With Fedora, everything (except the fingerprint reader) just worked, even firmware updates. No configuration, no messing around, the entire process was flawless.
I don't care for the fingerprint reader, and the USB-C dock uses DisplayLink, which is beyond awful.
Here's a link, but I see the price already gone up a little:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-pavilion-15-cs...
It has a slot for an M.2 card that does not interfere with the rotating SATA drive, so I'm about to try that. I'd like to have both installed. SSD is nice for Linux but is absolutely required for Windows.
One nice thing about Dell XPS: they have the Thunderbolt port. I theorize that this is potentially very useful for a corner case that I have: you can add a PCIe box and add a parallel printer port card that accepts ancient security dongles required by certain engineering software that I invested in the past.
NVidia, no way to working fine on Linux: you will wait for new drivers after each kernel update and tons of another issues.
As installed: 18.04 works, but long delay when you login because nouveau driver is having problems (a bunch of timeouts from it in dmesg). But it does seem to work (I didn't understand the reason for the delay at first).
Install Nvidia closed-source "435" driver: the above problem is fixed, but now it does not recover from suspend.
Force it to use the Intel GPU with "nvidia-settings". Now all is good. Intel driver is supposed to be lower power anyway.
It's interesting that the there are two GPUs that can share the same video port.
There is also something going with the WIFI driver:
iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: FW already configured (0) - re-configuring
iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: BIOS contains WGDS but no WRDS
I've found that installing a 1 TB M.2 EVO 860 SSD works, and you can also have the mechanical hard drive at the same time. However, the BIOS is stupid: it always wants to boot from the 2.5" drive, so you need to install grub on it. I used a Samsung migration tool to move Windows 10 to the SSD, but Windows itself is stupid- it's random whether it boots the new SSD partition or the old 2.5" partition.
I'm hoping 20.04 will be a smoother experience once it's released (we only run LTSs on development machines at work).
One of my new team members couldn't get her brand new XPS15 to output to a 4K TV (1080p internal disolay) on 18.04 yesterday. The screen would just constantly flash on and off. We had to settle for her using 1080 for presentations etc on the office TVs as no combination of proprietary drivers or Nvidia on/off resolved it.