Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition: Now available with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
dell.com
dell.com
I need 32GB. Because modern developer applications are incredibly RAM hungry. My Jetbrains IDEs eat up easily a dozen GB for indexes on my projects. gopls takes up a couple GB. Firefox fluctuates, but often half a dozen depending on how many tabs I have. Add in a few electron apps, and I'm at 27GB used right now.
You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. I want the multitasking performance.
I'm currently on the previous generation Dell XPS 13 (9310), and I'm still satisfied, I'm not actually looking for a new laptop. But it was the exact same story when I was shopping for it. Impossible to get the developer edition, so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself. Arguably it's more resellable because I can just wipe the Linux partition, re-merge the partitions, and it'll look pretty much stock. But meh. Worth mentioning that Linux Wi-Fi drivers for the model I have is terrible because they had two different chips they were using for XPS laptops and getting 32GB meant I would get that "upgraded" (but actually worse) chip. Had to fight with kernel upgrades to get a patch ahead of time to make it usable.
Pricey machine, BTW.
The work laptop does indeed have 32GB, because containers everywhere, which is something I don't use at home or development side gigs.
I don't understand the resale value either? You can always re-install windows? Do people pay more with the "original" Windows installation? Shouldn't you actually want to explicitly wipe before you sell??
But the general public, non-Linux users, will find it much less attractive if there's no Windows license, making its resale somewhat more difficult.
And as I said, that is what I do; I bought the Windows version of the last-gen XPS 13 and installed Linux on it (dual boot).
I was questioning your logic.
Are you concerned with it's purchase price or it's resale value? You can't have both, can you?
I don't understand why you use dual boot, if you only care for Linux? Or maybe you don't? Then why complain?
The capacitive top row renders it a clear "management" option anyway, I don't understand the appeal of it for development.
I think you don't have your priorities sorted out.
Re dual boot, because if I do have a Windows license, I rather not just throw it away. I don't mind losing like 50GB of my storage just to keep Windows around in case I need to sell the thing or send it back for warranty. Doesn't hurt to have sometimes to test something in a Windows browser or whatever, from time to time as well (yes, VMs are a thing but meh, overhead and jank).
Then you basically give microsoft free money for windows license you don't use because the price includes windows license price.
You definitely can though https://imgur.com/a/tL10iNZ
> You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5.
You can select the i7-1260p option. Not the top one, but definitely not the i5.
But this:
>Capacitive touch function row
is a hard no. I cannot wait for this fad to die.
Personally, I probably wouldn't mind it. I rarely use F keys these days, other than the occasional volume/refresh/brightness stuff. I'm not a vim user so I don't use ESC that much. I use DEL a lot though, so that might be annoying.
I wouldn’t be so comfortable speaking for an entire legacy user base so casually.
I guess that's why you still use the ESC key. You need to break some eggs to make an omelette!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esc_key#/media/File%3AKB_Ter...
Also, Dell seems to be either lying or incredibly incompetent:
> As of today, the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is available in the following countries
Let's try the links they themselves put:
- US: Yes
- Canada: Yes
- Germany: Nope
- France: Nope
- UK: Nope
- Austria: Yes
- Netherlands: Yes
- Ireland: Yes
- Italy: Yes
- Switzerland: Yes
- ...
What is going on? That makes no sense.
Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data.
I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.
I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk?
At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened?
Meh.
node_modules
> and setting up the dual-boot myself.
Only good thing about XPS is that you can replace the NVMe drive. So when I bought mine, I also bought a separate NVMe drive and simply removed the one laptop came with and just installed Linux on a new drive. When my XPS died, I could buy a cheap used laptop (got a ThinkPad!) and put my XPS's drive in it and recover any data I needed.
With M1 you don't have that option sadly.
I will never buy an Apple product ever again, frankly. I hate their walled garden.
That said, I'm not too happy with the Linux support in our model as well. I replaced Ubuntu with Arch (was the plan anyway) and had to fiddle with the fingerprint sensor, plus the WiFi is not suitable for pentesting (but worked out of the box on Arch). Bluetooth causes lockups, so I disabled that (maybe fixed with recent kernels?). Not exactly what I expected from a laptop that's sold with Linux. Next one will probably be not Dell.
