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A Developer Edition (with Linux preloaded) will come at some point.

Currently there are driver issues of which the non-working audio is most persistent. Most elaborate info on it here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1413446

In this Reddit thread...

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2u0jjd/linux_support_...

...you find comment from barton808, who identifies himself as the Team Lead of Sputnik (= XPS13 Linux), and gives away that they are waiting/working on the same issues (to be resolved).

I think it will make a great laptop. I currently own an XPS13 old version, and think it is just a bit short of Apple hardware. I've heard this new one should be up to par with Apple's hardware while having an eventually more compatible hardware stack.

It will probably be the most powerful Linux-preinstalled ultrabook on the market, when releaed.

Fingers crossed it may be released soon. :)

View on HN

For those interested in following along on the process: https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...

With an updated BIOS and a bunch of patches, it looks like it's getting close...

Nice one, thanks!

From the link:

   you could replace the bluetooth/wireless card with a     different one.

Can you really? Many laptops have whitelists and if a device doesn't present the correct pci id it won't be enabled by the bios.

I think the Dell linux team could..

I replaced the one in mine with an Intel card (7260NGW) and it works fine under Linux.

Thanks for the feedback. I've had problems with this in HP and Levovo laptops before.

In my experience, HP and Lenovo are usually the only ones enforcing whitelists.

Does Lenovo enforce whitelists on its Thinkpad laptop line too? Or just non-Thinkpad laptops.

If they have Thinkpad whitelists, do you remember if IBM did so when they owned the Thinkpad line?

They do, and it seems to date back to IBM days.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_Mini...

I would be surprised to see that kind of setup from Dell. From my experience they produce work horses and don't mind people tweaking their laptops. You can disassemble, replace memory, hard drive, clean CPU/GPU fans, assemble it back, and still have valid manufacturer warranty. And yes, I personally replaced wifi and bluetooth cards on my inspiron, precision, xps15 laptops without problems before. So unless they drastically changed their vision, I would expect them to still build product which is hacker-friendly.

Probably not Dell (I have no idea) but Lenovo apparently has a white list for these things. I don't mean to pile on the recent carp storm that they are in... I just happen to have a idea pad y510p. (I am contemplating removing everything and installing Windows from scratch.)

FWIW, I got nothing but grief from the Lenovo Windows 8 / 8.1 installation on my Thinkstation--Windows booting into repair mode for no apparent reason, janky addon software, etc. A clean, fresh install made it all better, although finding the right storage drivers was a chore.

I'm thinking of doing the same for my y510p. Will the reset windows option keep the recovery partition so I can go back to factory state if I need to do so?

AFAIK the recovery partition is actually somewhat difficult to destroy even during a fresh, non-OEM install (I tried and gave up) but I would never choose to recover to the Lenovo build.

I created a bootable Windows image on a flash drive and sure enough it does give you a choice to keep the other partitions intact. YMMV.

That doesn't surprise me, Lenovo seem to be working hard to become the next HP in terms of hardware quality. I recently spent hours and hours trying to get a Thinkstation to boot with ECC memory that it specifically listed as supporting. The Lenovo engineers seem to basically get the motherboards to the point that they can kind of boot with the exact hardware the machine ships with and then completely give up. The smallest hardware changes would render that machine unbootable, including inexcusable things like changing graphics cards (Nvidia -> Nvidia too, just a model change).

Yup: https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...

iFixit gave the laptop quite a good score too: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157

I was excited until I read 8GB max... that can't be right can it? What modern developer machine would have an 8GB cap?

Same as a Macbook Air.

The 8gb model is 2x4gb, maybe the developer edition will see 2x8gb?

One can hope, currently as my next portable, I am looking at the Asus UX303LN (great memorable Asus names...) but haven't found much info on putting Linux on it yet.

It's a bit of a bummer. But I can live with it.

For me it's all compared to other ultrabooks, like the MacBookAir which also does 8G max.

I hope I'll never need to carry a classic-full-size laptop anymore, ever.

The original samsung series 9 is a sandybridge "ultrabook" from 2011 that can take 16GB of ram. While technically before ultrabooks were first released, it has a similar profile to the air. It was also released before 8GB dimm modules were available, but while never being "supported", they work just fine.

I haven't seen an ultrabook I'd prefer over it, especially when I rule out ones that use a tapered design.

