>Project Sputnik, a product of Dell’s new internal incubation fund, features not just full hardware support for Ubuntu on the XPS13, but a notion of “profiles” for developers
They could have stopped at "full hardware support for Ubuntu". Nobody cares about their crapware.
Just two weeks ago I bought an HP ProBook for a colleague for the sole reason of being Linux certified. It came with a Suse license but he's using it with Ubuntu.
The one Dell laptop I could have bought came with an Ubuntu version from 2010.