I've noticed many laptops that come with a Windows installation often have a separate recovery partition (about 4-5gb in size, which is about the size of a Windows ISO) that is used to 'factory reset' the device.
If you have one, you should be able to safely clear the Windows partition, reformat it, and install Linux. When the time to resell the thing comes, you simply reinstall the OG system from this recovery image and get the OS in 'mint' (yet heavily outdated) condition.
No bloatware lost! :)
Then at the end of the article, I saw it list the UK as a country in which the laptop is available, and was pleasantly surprised: "As of today, the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is available in the following countries (available configurations may vary by country):"
The words "United Kingdom" are even a link to the Dell UK page to buy it. I click on the words. The configure-and-buy page opens. Operating system: Only Windows 11 is listed.
Just... what? What is going on here? They explicitly said the Ubuntu edition is available in the UK, and then it isn't. Why does it feel like there's some bizarre conspiracy to deprive people in the UK of the Linux SKUs?
I had the same problem in the Netherlands with my XPS 13 with Ubuntu 20.04. The local website didn't list it, but when I gave the phone rep one of the codes they use for it on the US website they could order it (they were genuinely surprised at that). Dell's website really sucks, and it hides or shows things based either on outdated inventory data, or really black-boxy algorithms.
Even their cookie box is weird. I’ve never seen ”Declinate all” as an option.
I… guess something to do with having en_GB as language set in my browser? Am I the only one getting this option to accept cookies for everyone? It feels like a huge responsibility.
(Screenshot: https://postimg.cc/t1D1n3Pq)
Or did the US SKU give you a US keyboard?
The filtering functions of their shops insist there's no options for Linux laptops. Then you use full text search and some show up. Obviously not the dev laptops I'd have wanted, but still.
These companies need to get their act together; it's unbelievable how bad their online shops are in 2022.
But a few months ago, I had bought an HP EliteBook 845 G8 for work. Note the 5, it's the AMD version. We went through an intermediary to buy (our usual supplier), and I suspected there was some funny business going on, since it physically had a Realtek WiFi card while the merchant's description said Intel and I specifically wanted Intel. This wasn't some kind of shady seller off Amazon, mind, but a reputable local business.
Lo and behold, HP's site didn't have any such model. I was checking it from the computer in front of me. Not only did their online store not seem to carry any EB845, even the "models" only tangentially mentioned it. They wouldn't show any details when clicking on it.
But if I went to Google and looked for the computer's manual, it would show up, on the local HP France site, in French. The warranty check would correctly identify the product, with the correct country and date of purchase. Digging around the manuals, with my SKU in hand, it was indeed supposed to have the RTL Wifi card.
In Slovakia there's no official e-shop for Dell, Google, Apple (and presumably others), you have to go through resellers, where prices are higher and vary from one shop to another, and most of them don't have the build your own system option and/or don't list all available configurations...
At least for Apple and their Premium resellers (in Slovakia: mzone, iStores, iSTYLE), they are exactly the same. They have to be. (This can be a disadvantage as well).
Different countries, different laws, different taxes.
Although delivery might be tricky for non Swiss residents/workers.
10 of the links do actually have the Ubuntu option: USA, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Norway
3 of the links DO NOT have the Ubuntu option: Germany, France, UK
We still have a Dell laptop bought as high end developer machine well over 10 years ago running Linux as surf PC here at home. The support Web site was excellent back then and the build quality obviously, too.
Nowadays they seem to be unable to sell. No idea whether it would be worth making any efforts to buy.
On Dell's website, when you visit the UK store and you are not in the UK, it prompts you with a modal that covers the center of the screen to switch to your local version and when you switch, it does't take you to the product page or sorry this is not available in your country page but to homepage.
It's such a poor experience.
On the other hand, if you visit Apple, Apple will simply provide you a passive but prominent banner at the top with an option to change country store and it will take you to the correct product page. The website pages are consistent between countries and you can even guess the product page in another country by changing country code in the URL(http://apple.com/uk/iphone-13/ => http://apple.com/de/iphone-13/).
I guess, unlike Apple, Dell and others use fancy optimisation and analytics to provide the best and most optimised local experience which leads to inconsistencies and complexities.
Have they stopped gimping the Linux versions by removing hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers like the fingerprint reader rather than doing a Lenovo and writing the drivers for them?
