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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

The dell xps 13 is a really nice laptop, and it's fully compatible with linux because dell even has a 'developer edition' of the laptop that ships with ubuntu.

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I'm going to push back on this one for Linux: The "developer edition" thing was nice when they first started it out and Linux laptops were super-rare. But even then, it was clear that this was a Windows machine that was awkwardly cajoled into mostly-kinda supporting Linux. Some stuff didn't work, there are proprietary drivers that only work with Ubuntu, and in general it just required a lot of tweaking to get it to work at all, in a way that makes it fragile to change -- you really need to run the preloaded Ubuntu and nothing else.

Now that there are machines out there that work out of the box with any upstream Linux kernel, the XPS Windows-first, Linux-eventually model just doesn't seem appealing.

And very concretely, one problem with it is that there's a wait between the Windows version appearing and the Linux-mostly-supporting one appearing. With the recent XPS 13 refresh to the 9315 model, there is currently no developer edition available (Dell lists it as "discontinued" if you go to its webpage), and the Arch wiki shows major compatibility problems, like the webcam not working: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Dell

Yeah, mine's from ~ 2016 I think. Before that I had a insp 1420 which was also well known for it's linux compatibility. Apparently things have gotten worse in recent years?

I was really unimpressed with mine. I've never quite figured out what got the XPS such a good reputation. By comparison, the lg gram Just Worked, though I don't know if they make a 13" model.

My last "PC" laptop experiment was a fully loaded XPS 15. It's probably the tech purchase I regret most in my life. I cannot fathom how that $3k laptop passes for high quality. Constantly runs hot so you're not even able to take advantage of the dedicated GPU since it's always throttling. Fans are almost always running full blast. Driver issues with what is supposed to be an amazing display ruined the entire experience. Not to mention the sleep / hibernation issues which require you to manually shut down your laptop before closing the lid or it's a 50/50 shot it will continue to run full power in your backpack cooking itself to death.

My XPS ran hot with Ubuntu 18.04 despite lots of attempts to under clock and such. However it runs like a dream under 22.04. I don't know what changed but it's a totally different machine. It's so slick and responsive it makes my M1 macbook feel sluggish. Really remarkable.

I love my Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu - yes, a lot of things (docking stations, video conferencing tools, etc.) that "just work" on Windows and Mac need some TLC to get working, but once over that hump it's been great.

This is the flimsiest laptop I've ever had.

It's a big no for me.

Huh, I wonder if recent models have gotten significantly worse, cause the build quality on mine is quite good.

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