Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review | Hacker News Reader

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review

jx0.org

141 pointssheff165 comments

I've been using one of these with the HD screen since the spring, here are some thoughts:

Nice: - Good battery life. With screen on full, wifi on I can get between 3-5 hours depending on CPU utilization. With screen brightness turned down, wifi off, low utilization, ~6 hours

- Keyboard and mouse pad are great

- No issues with unsupported bits and pieces from ubuntu, with exception of video output via usb

- the battery strength indicator on the side is handy for quickly checking if i need to grab my power cable without having to turn the machine on as well

- Display quality (minus the glossy finish) is great, wide viewing angle, vivid colours

Naughty: - Glossy screen is a pain in the ass. Forget about using in sunlight, I also need to adjust mine to avoid getting the overheads in our office.

- Temperature management is pretty poor - the air vents on the bottom don't have much clearance even on a flat surface, and don't seem to move enough air. I worry about the long term lifespan of this machine because it regularly operates > 70c. When I can, I sit the machine on a laptop platform with a fan.

- (minor) the function keybind for adjusting the volume requires 2 hands - the fn key is on the lower left, while the volume up/down are on f11/f12.

- only 2 usb ports and no SD card reader.

Overall I've been happy with it.

3-5 hours is good battery life in 2014?

It's the one thing that hasn't improved over the years.

My laptop goes easily to 7-8 without changing my usage significantly, 9 if I'm only doing email. I hardly carry the power brick outside the house anymore.

I go crazy under 6 ... That's why i'm spending more and more time behind my chromebook; it has all day battery life. My laptops hardly make 3 hours and it makes me not want to use them for much of anything anymore.

How about the backlight bleeding issue (especially bothering in the terminal window)? This is why I returned two laptops from the older models and decided to stick with Macs!

> I've been using one of these with the HD screen since the spring,

So not the Haswell version the review is about?

A laptop targeted to developers should have a TrackPoint to move the cursor without taking the hands off the keyboard, a non-shortscreen monitor to see more lines of code, a matte screen to read the code better, and a numpad to, well, type numbers. OK, I guess I'm asking too much for today's standards, even if all these things were common ten years ago (sigh...), but when I saw "developer edition" I thought I would see at least two of these four features, and I see none.

This is just a standard high-end laptop. Disappointing.

I don't think a numpad is necessary, developers normally don't type that many numbers (except maybe 0 and 1).

I agree that a numpad isn't really necessary. The keys I miss on a laptop keyboard are:

- Home, end, pgup, pgdown

- Delete

- Function keys that are just F-keys, not volume/brightness controls that act as F-keys when you press a 'function' modifier key.

My work provided Lenovo w530 has all these. The F-keys do have volume and brightness controls on them, but you have to hit the Fn key to do that, pressing just F4 gives you 'F4'.

It's not as stylish as a MacBook Pro though.

If you do spreadsheet work based on numbers, a number pad comes in handy. Some developers have to do estimates or accounting where this applies.

I only have a full-sized keyboard to get the arrow keys. Being able to smack "Enter" in the corner is a nice bonus.

Agreed about the screen - it's annoying. But pretty much everything has those stupid HD style screens these days.

I thought the glossy screen would bother me. It doesn't.

Numpad? Never used one.

Trackpoint? Not my style - I mostly navigate with the keyboard and the trackpad just launches the pointer into the window I need active, and then focus follows it!

I've never really understood the attraction of focus follow mouse, and it's especially confusing to me when the preference comes from someone who professes to mostly navigate using the keyboard.

If you're using the mouse, not having focus follows mouse means you have to click twice to activate something in a window without focus, which from my point of view as someone who uses focus-follows-mouse, is pointless and irksome.

When I'm not using the mouse, I change the focus with the keyboard (In my setup, focus follows mouse only when the mouse moves).

That depends entirely on your window manager. I generally run a customized Fvwm2 setup, so that's all easy to tweak.

In my setup, focus follows mouse only when the mouse moves

That makes much more sense to me.

Over the years, my work style on Unix style systems had come to depend on focus following the mouse, but also, importantly, the focused window NOT coming to the front. Combined with the ability to "push" a window to the bottom of the stack when I'm done with it allows me to have lots of shell windows I can work with simultaneously. I can move the mouse into a partially hidden window, run a command, and then go back to my main window without a lot of fuss. I am constantly frustrated by the inability to push down windows in Windows and OS X, or to interact with a background window. (Yes, some apps on the Mac allow limited interaction without bring the window to the front, but it's not enough for me.) I feel crippled by the weak window controls on Macs and Windows PCs systems. Getting rid of the top window by iconifying it, or by dragging the window I want to the top is NOT the same. Expose on Mac was nice, until they changed it. I suppose I should figure it out again.

I'm sure that if I had learned windowing system on a Mac or Windows PC, I'd find that natural and I'd have developed different work styles. But I've got thirty years of experience with highly flexible window managers and miss these features on less capable systems.

