It's a nice laptop otherwise.
Granted, I’ve still had some random issues with mine, even on the stock version. (The wifi card is glitchy and I have to systemctl restart NetworkManager sometimes, apparently this is a known hardware/firmware issue).
But I try to avoid buying any machines that require drivers that have not been mainlined or are a bit unstable. In 2011, I got burnt by the infamous b43 Broadcom card / driver which, while supported, had disastrous performance. So never again.
Aside, with NixOS, you can lock a particular kernel ABI or rollback if your update breaks. Aside, mainstream distros usually provide LTS kernels.
My Asus netbook was also sold with Linux (remember those days?), and if I want to have stable hardware video acceleration and OpenGL 4.1 support, I would have to keep using the original Ubuntu version that came with it in 2009.
Because the AMD open source drivers downgraded the GL suppport to OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video acceleration is yet to work as smoothly as it used to.
Which OS allows you to upgrade a major version and never break drivers? I guess Darwin does okay if you stay on the narrow happy path of first party hardware, but even then it's not exactly a feat of software engineering.
[ 39.112819] Freezing user space processes
[ 43.053644] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.00 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:5682)
[ 48.173464] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 2 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 53.293290] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 3 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 58.413471] usb 1-5: Failed to query (GET_INFO) UVC control 6 on unit 2: -110 (exp. 1).
[ 59.114437] Freezing user space processes failed after 20.001 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0):It's one of the reasons I'm not buying the Inspiron 16 plus in this moment.
I've owned several Inspirons and have no issues but then I use Arch (actually). Have a look into what kernels are on offer and consider a different one. However you may have another issue because I seem to recall that cams are now all basically standards based.
Try grabbing a couple of live "CDs" of other distros and boot them. See if your camera works. Try something like OpenSuSE "tumbleweed".
There are no drivers for the webcam.
But right now there's just some hacky out of kernel drivers for the no-longer-even-recent Intel IPU6 camera controller, which is on a lot of laptops.
Intel's been slowly working on this. Here's an update from May: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Progressing . Fedora has this out of kernel tree in driver. But it's been like this for a long time. Here's a well known kernel maintainer warning people off last August: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop
Honestly I'm shocked Intel has been this dodgy for this long. I feel like overall Intel today huegly gets it. They have enormous dedication to getting drivers out there & making systems work well, in a way very few companies compare against. But they are hit or miss across different divisions. I'm not sure what the IPU6 folks see as their path to getting upstreamed, or whether they intend to keep just floating along out of kernel for a bit.
It does look like there is support for pretty modern kernels out-of-tree, & there is a repo with binary firmware, so I wouldn't be shocked to hear that XPS13s and most IPU6 systems work pretty ok.
It’s also sad that this is basically the only Linux-preinstalled and supported hardware from a mainstream company. When I have a choice it’s between one of these or MacBook Air and I’d choose the Mac at this point and forgo Linux
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
They do however support Linux, and have the best upstreaming support that I've seen getting fingerprint readers, webcams, etc all with working kernel drivers.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/operating-systems/how-to-i...
The XPS's I've tried in the past have always ended up with unsupported hardware after a while, so I've written them off.