Dell sells a few "developer editions" of their XPS13 with Ubuntu preloaded [1].
[1] http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/xps-13-9350-laptop-ubuntu/...
[1] http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/xps-13-9350-laptop-ubuntu/...
Ubuntu has been terrible. I switched to Fedora 24 on the XPS 13 and it has been brilliant. No other laptop (not even macbooks) come with that weight/power ratio.
Everything works - including skype, etc. suspend resume has worked absolutely perfectly.
I really, really recommend using Fedora. Ubuntu has not been delivering the experience that the hype expects.
Works way better than expected and I use it ten hours a day. At some point, Wayland solves this natively, but in the meantime this is an acceptable workaround.
It is 80% there, and if I didn't just get a MBP from work, I'd probably spend some more time with Fedora outside the VM.
Either way, if MS doesn't clean up their act, I'm done with Windows after a long time of daily use.
Long version: It seems there are two kinds of people here:
Some like me never think about any font that finds its way into any mainstream distro.
Others seems to care deeply about them.
I find it useful to keep this in mind as I honestly find one of the highly praised Mac a usability disaster (tried honestly to work with it or around it for almost three years).
I personally would love to see a proper graphics application. I would use linux as my main PC in a heartbeat if a Sketch equivalent was available. I expect a lot of people have similar feelings or have one thing keeping them from completely making the jump.
I recently got a MBP and the fonts are great. In 2016, Linux needs this fixed.
That's like saying some art dealers don't care what paintings look like. They just sell the stuff.
I know three types that I use: serif, sans-serif and monospaced programming fonts.
I do however care a lot about keyboard layouts, keyboard shortcuts and general snappiness of the OS so I am definitely a programmer ;-)
Edit: and I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not an "art dealer" anyway, more like someone in logistics. :-)
Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.
Switching to Linux is not like switching brands of cars. It's more like switching from a car to a motorcycle. The rules are different, the ride is different, the functioning knowledge you need is different. Don't expect your car-seat to work anymore, you'll need a different product entirely to achieve the same function.
Especially if you are switching for philosophical reasons, I'd say just bite the bullet and learn to adjust. There are a lot of huge benefits, but also a lot of things you're used to just won't work anymore.
I haven't touched Windows in 3 years. You definitely don't need it.
Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.
This is quite an irrelevant point. macOS is also very different from Windows, from the POSIX API (which makes it very similar to Linux) to Cocoa. And yet Skype works fine.
The real reason is more likely to be that Microsoft just doesn't want to support Linux properly. Of course, the reasons are more clouded, possible reasons are: virtually no marketshare on the desktop, large fragmentation, or they simply see Linux as a competitor that they don't want to give momentum. Given that they do support Android, iOS, and macOS, my guess would be the former two.
rm -rf /opt/skype
But there's a new official client coming based on WebRTC :
https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-Alpha-a...
No video yet though
Jitsi Meet is a self-hosted, enterprise-grade alternative which works just as well. It even supports larger video conferences than Skype.
Easier said than done when colleagues, friends, and family use Skype for video calling.
Public instance there: https://meet.jit.si/
Company I work for migrated from Skype to Jitsi for meetings.
This is all with Debian Linux btw.
The desktop experience of Linux in general is still a bit off, but if you are like me and spend 99% of your time in the terminal or a web browser it certainly gets the job done. You can always supplement with a VM if you have to run "that program".
I don't understand why the XPS is so popular compared to similar priced business grade Thinkpad and Latitudes.
Only nit is that the standby battery life is only a few days. I upgraded from the 3-cell (which was pretty old and lasted about two hours) to a 6-cell. I'm still testing it but it lasts at least 5 hours under moderate usage. I think with the brightness on low it could last 10.