The operative word is "Linux", not "Developer".

Logged in to upvote you. I would also add that a proper keyboard which doesn't resemble typing on mashed potatoes would also be my requirement. Even Thinkpads have degraded to a calculator-quality cheap uniform keyboard without oversized keys copied from Sony/Apple... Ugh...

Someone who gets it! I'm doomed to stay with a 2010 vintage Lenovo T-series by the looks.

...using tools from the late 70s/early 80s no doubt (vim, emacs, etc.)

Unix, DOS/Windows, etc.

Just because it was originally conceived and created then, doesn't mean there hasn't been a fair amount of evolution in those products since that time.

Yes indeed. Vim+FreeBSD+C

Nothing has shown itself as significantly better yet.

There isn't anything better than Vim or Emacs. Sorry.

For text editing, sure.

For an IDE for, say, C/C++, Visual Studio beats it soundly. For Java, Eclipse.

All that said, these tools are quite useful despite being old--I don't mean anything pointing out their age other than that a somewhat old laptop is probably still quite sufficient.

Eclipse? Surely you mean IntelliJ IDEA.

The problem with the new T440p, and the entire Lenovo line in general, is the awful keyboard and trackpad.

They moved to a chiclet style keyboard in the previous generation, removed the top row of keys, and have now inverted the function keys so they perform media functions first. In order to get an F4 you have to press Fn+F4. Ridiculous!

Also they have removed the physical buttons surrounding the trackpad. Previously, one of the nice things about the trackpoint was the ability to have your finger moving the trackpoint while your thumb took a rest on the middle button. Being able to feel the physical buttons you always knew exactly which button you were going to click. Now with the Apple style trackpad, you get no textual feedback at all.

I'm using a T440s, and I haven't had any problems with the keyboard, other than hitting PrtSc. Between Right Alt and Right Ctrl is not the proper place for that key.

Fn+Escape turns on Function Lock, and it stays on permanently through reboots.

I agree with you that the clickpad buttons are inferior. It's much harder to drag and drop, for example.

Also they have removed the physical buttons surrounding the trackpad.

The W530 still has the proper trackpoint buttons. But it's a 1080p screen with a numpad that displaces the main keyboard.

Lenovo sells USB trackpoint keboards (with and without a trackpad). I already had one for my HP desktop box and ordered another on the assumption that sooner or later Lenovo will turn to the Thinkpad line to shit and I'll want that keyboard for whatever laptop I get next.

You're confusing w530 and w540. w530 has a centered keyboard and no numpad, and physical trackpoint buttons. It's the new w540 that drops the buttons and shifts the keyboard.

That said, I suppose I'm the audience that Lenovo's changes are targeted to. As a current owner of an early 2011 macbook pro, I just ordered a T440p yesterday, but for a long time I was deciding between it and T540p. I prefered T540p to the very similarly priced and equipped w530 (for my price range) because of the new trackpad.

I eventually settled on the T440p because of its greater portability and centered keyboard.

There's just more people who care about a good trackpad than a good trackpoint. I've used lenovo trackpoints and just can't get used to them, so I suppose it must be similarly difficult for trackpoint users to learn to use trackpads effectively, but I don't think either is inherently better.

Indeed you are right. That's even more depressing. :)

I get that maybe more people are interested in the trackpad but I don't see why Lenovo improves the pad at the expense of the trackpoint. I disable the trackpad on my laptops so there's a net loss for me when they degrade the trackpoint buttons.

If they insist on degrading what distinguishes a Thinkpad then they'll be yet another generic laptop provider.

I quite disagree. A touchpad doesn't require appreciably more movement off the keyboard than a trackpoint (I used a trackpoint Dell machine for years). Matte screens are bad for reading code, because they create a layer of gritiness that reduces the sharpness of text. Glossy screens with good room lighting are far superior. Finally, a wide-screen 13" display is just about the right size to fit two 80-character Emacs windows side-by-side.

The difference between 16:10 and 16:9 (HDTV proportions) screens is appreciable though, the former is better for dev work.

Although I cannot imagine doing any work on a laptop without external monitor and ergo KB/mouse, so I'm too fussy I guess.

Serious question: aside from data-entry people and accountants, who uses numeric keypads anymore?

As a developer, I don't exactly type a lot of numbers. And they're too far away from the home position of the hands to make the numpad efficient to use for numbers in mixed alphanumeric text.

It really seems like they are rightly turning into a very niche input product, like Wacom tablets, instead of a general-purpose one.

True programmers do everything with alt-codes.

Get off my lawn. Alt codes didn't exist in the days when true programmers roamed the earth.

I must say I'm probably quite biased regarding the numpad, because much of my programming is about experiments that give numeric results, which then have to be processed and/or reported... so typing lots of numbers always ends up being a part of the equation in my particular case, but not on the code itself.

