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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

I own a dell xps 15. Same, i don't recommand it. Autonomy is abysmal, usbc support very poor, the bios took a year to be stable and the sound died after some months. Not worth the price tag. Mind you, the xps 13 doesn't seem to have the same problems.

I still love my old samsung 9 serie and wish the brand would have worked out the quirks and made a new one.

My next try will be a thinkpad carbon since every owner around me are very happy.

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This was also my experience with the XPS15. Took a lot of struggle just for really basic hardware to start working properly on the ubuntu side, also extremely painful to install ubuntu itself and to have it recognize the XPS15's touchpad.

I would not spend 1400$ and 10-20 hours to configure the damn thing again, do not recommend.

Had the same experience with Dell XPS and ubuntu 17.02 and earlier versions.

Upgrading 17.10 and everything is working perfectly.

Still would rather use my MacBook though because of software incompatibilities.

Interesting, so everything works on the xps 15 w/ Ubuntu 17.10? I want to pull the trigger on buying one but I am concerned about the Linux support.

Also, do you know if the new XPS 15 support a two hard drive configuration?

technically it does not "work" but after some amount of hours of googling specific issues that pop up you can get it going. it's painful though.

Any pointers on specific issues to look out for? I'm thinking of upgrading from 16.04 on my XPS 15

I use the precision. my biggest issue was with getting encrypted drive setup. the trick was to use the dell recovery image to install with encryption. this works but leaves the machine with an older kernel that doesn't have all the tweeks around usbc and wifi and such. You have to switch to the Hardware Enablement Stack to get it running well.

Everything works great for me, no problems.

I have the Dell Precision M5520 developer edition which is the Linux version of the XPS 15 with Intel WiFi and I opted for only integrated graphics to avoid graphics drivers on Linux.

It works flawlessly with Ubuntu 17.10. I have the UHD screen which looks great with 2x scaling. I do a lot of work with Docker and can work much faster on Linux than before when I was on a MBP and had to run a VM.

Do you manage to get the 11h hours of battery they promised when they first marketed the laptop ? Because I get 4h on a good day.

I probably get 5-6 when coding and browsing in Linux. I have the big battery that fills the hard drive bay.

I had enough hiccups getting a clean install of Windows 10 Pro to function fully featured on my XPS15 (6 individual drivers to get full support from the Thunderbolt dock), I couldn't imagine getting a Linux environment going.

Also got the xps 15 and don't recommend it.

The PCH overheats very easily causing cpu/gpu tasks to throttle for its life.

The system has a interrupt overload from the WiFi extreme which causes subtle stuttering.

I've lost 47%battery health in just over a year.

The sound pops when playing YouTube videos and sometimes just goes Max volume until the sound card resets.

The graphics card didn't work when I got it and had to be downgraded to a different model and version for it to work.

The thing is a piece of shit. I had the macbook 2015 before that and it worked flawlessly in comparison.

> Mind you, the xps 13 doesn't seem to have the same problems.

Maybe not the same but I've also had bad time with 13. Coil whine, 10 seconds to dell logo after pressing power button (sic!) and u had one firmware update that bricked the laptop. Fortunately it was still under warranty. And don't get me even started on accessories (TB15 was a disaster that should've been recalled).

I have an XPS 13 and also cannot recommend it. Same deal with the coil whine (it's a very annoying buzz sound). After a while, my battery began to swell too, which has broken the touchpad and visibly elevated the keyboard.

I have an XPS 15 (>2 years old) and also had battery swell, which made the trackpad unusable along with other safety concerns. Dell decided to replace the batteries for the 84wh model for free, but not for the 56wh model, which is very disappointing...

Also the throttling in the XPS 15 is real. Even with the 960m I can't even run light games on it because of frequent fps drops... And the BIOS was pretty unstable for the first year (laptop running fans at maximum while in sleep mode, while getting really hot inside my bag), with lots of coil whine. Overall, I am very disappointed in the overall build quality of it (I previously had a 2010 macbook pro and had no problems). Going to try a Lenovo for my next laptop (it seems to have less build quality issues)

:/ wow, I was about to sell my 2015 mbp and get a xps. If not an XPS I don't know what to get. I've tried out a few of the newwer thinkpads and I'm just not impressed. Maybe I'll check out the carbon though.

I have a Dell XPS 15 as well. Mine does the coil whine and the keyboard isn't great. It's kind of sad, but it's probably still the closest thing to a MBP that I've had out of a non-Apple laptop.

I'm also running Elementary OS on it and it's been okay.

The Razer blades are more like MacBooks both in shape and in inability to upgrade the hardware.

Much faster GPUs, though.

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