daily driver with no issue.

Well Dell clearly doesn't have their shipping logistics down. I'm sure if you bought a Dell via Amazon Prime, it would arrive next day.

It's a pity they're not stocked more by third party retailers, that would have sorted your issue out. I had a similar issue with the warranty, because I was a bit uncertain about the coil whine issue, I preferred to buy from a retailer rather than directly from Dell (who don't have a clear no-questions-asked return window), but the Linux laptops aren't available from other major shops in the UK. There must be a lot of people who have bought the Windows laptops and installed Linux themselves. The oddity is those purchases are based on the existence of the Sputnik programme, but Dell presumably won't be able to account for them on that basis.

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