Numpads are nice for roguelikes as well :)

This is why I always need a numpad as well!

Yup, I'd rather go without the num pad and avoid the minor space and weight increment. If needed, I can always attach a usb number pad.

I dislike the trend of putting number pads on laptop keyboards. It moves the entire keyboard to the side.

For me it's a complete and utter deal-killer. Any laptop with a number-pad, regardless of any specs and price otherwise, is a laptop I will not buy.

Numpad = No deal.

I still curse the trend of putting them on laptops. May it soon pass.

Scientist. I went out and bought a numpad to attach to my laptop I missed it so much.

The problem with numpads on laptops is that it shifts the keyboard to the left, resulting in a non-ergonomic typing position. That's much worse than not being able to type in numbers marginally faster. Also using numpads takes your fingers far from the home row, which is in contrast to your trackpoint argument.

This is precisely why I haven't purchased several otherwise very nice looking Linux laptops.

Which Laptops? I always like seeing who's making Linux laptops.

When I specced out my Dell laptop a couple of years ago, I specifically went for a smaller model so I could get a keyboard without a numeric keypad. When on my lap, why would I want the keyboard shifted to the left?

If it's on a desk and not your lap, buy a keyboard.

Number pads are such a colossal waste of real estate. Let alone on a 13 inch laptop, the keys would have to be so small.

With regards to wanting a 4:3 display over a 16:9/10; with 1920x1080 resolution do you really need the 4:3? Are you really going to make your terminal/editing window full screen height? I use my rMBP in 1920x1200 and my terminals rarely need to go full screen height in order to see all the lines of code I need to see.

I always make my terminals and windows full screen height in my 1600x1200 monitor and in my old 1920x1200 laptop. And on the desktop, I also have a vertical (1200x1600) monitor, typically used for documentation. Vertical space has always been the most important for reading text, that's why books typically come in portrait form...

Books can't scroll. Terminal windows can.

The question is how much text needs to be on your screen at once. Sometimes you need a lot but I find most of the time I don't need 1200 pixels of height worth of text on my screen at once.

So, if you have the same number of rows (say, 1200), you'd rather have 1600x1200 (4:3) than 1920x1200 (16:10) screen?

I hate 16:9 screens, just because manufacturers robbed me of 120 pixels on the screen (1920x1200 vs 1920x1080). 4:3 fascination was always strange to me - I never saw 4:3 laptop with more than 1200 pixel rows, and more pixels before my eyes is always better in my book.

This is totally shitty naming by Dell. Name it Dell Sputnik and you are fine.

Ah, the eternal "war" between product development and marketing. I like the Sputnik name better as well, even when they called us cosmonauts :D

But the XPS 13 is a standard Dell laptop. Sputnik is just the project to get Ubuntu running excellently on them, coupled with some developer tools.

"This is just a standard high-end laptop. Disappointing."

Well, a high end laptop with a low resolution screen...

It's a strange world where we're saying 1080p is "low res".

It is pretty garbage by today's standards, and is inferior to CRT screens I had ten years ago.

If this is for developers, pixels matter.

For people used to WUXGA it's (somewhat) low res.

I thought the newer W-series Thinkpads would have better res then "HD" (AKA "short screen") but last I checked they're still stuck selling "business" machines with entertainment-consumption screens. Plus a numpad that shifts the main keyboard over.

On the bright side they still have dedicated trackpoint buttons instead of the clacky thing built in to the trackpad that some of the other other recent models have.

The Dell that I got several years (3-4) ago that this one replaced was WUXGA. This one (an XPS13) is light and has more battery life, and is faster and all, but I do miss that screen a lot. More pixels == better, with a bias for vertical pixels.

16:9 is a no-deal for me. Horrible aspect ratio for actual work. I require at least 16:10 or preferably 4:3 (I have two monitors in portrait together at my office that effectively give 5:4)

I absolutely detest TrackPoint-type sticks. I find them largely unusable for pointing, and every one I've ever had has got in the way of actually typing. We have them at work and thankfully they are removable. A non-removable one would be a deal-breaker for any laptop for me.

I absolutely love TrackPoint-type sticks. I find them the best thing for pointing, and each one I have ever had has never got in the way of actually typing. I wish we had them at work.

I have one of these and think it's pretty good. I am really happy to have been able to give my money to someone selling me something with Linux on it.

I think the standard for friendly hardware should be open firmware support (Coreboot), rather than what’s preinstalled on HDD.

Knowing that you're not also paying for a windows license and inflating the Windows market share numbers is also nice.

Hi David,

I have one of these too! But which one, that is the rub. As far as I can tell there are now three versions of project Sputnik. I too am so happy to throw my € in Dell's direction. I have the second because I bought mine just before the recent Haswell refresh, gah :(

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Original version ... November 2012 1: http://bartongeorge.net/2012/11/29/sputnik-has-landed-introd...

