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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I have one of these and think it's pretty good. I am really happy to have been able to give my money to someone selling me something with Linux on it.

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Hi David,

I have one of these too! But which one, that is the rub. As far as I can tell there are now three versions of project Sputnik. I too am so happy to throw my € in Dell's direction. I have the second because I bought mine just before the recent Haswell refresh, gah :(

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Original version ... November 2012 1: http://bartongeorge.net/2012/11/29/sputnik-has-landed-introd...

Brings 1080p (after much clamour and feedback) ... February 2013 2: http://bartongeorge.net/2013/02/18/spuntik-2-is-here-xps-13-...

Brings Haswell ... November 2013 http://bartongeorge.net/2013/11/15/introducing-sputnik-3-and...

Not sure which version the original poster is reviewing, I always meant to review mine and haven't done so yet. I upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04LTS to 13.10 and had to futz about a bit with backlight keys. Wifi drivers kept glitching out until recently. I had to add TRIM support myself (I had thought it was there, it wasn't!)

Might be an idea to set up a Sputnik User's site unless one exists :) as opposed to a Dell forum or employee's blog.

tip o' the hat ...

Want to start one?

Want to help?

The reviewer mentions they're reviewing the November 2013 Haswell Refresh. My work laptop is the Feb 2013 1080p version, and as an Apple fan I must say I'm very impressed with the quality of this machine... and the 1080p screen is really fantastic.

How did you resolve your WiFi issues? Quite often I've found the laptop unable to connect to random hotel WiFi (with no useful indication of why in logs/dmesg) and I have to connect via my S3 and share the connection via USB.

For a while I had terrible (in the 800msec - 4000msec range) RTT pinging an AP right next to me, running:

    sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save off

did the trick for me (issued after every boot or through an UDev rule such as https://raw.github.com/lvillani/ansible-playbooks/9dc40c75cf...)

I didn't actively do anything to fix WiFi. I just upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu and enabled backports in the repository settings to stay current (but not in bleeding-edge dev mode, no thanks I gotta work). The driver seemed to crash on coming out of suspend/hibernate/whatever sleep state it was in. This kept generating automatic error reports that were phoned home. A few weeks ago this stopped happening so either Ubuntu or kernel Wifi devs or somebody somewhere has gotten a fix in. Let's hope it stays that way. I really didn't dig into it.

The Dell Sputnik forum has been somewhat useful, but mark me interested in a possible third party forum/list for sputnik users. I'm still running 12.04 (plus too many PPAs for apps) on my Sputnik beta XPS. Lots of folks are doing fine with other Ubuntu but I'm waiting for another LTS. I mostly use Gnome classic and Gnome 3, fwiw.

Other than the touchpad still being too sensitive for my preferences (this gripe not limited to the XPS) it's been a awesome machine. It was my first SSD machine and still boots so fast. I'm jealous of the newer CPUs especially if battery life extends.

I too am jealous of the new CPU and chipsets as it does seem to extend battery life by all accounts. Also the new Intel integrated graphics chipset is said to have a fair bit more grunt which I wouldn't mind. Oh well. If only I'd known, I'd have held off a few months.

A few people seem interested in a third-party forum so maybe...

I think the standard for friendly hardware should be open firmware support (Coreboot), rather than what’s preinstalled on HDD.

Knowing that you're not also paying for a windows license and inflating the Windows market share numbers is also nice.

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