I'll bite the bullet and be that guy. What about dual monitor support? What about suspend/resume? Do WiFi and Bluetooth work without issues?
Suspend/resume works fine.
I've had to restart the network-manager service just once to get WiFi to refresh. Otherwise it's fine reconnecting when you come in/out of suspend.
Other things: battery isn't great but I don't use it away from a desk. On the first couple of days the Ubuntu Software Centre kept crashing; I think it's fine now but I don't tend to use it anyway. I disabled the Dell apt source because it was failing - I don't know if that was a one-off problem or it's just broken.
But, I'm running Linux as my primary development environment again and it just feels _so good_ after a few painful months on OS X.
Can you expand on that, please. Why were you months on OS X painful? Just curious to hear the use case that caused this.
I started a new role a few months ago that forced me onto OS X and found physical and software issues. Physically OS X does not let you configure mice properly without installing third party drivers. Of course I ditched the "magic" mouse pretty quickly after my hand started hurting after a couple of days, but even with a normal mouse you simply cannot configure mouse sensitivity and acceleration properly - it cannot treat a mouse on par with what Linux or Windows will. You need extra drivers to even enable mouse buttons 3,4 and 5.
The keyboard shortcuts hurt too, sometimes using Ctrl, sometimes using Cmd, but that could be just fighting 15 years of muscle memory - so take that with a grain of salt (but it indirectly caused more physical finger pain).
Software-wise I don't know how objective I can be, but it feels faster/simpler to install software and things like the terminal are much better integrated - I can auto-complete git branch names on the command line for instance. Maybe OS X can do that kind of thing, but certainly not out of the box. To me, OS X feels like a 95% emulation of Linux, just that slightly bit lacking.
Then there are the embarrassing things like I couldn't find the shortcut to go to the end of the current line. On Linux it's the End key - on Mac I assume it's some combination somewhere.
Crt+a. Every emacs shortcuts work everywhere in MacOS.
I'm now questioning myself on this comment. I have med-large hands and the magic mouse, even though not intuitive at first, became my favorite mouse. I've tried many difference mouses (I believe that's the plural of the computer kind) since swiping to go back/forth on web pages is so much easier.
I guess its dogmatic; I freely use shortcuts on web browsers to switch to specific tabs or going back/forth when doing research/googling/SO but when I'm browsing/reading/wasting time, and only using the mouse, the swipe is quite intuitive.
Now I have to see if: it's easier to swipe between pages or use a 3rd/4th button to perform similar tasks...i'm sure it's nerdy/geeky but its an interesting question nonetheless, from the daily routine standpoint.
Most of Dells Ultrasharp monitors from the past couple of years have supported Daisychaining through Displayport. I have an older XPS 9333 DE from 2014 and use it with Dell's U2715H and U2415H monitors through a single displayport connection.
The laptop came with Windows 10 preinstalled (Dell did not offer Linux preinstalled in Australia).
I installed Fedora 25 on it. I hit a major issues with the Linux installer failing to recognize the Laptop's built in SSD. I was able to fix this by entering the BIOS and changing the SATA controller to AHCI mode and disabling Secure boot (apparently intel is to blame because bios default SATA "RAID mode" only works under Windows). After I made bios changes Windows partition would no longer boot (not a huge deal for me as I nuked this partition during Linux install).
The first time I closed the lid it failed to wake from suspend and I had to power cycle it. However since then I've updated the system packages quite a few times and it has successfully woken each time I have closed the lid subsequently. So suspect newer kernel fixed this.
For dual monitor support I haven't noticed any issues. But rarely run with an external monitor attached. WiFi worked out of the box. Never used bluetooth on it.
Trackpad is probably biggest issue it feels very poor to use and often does not register clicks. When I mentioned this on LWN some people mentioned changing from synaptics driver to using libinput driver for touchpad - for time being though I have been using an external mouse.
Overall I'm mostly satisfied. For hardware as new as what I purchased everything has worked remarkably well.
Wifi and Bluetooth work just fine. Yet to have an issue.
I drive a 4K Dell screen via a Kensington dock - this is a nice solution, one USB-C connector into the laptop, supplies power, and gives me Ethernet, 4k60 DP (which also allows chaining, but I haven't tried that, yet).
However, I skimmed the article and searched for terms like resume/sleep/wake/suspend without a hit - which I assume means they're working fine.
The article did quote that everything is running out of the box, so, again, the presumption is that those features work.
Bluetooth and Wifi work but who knows in Real World experience since the more you tinker with Linux the more issues you run into (unless you're seasoned).
Dual monitors I have no idea.
Also, those are all valid questions which I think most intro-level folks to Linux ask.
My personal issue with Linux has always been printing. At times, the drivers just stop working or crash a network company printer for no good reason. Not sure if its the novice in me or a SOP for most Linux users.
The two models we have are 283 and 284e; both have similar issues.
I spoke with a tech thinking it was my ignorance when downloading drivers but they told me "I've never seen this issue before". I chalked it up to doing something wrong and quit trying.
The Linux machines at work don't really need to print and I've attempted several times from different distros with similar results.
Again, can totally be my ignorance and lack of time to tinker with so YMMV.
Of course, mind you, dual monitor support on Ubuntu (or any other linux distro) sucks (I guess it's because X is crap). It is, however, functional. You get some annoying glitches when hot-plugging monitors, etc. Sometimes apps crash when both monitors "disappear" (laptop is closed an you disconnect the external monitor). But it works WAY better than I expected.