Brings 1080p (after much clamour and feedback) ... February 2013 2: http://bartongeorge.net/2013/02/18/spuntik-2-is-here-xps-13-...

Brings Haswell ... November 2013 http://bartongeorge.net/2013/11/15/introducing-sputnik-3-and...

Not sure which version the original poster is reviewing, I always meant to review mine and haven't done so yet. I upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04LTS to 13.10 and had to futz about a bit with backlight keys. Wifi drivers kept glitching out until recently. I had to add TRIM support myself (I had thought it was there, it wasn't!)

Might be an idea to set up a Sputnik User's site unless one exists :) as opposed to a Dell forum or employee's blog.

tip o' the hat ...

Want to start one?

Want to help?

The reviewer mentions they're reviewing the November 2013 Haswell Refresh. My work laptop is the Feb 2013 1080p version, and as an Apple fan I must say I'm very impressed with the quality of this machine... and the 1080p screen is really fantastic.

How did you resolve your WiFi issues? Quite often I've found the laptop unable to connect to random hotel WiFi (with no useful indication of why in logs/dmesg) and I have to connect via my S3 and share the connection via USB.

For a while I had terrible (in the 800msec - 4000msec range) RTT pinging an AP right next to me, running:

    sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save off

did the trick for me (issued after every boot or through an UDev rule such as https://raw.github.com/lvillani/ansible-playbooks/9dc40c75cf...)

I didn't actively do anything to fix WiFi. I just upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu and enabled backports in the repository settings to stay current (but not in bleeding-edge dev mode, no thanks I gotta work). The driver seemed to crash on coming out of suspend/hibernate/whatever sleep state it was in. This kept generating automatic error reports that were phoned home. A few weeks ago this stopped happening so either Ubuntu or kernel Wifi devs or somebody somewhere has gotten a fix in. Let's hope it stays that way. I really didn't dig into it.

The Dell Sputnik forum has been somewhat useful, but mark me interested in a possible third party forum/list for sputnik users. I'm still running 12.04 (plus too many PPAs for apps) on my Sputnik beta XPS. Lots of folks are doing fine with other Ubuntu but I'm waiting for another LTS. I mostly use Gnome classic and Gnome 3, fwiw.

Other than the touchpad still being too sensitive for my preferences (this gripe not limited to the XPS) it's been a awesome machine. It was my first SSD machine and still boots so fast. I'm jealous of the newer CPUs especially if battery life extends.

I too am jealous of the new CPU and chipsets as it does seem to extend battery life by all accounts. Also the new Intel integrated graphics chipset is said to have a fair bit more grunt which I wouldn't mind. Oh well. If only I'd known, I'd have held off a few months.

A few people seem interested in a third-party forum so maybe...

6 hours isn't great, it's shitty for a 13" laptop with Haswell.

Yeah, but not one that thin (small battery).

It's not particularly thin. It's about the same thickness at its thickest point at the MBA. In terms of size and weight, it's about in the middle for an ultrabook. It's battery is a little smaller than the MBA's, but not that much smaller (47 watt-hours versus 54 watt-hours). Dell's own XPS 12, which has a very marginally larger battery (50 watt-hours), gets almost 9 hours of Wi-Fi surfing at about 50% brightness.

I've never seen a laptop actually get 9 hours. Even a Netbook or Air won't last much past 6. I think people tend to exaggerate. If you say 9 hours, I'd believe 4.5 hours.

I mean if I left it to idle for 9 hours yeah it would last at full charge, actually using it....nah. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop work at it's advertised battery life.

It's thickest point is where the fans are, its about a thin as an air where the battery is.

In either case, a Macbook Pro doesn't get any better, I've not seen any laptops that get anything past 6 hours without having a low power Atom or ARM based chip in it.

> I think people tend to exaggerate. If you say 9 hours, I'd believe 4.5 hours.

I'm describing tested battery life, not anecdotal estimations. E.g. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Update-Dell-XPS-12-9Q33-....

Battery life obviously depends on your usage scenario, but the one described in the article is very light. Moreover, he's using a very low brightness setting, and seems to be using wi-fi intermittently. These points are important to note because on most workloads, the display and the wireless adapter are the major sources of power draw.

The usage described in the article is:

> I get about 6 hours of usage from a full charge (or more if I leave my desk for breaks and the screen shuts off after 5 minutes, which saves battery). As I mentioned earlier, that's usually on the lowest (or second to lowest) screen brightness setting, with the keyboard backlight enabled for about 50-75% of the time, and having Firefox open with 5-10 tabs, sometimes YouTube running in the background for some music, some Terminal windows open, Steam open in the background, Skype running in the background and a few text editor windows open.

