Not great advice. Dell laptops at least ship with a specific version of Ubuntu that has all the necessary drivers and config tweaks for the laptops devices to work well out of the box. A stock Ubuntu install will result in a half-working laptop and a not great experience.
The Dell-customized Ubuntu image is pretty clean and crap ware-free anyway so it’s definitely a good idea to use that.
But it's probably something trivial. I know stories about bleeding edge wifi hardware drivers not being provided by a year old LTS Ubuntu (well du'h). And of course there is the gpu driver shism. But i'm guessing.
Can you elaborate on the changes made by dell?
I wouldn't trust vendor not to put spyware / crapware on the laptop.
It is a matter of trust. I trust my distribution vendor (no choice here really), but hardware vendors should just offer open-source drivers and apps and leave it at that. The app comes from the PPA already compiled, so who knows what it is doing.
Become a source of software where paranoid people install your things instead of from the OEM. Install rootkits on your drivers and sell to the CIA
Most of the utility in running Linux on your hardware is from running the Linux distribution you prefer.
> A stock Ubuntu install will result in a half-working laptop
Probably just because Ubuntu is outdated, try Archlinux.