But here we go, Dell has decided to put a capacitive escape key. They really need to know their market better.
Anyway, it looked like a nice laptop. Totally unusable to a developer without a physical escape key.
*edited, thanks for the correction cassianoleal
In my case, I have a physical Escape key, but use Caps as my "hyper" key to interact with the WM.
If you're using X11, the incantation goes into your keyboard config (the last one is what's of interest):
% cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-custom-kbd.conf
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "keyboard defaults"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
Option "XKbModel" "pc105"
Option "XKbLayout" "us"
Option "XKbVariant" "mac"
Option "XKbOptions" "shift:both_capslock"
EndSectionI think many if not most people never use it at all.
Having seen benchmark number from XPS 13 Plus compared with other notebook equipped with Alder Lake-P, it looks like it's working.
It really an immense design flaw in my opinion and honestly the problems here should be predictable enough to not even make the mistake in the first place.
I seem to remember, a while ago, when this new model was introduced, that it looked exactly the same.
There is literally nothing I use or seen that meaningfully uses that bar. I've not even seen a useful implementation by Apple.
Considering that the Macbook Pro also is generally about 40 degrees at the back of the keyboard when I do work on it, I'm not really inclined to put my hands back there anyway.
No escape key
Zero travel keyboard
DEVELOPER EDITION!
The capacitive ESC was part of the touch bar on older models. After that, they added a physical, scissor ESC key like the rest of the keyboard. Thankfully on newer models they got rid of the touch bar altogether.
Not only that - the touchbar is dynamic and adapts to the program that has the focus. This is a set of almost fixed-function spots. This is beyond stupid.
We've spent over $75K at Dell this year. We buy all our kiosks, laptops, monitors, docks, webcams, speakerphone equipment, servers, and more through them. And we love all of the gear, it's beautifully made, and it all just works (tm) together.
But personally I long that they would give up on trying to push out hyper modern laptops or macbook clones and just push out robust business laptops that look like ThinkPad T/P-series.
One of the reasons we don't buy Lenovo is because the quality of Dell's software, support, BIOS, recovery etc. is all lightyears ahead of Lenovo. For example, our business laptops don't ship with recovery partitions that can be wiped. We can open SupportAssist in the BIOS, connect to WiFi in the BIOS, and it will automatically download the latest factory image and re-install the OS from the cloud. The images don't come with any bloatware or ads baked-in and from there we can just deploy everything with InTune. Fantastic.
It’s a shame the Precision 3000 series shares nothing design-wise with the 7-series. The 7-series is quite frankly unaffordable for the general case. And the recent revisions are slowly losing their ruggedness.
We would buy a 7-series chassis with an i5 and no GPU if it had a price point around $2200-ish.
As a MacBook user, neither do I.
It looks like Dell took all the mistakes Apple made in recent years and turned them up to 11 in a single package.
That keyboard will be a nightmare to touchtype on. The arrow keys will require looking down to use every single time. The trackpad without clear borders will be a usability nightmare. Or perhaps they mean it spans the entire width of the laptop, which is probably much worse. Capacitive things have no place in a developer's computer.
The build quality between the XPS and the air is night and day.
The 9300 flexed so much that when I picked it up with a single hand, the trackpad would click from the flex.
After a couple years, the keyboard stopped working, the shell started to physically split and I had to tighten the case screws every week or so (there was a ~2-3mm gap in the case, to a point where the USBc wouldn't line up). My camera started to turn off at the slightest vibration/breeze.
I find OSX painful. But between a mildly frustrating OS and crap hardware...for me, the air is an obvious better buy.
It's not the first time: https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...
> On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. [...]
> Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...
One of them bloated like a balloon after a few months, and the other one overheated all the time.
I have worked with other powerful laptops and none of them had those issues, which points at Dell not caring too much about quality.
I'm not saying this laptop sucks, but I'd wait for a while before buying it.
Ranging from warranty being voided for placing them in a bag: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
To having to _buy_ access to drivers; Dell support told me I had to pay to get access to the Windows 7 drivers of a Dell laptop I explicitly bought because of the Windows 7 compatibility.
Right now I just will use it to stream videos until it dies. Most of the Dell computers I've purchased in the past 8 years have had major issues just after purchase which conveniently occur just after warranty expires. I got an R13 earlier this year prior to my laptop failures, it's still sitting its box unused for when my 8300 fails.
