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Comment by siscia | Hacker News Reader

I am a little scared by the touch screen, I have never had one and I don't think I need it...

Anyway the extra complexity that come with it doesn't makes me comfortable...

Any experiences so far ?

Love it, thought I would not use it, but actually, when typing, if it's a pop up window, touch is quicker then trackpoint or pad to tap away, swiping windows to lock them to the sides is good, swipe to go forward and back in a browser, sure, it's not viable to hold your arm up and do anything intensive, but for single location taps, I like it!

There will be a non-touch option (a matte 1080p screen): "The i5 configuration will come with 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD and FHD NT. The timing of the i5 config is dependent on the depletion of the current inventory on hand." From the project lead's blog: http://bartongeorge.net/2016/03/10/xps-13-developer-edition-...

I'm personally looking forward to this model!

I have the previous gen xps 13 9350 in matte 1080p and it's great. I don't want higher res or touch. Plus lower power. I do wish I had 16GB in it, but that wasn't an option.

Its useless. Hopefully doesn't get in your way. I had it disabled for a while, until some update overwrite my settings. I perhaps didn't realize this for quite some time, and later just didn't care to re-edit the config.

Otherwise, it good laptop. I'm happy with my decision.

I have a 'Dell precision m3800' and it has a touchscreen. Never touched it. It came with ubuntu preinstalled, and the first thing I did was a full reinstall: these manufacturers tend to just have 1 partition for everything, while I prefer another scheme ( /home really needs to be a separate partition IMNSHO)

Does Dell offer a repository for all their drivers or some other way to get the same build that it comes with out of the box? Or all they really all open source and in Ubuntu's repository? I need a laptop with great Linux support but may prefer to have it pre-installed with Windows for gaming and install my own Linux partition.

XPS13 / QHD / Touch user here (last years model). I've used it rarely but it works without flaws. (Well, firefox can't really handle multitouch on X11, but that's a whole different story).

Only problem is that it's incompatible with kids. "Hey, what's that? TAP"

Oh, let me press reply on the screen :-)

I have a different 13" laptop with a touchscreen (also Dell, but not XPS), and while I don't use it a huge amount I do quite like being able to quickly tap at stuff now and then. Personally I wouldn't pay more than a very small amount to upgrade to a touchscreen, but I don't mind having it there, and I've not had any issues caused by it at all.

(Disclaimer: I used to work on marketing - Dell was my client, not my employer - for the brand I'm using, which is Alienware. Currently I have no connection to Dell/Alienware other than friends working there and trying to decide whether to keep using my Alienware 13 or to switch to an XPS 13...)

If the Razer blade stealth had a 16/32gb option I'd pick it over a Alienware 13 or XPS 13

http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-stealth

I use a Microsoft Surface, and don't use the touchscreen most of the time (type cover + USB mouse are almost always connected). It is nice to have though - some things (like zooming into a certain section of a webpage) are more convenient with the touch screen (I've actually caught myself about to reach out and touch my non-touch desktop monitor a couple of times...)

I am running Arch on the non-developer edition XPS 15 (late 2015 edition). Initially the touchpad was occasionally not recognised, then having a touchscreen is really useful :) Other than that, I got it because there was no HiDPi screen without touch. And HiDPi is definitely worth it.

How is hidpi support on Arch?

As good or bad as you want it to be. Arch doesn't have any default gui or desktop environment, so it really depends on what window manager / desktop environment you run. Gnome3 and kde5 are both pretty good out of the box with hidpi, xfce is pretty simple to get working. Not sure past that as my experience with Hidpi support past testing was turning it off for the gtk and qt programs I use as I find 4k at 28" fine at native res/scale.

But in general, arch keeps packages as vanilla as possible, so there's no default/recommended configurations like there are with most distros.

I’m using Gnome and it works surprisingly well. All browsers and Gnome apps look great out of the box (apart from blurry icons occasionally). Qt or WxWidgets-based apps have clipped text and small checkboxes etc; they are usable but it is not pleasant. I use only two of those apps, and I rarely use anything more than a terminal, a browser and a music player, so 90% of the time everything looks great.

I didn’t have to configure anything; Gnome automatically set the scaling factor to 2 and everything worked out of the box, browsers too.

I use arch in a VM on my HiDPI XPS13 with and without a desktop environment. Support is simple, if it doesn't recognize the HiDPI automatically (I could understand from inside a VM but I would suspect it running on hardware), support is just one setting in the X11 config file. With distros that don't have HiDPI support, I set the internal VM resolution to half my screen size and then set the VM scale to 2.0 within VMware. Overall a good experience.

I have a new XPS 15 and you can completely disable the touchscreen in the BIOS. I did this pretty much the first week I got the machine.

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