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Comment by bketelsen | Hacker News Reader

I've had the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu installed for a few weeks now and love it. It works as well as you could hope any Linux laptop could work.

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I've heard that the only hardware difference between the standard + developer edition is the WiFi card (Broadcom vs. Intel) and that a lot of people just buy the standard edition and replace the substandard Broadcom card for the better Intel one.

I've been using the standard version with Ubuntu (Kernel 4.4) and the Broadcom driver is also perfectly stable for me.

I've had 3 hand-me-down computers, all with Broadcom drivers and they all exhibit bizarre behaviour which rendered the computers unusable. For one of them, the solution was to switch to the proprietary drivers and the other two just had to be replaced with equivalent Intel cards.

tl;dr mileage depends, but it's universally accepted that Broadcom cards are shit.

Got myself the XPS 13 standard and it seems to work well. Fonts at 3200x1800 looks as great as on a smartphone and I was dubious about the touch screen but it has won me over.

Lazily poking the screen for browsing the web is a mobile paradigm that I welcome on the desktop.

The only thing that annoys me is not having a dedicated home, end, page up and page down buttons. They're mapped to the arrow keys + Fn.

Speaking of Thinkpads. My first is a T450 which I got for work recently. It's solidly built but lacks a premium feel to it. Also the display has awful viewing angles.

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