My previous non-ssd XPS 16 still runs, after 10 years. That's the reason why I once was loyal to the brand.
(Doesn't the XPS have normal crosshead screws? My fairly old one does.)
They're fairly common in some European countries. Here's sets for sale in the UK[1] and Denmark[2], just the first I found. There are larger (T20?) Torx screws in my apartment in very boring places.
[1] https://www.halfords.com/tools/hand-tools/all-hand-tools/hal...
[2] https://www.biltema.dk/en-dk/tools/hand-tools/screwdrivers/p...
9 years ago I bought a new Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Everything has been fine until one month ago when I decided to natively install Guix OS.
The wireless card "Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (2x2 b/g/+ Bluetooth Combo Card)" has non-free, proprietary firmware. So no native(!) Guix on my Dell XPS. (Only hosted)
About wireless that is to be expected with most (all modern?) Intel Wifi cards...
I mean there is proprietary firmware running on most/all modern Laptops, the difference is that many controllers have their own flash and don't rely on the os to feed them their firmware...
If this is conclusion of mine is correct(?), that means: even less motivation for modern Ubuntu versions to include proprietary blobs.
However, on other issues internal flash means the controller is more expensive and more difficult to update on bugs or security issues, so putting firmware on in the filesystem makes it much more visible, easier to manage and cost-effective. This is not possible for many controllers, like the boot rom, keyboard, touchscreen, hdd/ssd controller, because they are needed to work before there is a filesystem available in many cases. But in case of Wifi and Bluetooth, doing it like this is possible and preferred for most people I guess.
Of course many people would prefer having only FOSS firmware, but even in that case they would prefer having as much firmware as possible visible on the filesystem instead of hidden away on some flash for those reasons.
Also having been a user of couple of generations of XPS, I wouldn't wish this laptop upon an enemy. These laptops were the most unreliable I have a ever had. I also never heard fans so loud in any other laptop like in my XPS 15. They were louder than a hairdryer. Imagine this during a meeting. Plus typical issues like coil whine or if you power it off, pray that it will turn on... When my XPS 15 died, while not being a fan of Apple I bought M1 MBPRO.
Now I am not sure why other manufacturers like Dell even bother making their laptops. Do yourself a favour and don't bother with Dell. You can run Linux on Mac just fine (through virtualisation).
That's if this comes out in whichever European country one lives in of course, because Dell is exasperatingly vague about their specific offerings, and in my case (the XPS 13 with Ubuntu 20.04 with Dell Netherlands) I could only offer it via telephone. That part sucks. The laptop is fine though.
For the record: for my work laptop over the past ten years I've had two System76's and now a Dell XPS 13.
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
Dell claims it’s not a known issue, so they won’t fix it for free, but if you google it, it seems fairly common on my model
It always had suspend issues with Ubuntu too, it wouldn’t wake up 100% sometimes and would lag until I restarted it
Our last XPSs were overpriced garbage.
So what do you mean? Are there better laptops with Linux preinstalled from major oems?
Every XPS15 we had in the office had some sort of issue. Either motherboard cooking itslef, battery dying prematurely, trackpads getting stuck, display flickering, laptop cooking itslef in the backpack, HDMI issue etc.
Unacceptable for such expensive devices.
>So what do you mean? Are there better laptops with Linux preinstalled from major oems?
Read my comment again. I mean XPSs are very badly designed and built devices. I never said others are better.
- It won't boot when battery is empty. I literally have to wait for like 10min until it decides I can now use it. Have fun explaining why you are late on your morning meeting after forgetting to charge it over night. You just sit there, looking at your laptop.
- No graphics at all by default, in Debian Buster. Had to install some drivers from Unstable.
- Touchpad is barely acceptable.
- Only a single Jack port on the laptop itself, so you have to bring the whole heap of wires and boxes with you if you want to use a mouse or plug in a USB; so much for a "portable laptop"
- Pointless touch screen. Never used it.
- Sometimes fans are going crazy for absolutely no reason. I think there has to be a mechanical fault, the noise is not something you d expect. It got suddenly better tho, without me taking any action.
Overall, it brings headaches, without any advantage. No way I am getting this for myself.
