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Comment by scorown | Hacker News Reader

My first Dell as developer machine is XPS 15 9560 but it is in no way a developer machine: - The thunderbolt dock wire out and laptop USB C are on opposite hands. I have to place my laptop on top of the dock like a giant book resting on a brick.

- Awful coil whine on the power adapter.

- Touchpad is annoying to use when clicking moves the finger resulting in wrong place click.

- Had to replace Killer wifi card with Intel's, Dell's support was top notch here.

- If you don't have nails, opening lid can be an unusual experience, especially when laptop is sitting on top of the dock.

Coming from Thinkpad W530 and miss it but our company switched from Lenovo to Dell

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Yeah i've had issues with my XPS 15 9550 as well. I guess they have not been sorted in 9560 :( Once I customized everything (replace wifi card with an Intel based on, new battery under warranty, many many many BIOS fixes) it works well.

However, I would probably steer people to the Precision 5520 instead if you are going 15" and Dell. Comes with Linux and is business class which hopefully means less stupid QA issues and better tech support

I have a 13" 9360 and have similar concerns. I just replaced my Killer WiFi, but Bluetooth is still broken. I think I just haven't found the right driver yet. Did you get it working under 16.04? The touchpad is a mess, I mostly use an external mouse. I don't know why Apple seem to be the only ones who can get touchpads right.

But even with the above, I do like my XPS and would buy it again. The compact size and light weight are great, much lighter and more compact than my 15" Macbook Pro, which mostly sits on my desk in a dock.

The touchpad problems are well documented, e.g. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197683. If your XPS is still under warranty you can request touchpad replacement referring to the thread I linked to above. I'm just scheduling mine, hope it fixes the problem.

I bought the 9560 as my home dev machine. I still vastly prefer my MBP 2015, but this actually was the closest I've ever felt any sort of satisfaction for a non-MBP laptop.

I made a stand out of cardboard, kinda wish they offered something decent out of the box instead of forcing me to get creative with the box.

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