Since idle background apps should take up very little battery, this seems even lighter than Anand's "Light Workload" scripted test, on which the MBA gets 11 hours (close to its rated 12). See: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-revi.... Anand's test is at 200 nits (80% screen brightness). The author of this article says he's running at the lowest or second-lowest screen brightness, so maybe 10-20% or 30-60 nits. Even with the heavy workload test, which involves constant Wi-Fi activity and 1080p video playback, the MBA gets 5.5 hours.

If you mimic the usage in this article, with some apps open in the background, the brightness turned down, and typing into some terminal windows, the MBA would probably get 15+ hours: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b....

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but I agree. If Apple can pull 12+ hours of out the Air, there's no excuse for 6 hours. Even the 13" Retina gets 10+ hours. 6 hours is about the bare minimum for a portable machine. The Apple machine doesn't cost any more.

Very true, although seeing your comment made me realize how awesome it is that people consider 6 hours to be shitty for laptops nowadays. It doesn't seem that long ago that 90-150 minute battery life was pretty standard.

You mean ten years ago?

Great laptop. I got mine over Christmas and I have no complaints. I hope Dell continues to support Linux.

The real issue here is battery life. Only 6 hours? The new X1 carbon from Lenovo can get 9, the T440s can get up to 17 (with extended battery), and the MBA can get 12 right out of the box.

The Lenovo X1 carbon has a 1600 x 900 screen though... I needz my linez of code ;)

Not the new one! It's up to 2048xsomething-or-another.

The first thing I noticed from the picture is that the keyboard looks exactly like the keyboard on my MacBook Pro. I haven't really looked at Windows laptops in a long time, so maybe this is a common layout now. It just seemed notable to me.

I had one of these for some months and I'd say the only culprit is that there are only 1 mini DP and 2 USB ports and nothing else: no SD card slot, no Thunderbold or Firewire. Even a third USB port would have been nice. There isn't any kensington lock port, either.

The screen is glossy but for some reason, it's not actually catching too many random reflections (so it's much better than my MacBook which can hardly be used when sitting back to the window).

The touchpad feel isn't as good as a MacBook but it's large and much better than those from most other PCs I've tried. Overall a nice machine.

Hasn't the PC world moved on to USB3, ignoring Thunderbolt? And even Apple has dropped Firewire at this point.

Thunderbolt is seeing some take-up on the high end; it solves a different set of problems to USB3.

Where is it seeing take-up outside of the Apple ecosystem?

I don't disagree... on a Mac.

On a PC, I'm not sure what else there is to plug in to a Thunderbolt port other than storage.

The thing is, Thunderbolt manages to be this amalgamation of miniDP and PCIe x4. It is actually entirely possible to run PCIe devices on a thunderbolt connection, which means things like external graphics cards are now again viable (since almost no consumer computers have expresscard slots now).

Thunderbolt is an Intel technology, and it can be found (albeit rarely) on Asus (and maybe other) high-end laptops and motherboards. And even one firewire port would be better than no port :)

Thunderbolt is way too expensive for most hardware (and tightly controlled, which bothers some manufactorers), and USB3 is damn near free. Thunderbolt is expensive for the manufactorer and expensive for the user (read: complex cable requirements). With USB3.1 "doubling" the speed of USB3.0 in a backwards compatible way -- I suspect it will continue to dominate.

There is one thing, USB3 cannot solve, the latency(typical latency of USB is around 1 ms, compared to PCI-e sub-us). Graphics cards will never work on USB3 port. Well, external graphics card is for consumer market. For industrial, high speed data acquisition system has sub-us latency over PCI-e bus, which is included in thunderbolt. That is one of real application of thunder bolt. But I have not seen any such device utilizing thunderbolt.

This isn't actually true -- the latency of Thunderbolt is 1.5 microseconds, which means if you are building something (like a video card) with internal latency expectations, they will all fail.

If it had internal style latency, there would be GOBS of devices pushing to jump on it, but it simply doesn't. You can't even respond correctly to interupts... compared to internal PCI -- it is painfully slow.

They are USB3 ports though, aren't they?

Dedicated ethernet would be nice. Thunderbolt would be nice. Firewire would be nice. A DVD/blu-ray drive would be nice. Ultrabooks seem not to have these things. Make no mistake, I would not have bought one if it had been USB2.

   -[0000:00]-+-00.0  Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller
              +-02.0  Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
              +-14.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller
              +-16.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1
              +-1a.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2
              +-1b.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller
              +-1c.0-[01]----00.0  Qualcomm Atheros AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter
              +-1d.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1
              +-1f.0  Intel Corporation QS77 Express Chipset LPC Controller
              +-1f.2  Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
              \-1f.3  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller

I have one of the first-gen (non Sputnik) systems. I simultaneously love it and hate it so much that after one year I had to put my (mixed) feelings in writing here: http://lorenzo.villani.me/2013/08/19/dell-xps-13-l321x-the-r... (this is little more than a pondered rant, unlike OP's thorough review).