My macbook pro isn't that much thicker than an air.. though I wound up getting the 15" retina because I needed 16gb without waiting a few weeks for it... tried an 8gb/13" retina model, and returned it, needed the extra ram.

I don't know of any ultrabook that lets you go past 8GB. Not this, not the Lenovo X1, not the MacBook Air. Do you know of one?

Edit: saw your pointer to the Asus UX303LN. Interesting.

Dell E7240, 12.5" and allowed upto 16GB.

What do you use more than 8GB for? Only things I can think of are massive Illustrator files and large Windows VMs.

Might have multiple app servers running on the same machine for development. 16gb is pretty useful.

I have another OS installed in a VM, an admittedly ridonkulous number of open tabs (that's just how I work) and an IDE, and that puts me at around 11GB in use.

Well one plus is the total RAM footprint of a Linux distro + a DE, is less (by a lot) than just OS X's kernel. Right now, xnu alone is using 960MB on my laptop. Oink oink oink.

Edit:MBP82, created new user accounts, reboot, login, launch Firefox, load CNN, wait 2 minutes. Did this twice each Fedora 21 Workstation (Gnome) and OS X 10.9.5. Fedora free -m used = 614MB. OS X top PhysMem Used = 2866M, Activity Monitor Memory Used = 3.69GB. I suspect Activity Monitor includes "wired" which top splits out. shrug Anyway, it's not a tiny difference. Omnomnomnom.

The RAM footprints of most development tools on Linux are also less than on other operating systems, due to shared libraries and not just shipping every dependency bundled with binaries. A developer on OSX told me he was close to maxing out his 16gigs of RAM, blaming it on having to run 2 vagrant VMs simultaneously while working. While I wasn't able to establish a conclusive cause of his sizeable memory consumption (he was busy), I spun up 3 vagrant VMs of my own, simulated work, and opened/visited many more sites in Firefox to try to hog resources. I could hardly break 4 gigs of RAM used (out of 16), in Ubuntu 14.04. 8 gigs might not actually be so bad if you're doing development work using tools that aren't shipped as complete packages, but rather adhere to the unix philosophy.

I look at my RAM usage on ubuntu sometimes and I suspect that about 40-50% of the machine's total use is due to adblock running on firefox.

Give µBlock[1] a try, it seems to use quite a bit less memory. I've also found it to block more ads by default.

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

I suspect a lot of this comes from OS X apps all shipping with most of the library dependencies, so there's no way of deduplicating libraries that are loaded in the memory. In Linux, shared libraries are used, at least with software installed by package management. OS X should benefit from a kernel feature something like Linux KSM (kernel samepage merging[1]), that scans for duplicate memory pages and merges them to shallow copy-on-write clones.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_same-page_merging

The 3rd Gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon has 4GB (soldered) by default, and the biggest configuration that I can find has 8GB. What are they thinking?

Know that the most it can go to is 12GB.

If you want more memory you have to go to the T4XXp series, and probably buy the RAM yourself as the premium charged is considerable: 16GB on NewEgg is $120, while the premium payed for 16GB out of the box is $340. The T440s also maxes out at 12GB.

Just don't buy the RAM from Lenovo. On my T430, access to the RAM is a screwdriver away.

It's a bit of a pain with the T440s (have to pry apart all the plastic), but still better than paying what Lenovo wants.

I did this. I had an X1 Carbon, but couldn't find a way to upgrade the SSD (it's some weird size and connector) and 8GB wasn't enough, so I sold it and bought a T430s.

I'm curious, but why do you need more than 8Gb for ? I can think of a few potential uses of more RAM (large video files edition, R on very, very big data sets) but 8Gb seems reasonable for most tasks. Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day ?

I have 8gb and get warnings quite often that I'm running out of memory: windows 7, ubuntu vm with oracle or Postgres, IntelliJ, Firefox, chrome, office, R. Both R and the virtual machine take 2gb+, IntelliJ 1gb+...

An Java app, IntelliJ IDEA, few Docker VMs, 2 browsers (and you know how much memory Chrome eats?), few not so complex tools for development (like SourceTree, Dash, etc) - and 14Gb are used. Just checked. And I didn't run anything serious yet.

Had 8gb before, machine was swapping too much, become unresponsive, etc.

Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day?

Maybe not every single day, but easily 3 days a week. Personally I could never consider owning a primary work machine with less than 32 GB of RAM, as that is just about enough (with some swap) to do something reasonable with a moderately sized data set in reasonable time, without having to try to get too clever. That being said, I currently have an MBA with 4 GB of RAM as a secondary computer to complement my workstation at work, and that's fine for most of my day to day programming tasks.