They can launch a cheaper edition that can market the business side can win.
Let me reiterate - i can buy a Dell XPS running Windows (with windows tax baked in). But I cannot buy a Dell XPS Developer Edition running Ubuntu in India. So I cannot buy the cheaper variation of the same laptop..but the more expensive version is freely available.
- runs very hot (and gets loud)
- terrible battery life (battery almost completely unusable after a few years) + standby mode eating all battery quickly (and sometimes doesnt wake up from hibernation on linux)
- annoying coil whine when charging battery that is almost full
- wont turn on if battery is low (<5%) + connected to a charger (will trigger "ssd can not be found bios error")
- issues with wifi speed when bluetooth headphones are connected at the same time (might be a linux driver problem for killer wifi)
- touchscreen is pointless (but there was no other way to get the 4k display)
- low quality trackpad
- only 3 ports and all are usb c (not even HDMI on a laptop???)
First and last Dell laptop I will every buy. If ARM is not an issue for your use case there really is no reason why you should not buy a silent macbook air in current year instead.
Everyone's got his own experience, my experience with Dell was very good. I also used their display, can't say anything bad about it either. No dead pixels.
Can't comment about their support or something, we don't have such thing here, no matter whether it's macbook or dell. We support ourselves and pray it does not brake.
TouchPad feels very good but is a little buggy when the computer rest on some surfaces.
The function keys are not a pain to use, and the keyboard feels very good otherwise.
I installed Fedora and Windows 10 on it. Bought with Ubuntu for the price reduction.
Oled screen is marvelous, battery life is okay: 5h when developing using vscode and tons of extensions. It does get quite hot when doing some 3d stuff but that's expected I guess.
Battery life can be improved by choosing the LCD screen.
It has some flaws, but I find them minor and I value much more the possibility to have a windows Linux dual boot.
I'm looking for a new laptop. My current one has two GPUs (not Dell), but due to stability problems I ended up using only integrated GPU on Ubuntu Linux. I wonder if with Dell the Ubuntu support for such setups is better.
- The first experience was trying to open the thing, the hinge is too strong, so the bottom comes with the top instead of staying on the table, and because of the loose grip it drops and slams on the table,
- Fans are just as noisy as all PCs,
I was told the XPS experience was the closest to Apple in the PC world, barring System76, that was a marketing-by-lies.
So nope, gonna stick to Thinkpads for personal laptops I have to buy myself.
Dell isn't targeting Linux veterans, they're targeting people who have heard of this Linux thing and get led to Ubuntu by Google.
22.04 LTS is a useful reference though, even when planning to use another distro.
But you make a fair point because I can't find a similar announcement last month for the certification completion itself. There is probably a strategy behind that, we might simply not understand what Dell is trying to achieve with their developer edition.
You buy one of these, and then 2 months later call up Dell and say the Wifi on laptop is not working, then it can go one of two ways.
If you're running Ubuntu 22.04, then you'd be justified in demanding they support it, and repair/replace as appropriate.
If you're running $SomeOtherRandomDistro, then their support team you're dealing with may not have the right tools/processes to test and diagnose the issue. It would, I would argue, be justified for them to reject your support request until you can show it failing in Ubuntu 22.04. Assuming it wasn't something obviously physically wrong with the device.
> Dell ships a closed-source, user-space driver in the Ubuntu build it offers on the XPS 13.
Not really Dell's fault. Intel has become incredibly bad with Linux support for some of their newer hardware.
Ironically I already don’t even use its physical escape key, in preference for a more ergonomic mapping.
Also, how come Intel Evo, whatever that is, isn't supported when choosing Ubuntu?
1: No anti glare coating on the screen? 2: that touch pad looks really cool!
Continuous hardware problems with the keyboard and trackpad. Do NOT recommend.
Not having a physical escape key sucks.
- Screen Broken, the screen is distorted and unusable, need to connect an external screen to work
- Random Bluetooth Disconnects, throughout the day the Bluetooth will randomly switch off
- The laptop started to peel, looks like my laptop has dandruff
- Dell bloatware
The first time I was pretty sure the laptop turned into a brick. Of course, this happened hours before I had to give a lecture.
It was only marginally better than my current joke of a computer, an EliteBook G8, but this one at least doesn't even pretend to sleep (no support for S3 at all).