However, I think this year I'm probably going to bite the bullet and buy a 13" Retina MacBook Pro.

I'm conflicted about the price being in the range of MBPs and Dell competing with Apple, supposedly, based on quality and design. I think they would be much more competitive if they were to price this laptop significantly cheaper than MBPs without sacrificing too much quality. I think Dell has the resources to do this. It's difficult for me to ignore brand image and I guess this makes me a fan boy. Although, I really do want a decent Linux laptop. I will keep an eye on the XPS13 in case I make the switch.

Thinkpads make rock solid GNU/Linux machines. I highly recommend the X220. It has some issues such as not being Coreboot compatible and needing nonfree firmware to drive the wireless chip. The former has no fix, but the latter can be fixed with a little hack and an Atheros chip.

As an X220 it's a very nice machine but it's no in the same realm as the XPS or the Air/rMBP.

It has a great keyboard and underlying hardware. But it's also stuck with a low-resolution screen with terrible viewing angles, and is also as thick as a brick. The touchpad also leaves a lot to be desired but it does have the TrackPoint which is great.

The X240 will supposedly have a 1080p IPS screen but I'm not sure what the holdup is.

Does the x240 have the same screen dimensions as the x230? If so I wonder if you can use it to upgrade the 230 panel.

Chassis is quite a bit different, so probably not.

I love x220, but they are far from perfect. Some serious glitches:

- Small & noisy fan - Awful trackpad (but awesome trackpoint) - Low resolution wide screen

I cannot understand why Lenovo is destroying the x2 series. Now they:

- Replaced the standard processor with a ULV one - Removed trackpoint buttons - Introduced island-style keys - Removed ThinkLight

They should have simply improved a bit the glitches i mentioned.

I love my X220 (work laptop). I use it as my main machine at work with the dock and two monitors. It is fast, responsive and very portable and the Intel graphics just work on Linux.

But I have a T410 at home and I am not very happy with it. The dock is unstable, it disconnects, USB dies. The stupid dock blocks the fan, and you do anything cpu intensive and it end shutting the system down because of temperature. The NVIDIA graphics never worked reliably with nouveau + dock + suspend (I have to use the binary driver).

And worse, it is an i7 (x220 is an i5) and it feels so slow compared to the x220.

Thinkpads seem to have taken a turn for the worse in the series after the x220. I should rephrase my recommendation to "older thinkpads". I don't know what I will use when my x220 is antiquated. I hope there's another hacker friendly laptop on par with it by that time.

I compared this to a Macbook Pro 13", which is the closest comparable hardware. It came out better in features and cost ($300 cheaper then a Macbook Pro with similar SSD and memory), and was thinner and lighter.

I wanted the Macbook Pro, but I didn't see the $300 difference in the Pro.

One difference: you can't legally develop for iOS with non-Apple hardware. Which is IMHO an extortion, but there you have it.

You should see what you have to do to develop for Nintendo hardware...

The Macbook has a better trackpad and the (legal) ability to run every major desktop OS.

That's worth $300 to me...

People consistently underestimate how much value an Apple notebook has. The reason they cost >$1000 is because of what's inside.

Dell doesn't have the resources to make a MacBook Air type computer in volume. Apple's bought the gear, invested heavily in the suppliers to get them up to speed, and starves competitors of the equipment and supplies needed to produce similar computers.

Secondly, Apple focuses on a handful of models and makes a lot of them. Dell tends to produce dozens if not hundreds of models and can't get the volume on any single one up to the level required to really slash costs on exotic manufacturing processes.

HP has tried on a few occasions to produce something close, but they never stick with it long enough to really gain the benefits of scale.

I owned one of the early 2013 1080p versions for about a month, but had serious issues with backlight bleed. After having it replaced twice it became clear that the issue was inherent to the hardware.

Aside from this, it seemed like a fantastic machine, but beware of the potential backlight issues if you spend a significant amount of time with dark or black windows / backgrounds. For me, this was 90% of the time between terminal windows and Sublime Text.

> If the laptop is turned off (or sleeping) and the battery is charging, there's no way for you to tell whether the batter is full or not based on the color of the LED. It stays white.

This isn't entirely true. While the color of the charger LED doesn't change, the LED at the middle of the bottom/front edge (below the trackpad) goes from orange to white when charged.

My biggest gripe with this (very nice, portable) laptop is that the wireless card is a bit flaky with 802.11n under (x)Ubuntu 13.04 - 13.10. I find that in some rooms of my (relatively small) flat I can't connect without disabling 11n (sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1). I get a very high "Tx excessive retries" value in iwconfig otherwise and the network connection is unusable.

It's not a failing of the laptop, but rather the bundled Intel wireless card and the drivers that ship with Linux 3.11.0-15. My Lenovo T430s has the same issue (it has a Centrino Advanced-N 6205).