> Personally I could never consider owning a primary work machine with less than 32 GB of RAM, as that is just about enough (with some swap) to do something reasonable with a moderately sized data set in reasonable time

Suffice to say, you probably don't represent the average developer, or power-user. I can write code just fine without having to resort to 32GB data-sets. I think most other developers can too.

Not saying I don't acknowledge that some people may have such a need, but I don't see this is a big enough issue for enough people, to think it warrants making the already expensive developer edition even more expensive.

If you need 3-digit Gigabytes of RAM, have you considered just remoting into a server which has all the juice you need instead? In the age of the cloud, why on earth do you need all that power in your laptop? That just seems awfully backwards.

I don't see this is a big enough issue for enough people, to think it warrants making the already expensive developer edition even more expensive.

Sure, I agree. And I'm sure I'd be happy with this machine as secondary coding machine. But I do dream of one day getting a single laptop that covers all my needs.

have you considered just remoting into a server which has all the juice you need instead?

I do the few times I need 100+ GB of RAM, and to be honest it's a bit of a faff. Getting your tool chain set up, copying huge data sets back and forth, working out how to install proprietary software and the licensing there of. I'm unbelievably ecstatic that the option exists when I need it, but I'm equally glad every time I don't have to deal with it. Most of time my data sets aren't that big and all my work fits comfortably in 64 GB of RAM.

32GB might be somewhat excessive for mainstream developer laptops, but 16GB is not. A pair of VMs (for various MSIE versions, isolated dev environments, ...), an emulator or two (Android, iOS, …), 2-3 browsers open (with many tabs in at least one of them) and an IDE and you've blown way above 8GB working set without working on any big dataset.

I'm currently on an 8GB machine and regularly have to pare down my working set to avoid swapping.

Yeah, I also work quite a lot with large data sets, but what I want from a laptop is for it to be really great at doing everything else. I'll ssh to a machine that cost more than my car when heavy lifting is required.

I had to sit on my hands to keep from giving Dell my credit card number reading that review.

I work in games industry(as a programmer) and my machine has 64GB of ram. I hit swap pretty much every day, and our IT is currently in process of upgrading all machines to 128GB. In my own time I develop games in Unity and I used to run out of ram on an 8GB machine - upgrade to 16GB was an absolute necessity. I would not even consider buying a laptop with 8GB nowadays.

I run into the 8GB limit on my laptop pretty regularly. Mostly due to VMs for testing and building for other systems. But I also recently found that running Android Studio, plus the emulator, plus my usual stuff pretty much shuts my machine down. I had to use a VT to kill my mail client, the VMs, and some other processes, in order to get the mouse and keyboard responding in X again. Java memory usage is kinda crazy.

This is my use case for having 16GB on my laptop as well. Being able to simulate the network architecture of our infrastructure with a bunch of little 512MB-1GB VMs is a nice thing to be able to do.

If I'm not doing development with a cluster of VMs though, I rarely go over 8GB.

I use a Dell E6420, as a data scientist I kept breaking the default 8GB so upgraded to 16GB which is almost always fine. I won't go >8GB most days but when I do, I need it (else I lose hours trying to partition data and think about ways to subselect). 16GB for data science seems a sensible minimum for the folk I know. I'm on Linux Mint 17 (Ubuntu 14.04) + Python.

I have 16GB in my work laptop, and I find myself wishing for more constantly. I support a Linux application that wants 24 GB of RAM for itself. I'm also client-facing, so I have a Windows VM in order to run Microsoft Office. 16GB of RAM is plenty to run RHEL and Windows, but not quite enough to run RHEL, Windows, and a VM of the software I support.

Indeed I am, my "minimum useful" amount is 16GB -- my desktops are 128GB, and my current "monster laptop" is 64GB. The in-flight state on the software I work on can get well over 8GB with our test dataset.

16 GB is a must for my next machine, nothing I do is that CPU intensive anymore. I'd also like a Dockingport... its the main reason i love my Surface Pro 2 so much.

Displayport, Dockingstation, 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD all below 1200g, that is to be beat. I hope for a 16GB Ram version for the next Surface Pro 4.

I run daily into swap, having just one VM open, Photoshop and PHPStorm...