I've seen numerous bug reports and kernel patches but haven't had much success in resolving the issue.

I own this laptop, had it for almost a year. I love it except after a while I noticed random hard freezes, basically the display freezes in place and the system doesn't respond. I would have to hold down the power button to force an unexpected reboot (in the words of Moss). It would happen after a day, or a week of use.

Turns out it's a problem with the kernel in 12.04 and the Intel 4400 chipset. The only solid fix is to simply update to a non-LTS release. Since updating to 13.04 I've been okay. I shouldn't have to wait much longer for 14.04 so I should have an LTS release soon with the updated kernel.

The only other problem I've had is some updates deleting my firmware for the wireless, I've had to re-download it. But I did not have this problem when upgrading Ubuntu.

Despite these issues, otherwise it's been a very solid laptop.

You can use https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack to get a newer X server and kernel while otherwise staying on 12.04 LTS.

I think it should be cheaper compared to a MBA with Linux.. anyway the competition is good

I just did some comparisons, it is indeed cheaper than a MBA in similar configuration. In terms of price, the 13" retina MBP is a way better deal than both the Dell and the Air.

Warning: Ubuntu on this laptop does not support video output on USB 3.0 docking stations.

AFAIK, video over USB3 ain't pretty. I wanted to buy an USB 3.0 docking station but these things seem to be Windows-only and, even there, people experience issues.

I am guessing you are referring to the USB 3.0 DisplayLink Docking Station. Yes, DisplayLink has issues with supporting Linux. We can only hope that Dell and other PC manufacturers will put pressure on them to support Linux.

Notebookcheck has a test of this laptop:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-XPS-13-Ultrabook-La...

I love their review because they go into very much detail and some of the information is hard to found elsewhere, like real measurements of screen contrast and brightness, the one parameter that already eliminates 95% of laptops every time I look for one, and of loudness.

Thats a review of the 2012 version though, the 2013 haswell version should be much improved.

This is not the haswell/HD screen version though.

I'm currently looking for a laptop and it will be either the XPS 13 or a rMBP 13 inches. I'm currently favoring the rMPB a little bit because it seems it get less hot than the XPS. It kinds of scare me when the review says the laptop gets somewhat warm while surfing and I've had really bad experiences with overheating Dell laptops.

What's your experience XPS 13 owners ?

I use and love Apple hardware, but if you're not going to use OS X, does it make sense to pay the price in driver potential wonkiness?

Never noticed heat in mine, or for that matter, the fan running, except when I compile stuff.

How is the multi-monitor support on the XPS 13 running Ubuntu? I googled, but could not find much useful information.

How many external monitors can be connected?

I found some information here: http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-031040.htm , but it looks as if most of the info applies to Windows.

I have the first-gen XPS 13 with 1366x768 internal display. No problems at all in a multi monitor setup. I have a Dell S2409W, 1920x1080 at home and a NEC 1920x1200 at work.

Do you use both the internal display and external monitor?

Have you tried connecting more than one external monitor?

    > Do you use both the internal display and external monitor?

Yes

    > Have you tried connecting more than one external monitor?

Never tried. This laptop has only one mini DisplayPort output. I heard that there are splitter cables/adapters which should allow for that but I haven't found an affordable one yet. An alternative would be a display that supports daisy chaining (the only one which I am aware of is Apple's Thunderbolt display which doesn't even turn on for me).

Sort of funny, but it looks like their Linux developer laptop keyboard has a Windows key. Licensing issue, or just an unfinished project?

I bought a refurbished ASUS Vivobook X202E and put Linux Mint on it. I was pleasantly surprised that everything worked out of the box (touchscreen, multitouch trackpad, wifi, etc). It's still important to have manufacturers standing behind Linux on their PCs, but hardware support on Linux is always getting better.

Nice, I'd consider getting one. Wish it was a bit bigger though... I have an XPS 16 which isn't very heavy and don't want a smaller screen.

When I use the wife's Mac I'm always fumbling around the keyboard shortcuts. However, the screen is amazing. If this Dell had a bit more DPI I'd be sold.

About the low battery time I am pretty sure it is a linux problem and not so much a hardware. Battery is really one of linux weaker spots. However I read that the optimization ubuntu is doing for phones will help the overall battery situation. I guess we can just cross our fingers that its true.

I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga a month ago and installed the alpha of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the lock button and scrolling in Firefox using the touch screen (install the Grab and Drag Addon). Features: matte screen, TrackPoint, Pen Input.

Thanks for turning me on Grab and Drag. Firefox is one of the few things I want to touch scroll on Linux.

Seconded! Only used it for about 30 seconds and this is already one of my favorite add ons. :) I kind of wish it was only enabled for the touch or pen cursors, anyone know if that is possible?

I was debating getting this laptop or a Thinkpad T440s and a Chromebook Pixel. For me the Pixel just doesn't have the storage capacity I want, and the T440s isn't quite as portable.

I've made a deal with myself to get this once I've paid my loans off. C'mon, baby, just two months..

Then maybe the new Thinkpad X1 Carbon is for you: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...

I would seriously love to buy it but the new keyboard changes put me off (see comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016535). It's a shame, because otherwise it is really a nice machine - will as well go with T440s.

Oh god, it has Haswell now!! Damn the loans.

Not sure why anyone would get one of these. The new MacbookPro 13 inch is the sweetest laptop deal out there right now (if you can do with 13 inch and only 2 cores).

Because they want an Ubuntu laptop?

Right now I have Lenovo w520 and I approached 3 times to configure ubuntu with external screen, no luck.

Does Dell XPS 3 DE work fine with external monitor on ubuntu ?

does Ubuntu use some kind of DPI scaling on this or is it just native FHD ? That could be pretty small for some people. How does it handle setting to lower resolutions ?

Also 6hours of battery life seem a bit on the short side, though he had quite a few programs running. Id like to know how it would do in Windows8 though.

Id also be interested in how well it handles sleep/awake scenarios with an external display attached etc.

Yeah, for $1500 after tax, I'll stick with the 11 hours a MBPr gets and install a VM if I want to use Linux.

No DPI scaling, but it's OK for me. I always loved small fonts in term windows anyway :) 6 hours is a minimum for quite a heavy use; I myself found that mine easily does 8-9 hours when programming (Flash is a terrible battery and CPU hog).

how does it do with video playback?

Video playback is fine. And Ubuntu manages perfectly hot-plugging external monitors, TVs, projectors, etc.

Many desktop environments can do scaling well enough, in my experience. Not sure about Unity, the Ubuntu default.

Edit: for non-retina screens (i.e. it's fine on my 14" 1920x1080 laptop.) For retina (not this laptop), it might not be ideal yet. I took a screenshot (XFCE4) with very high DPI, and you can see some GUI elements don't scale: http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png

AFAIK no linux environments handle HiDPI well at the moment. Gnome 3 added support in a recent support but it's still not great. Also many apps that don't use native APIs look bad, Chrome for example is almost unusable.

I haven't used any retina screens, but I use scaling in XFCE for my 27" 2560x1440 monitor and for a 14" 1920x1080 laptop screen, and it works without any issues on both of those.

What are the native issues with retina (in Gnome 3, for example)? Are there GUI elements that don't scale along?

Many GUI elements do not scale. For example apps like Chrome and Skype render very small, almost unusable. I'm guessing these apps are not going through X to render. Others like Firefox render ok, but the icons are a bit on the small side. Even Gnome 3 itself doesn't do a great job, when you are in the Workspaces view the taskbar on the left is a bit small. The Settings/Sound menu in the top right doesn't correctly guess how much horizontal space it has and renders narrowly. Many Gnome apps, like the Settings app, renders a bit small.

I might try and install Mate and see if it is any better. I have no interest in using Unity or XFCE so I can't comment on those.

Ah yes, I see. I just tried it out, here's GIMP with a 256 DPI:

http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png

The title-bar size is configured in pixels, so that could be fixed easily by the user, but icons, both in the GIMP and in the native window don't resize well. It seems the DPI scaling is only applied to text, and only text-containing elements are scaled accordingly.

Arch Wiki is a good resource for this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

And apparently there is an update today! Can't wait to try this out.

Note that the setting mentioned there (Xft -> DPI) is the same as the one in my screenshot, found at Appearance -> Fonts.

could use a 15" brother with a bigger screen -> lets you see more lines of code and run side-by-side editors more efficiently.

Does the WIFI LED flash a different colour when it uploads directly to the NSA?

What am I going to do with 8GB of RAM? My mom has 8GB of RAM.

> First boot: Ubuntu animation, Dell User Agreement, then the standard Ubuntu installer.

Seriously?

FWIW, I picked up on that, too. Why would a new piece of hardware running a FOSS operating system need proprietary legalese from Dell? Not saying there aren't reasons for it, but anyone who's interested in buying a Linux laptop in the first place might want to know what they are.

I'm not sure I trust anything from Dell anymore after the DER SPIEGEL releases.

Two wishes. They supported 16GB RAM. Dell Australia would sell them.

No matte screen though :(

You don't need one, it's got gorilla glass, it's basically the same screen you'd get on a high end tablet.

how does it compare to a macbook air with linux installed?

Hardware-wise, the main differences are a better display (that is, more dense), and a slower SSD (non PCIe) and slower graphic card (HD4200 vs HD5000). Trackpad is probably worse as well, but I would suppose you can't see much of a difference under Linux where the experience is suboptimal even with the Apple one. You also don't have Thunderbolt connectors, though I doubt is a problem for most people.

Good might me next laptop series... Hm.

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