Hold off a bit then. USB 3.1 Type C is just around the corner. Once it's established, pretty much every laptop, tablet and phone will contain a USB 3.1 Type C docking port. (and most monitors will be docking stations).

Do you have a particular timeframe on that? I'm in the market for a new laptop, and considering just getting an XPS 13 tonight. However, the advent of skylake has me considering waiting (but who knows if that'll be out in the next 6 months), as does your comment.

The rumour is that the next-gen macbook air will have it, and that this is going to happen this quarter. Iff that happens, then other manufacturers are going to hop on board too.

If not, I expect it may take over a year before it's ubiquitous -- Intel isn't including USB 3.1 in Skylake, so it will require an extra chip, something manufacturers are very hesitant to add to laptops.

Hmm. Rumor has it the next Air refresh is next week. If that's not the next-gen one, then I'm a bit skeptical that they'll put a brand new model out right after a minor change. I guess I'll see what happens next week and then make my decision.

There are plenty of workstation class laptops available, pick one of ultrabook / powerhouse.

I run 8GB now on my 2011 MBP but if I am search for a new laptop it will have 16GB.

Luckily, I run a remote VM most of the time and can get away with 8 but if I need to do anything locally that involves a VM I start running short.

I had the same impression, 8G max is a regrettable decision. The price is also a little too much and Dell seems to be one of those coupon bullshit companies.

sigh

Linux on good new laptops always tends to be 85-90% of the way there. I'd like to switch back to Linux from Apple products but it's never 100%.

If I pay 1900-2200$ for a deluxe laptop, I would be keen to pay about 300$ more and have a deluxe Linux. Please Canonical, charge me but give me the deluxe experience ;)

give Fedora 21 a shot - you will see what a deluxe experience is like

Install microcore - your machine will really fly.

One option that works 100%, is just to let it run Windows, and run Linux in VMWare or VirtualBox. I've done it before, and I'm doing it right now - never had any issues with it.

Then why windoze? Why not go with Apple?

Windows-specific apps, and getting Linux working on modern macbooks has been difficult at times (Apple's bootloader is always a source of fun issues to troubleshoot....)

Any way you slice it, you're having to do things you'd rather not do and that aren't at all necessary were we in a sane world.

> I currently own an XPS13 old version

Which one?

I currently have two laptops: one is a recent (less than 3 years old) Dell Latitude 6430u, and the other one is an old Dell XPS 13 (the M1330, from 7 years ago). Of course the recent one is faster and lighter, but I have to say that the XPS still is a very good laptop, as 7 years later it is still able to compete with new ones.

So I don't need a new laptop right now but this new XPS 13 looks very interesting indeed, thanks for the information about the GNU/Linux version :).

> thanks for the information about the GNU/Linux version :).

You're welcome.

I own the previous version XPS13 (think I bought it in 2013 or 2014). It's a great piece indeed.

I dont use the Ubuntu version that it ships with (by I like NetrunnerOS, in case any one does not know it: have a look), and in the beginning I had problems with the touchpad. Now I mainly have problem with slightly unstable wifi connection (not toooo bad, but annoying).

Last two things: it makes a bit of funny squeeking noise (condensor screem), and sometimes a keypress fires double.

That said, I really dont need the touch screen -- I rather have one without.

In a way I am glad there's issues.

My mbp gave up and I was over the whole apple thing, so I went for a previous revision one just around xmas and installed Ubuntu myself (Australia doesn't get the Developer Version).

It's a great machine, and I love it, but then I got miffed when they rolled out a new revision just after I decided to buy. However, I had a feeling that Linux on the previous revision would be a lot more solid, and your post confirms that.

Any idea what battery life might look like on the Linux version? Really hoping it can get near the 10+ hours of the Windows version.

There will probably be some hit, but probably not terrible.

I have the Ivy Bridge version; I probably get 4 hours running Ubuntu and perhaps just under 5 with Windows; this is not scientific though. I really should measure it.

I have the 2014 XPS developer edition and can get 10 hours with modest screen brightness. I get even more if I use a minimal WM like i3.

I find the two things that can really eat up the battery are screen brightness and having a poor Wi-Fi connection.

Try running Powertop and check out the tunables pane. You might even be able to reap some additional battery life.

I had a previous developer edition. I was hard to get over the fact that you paid for a Linux laptop but it still was not visible for people, everyone immediately pointed to the windows key on the keyboard.

Maybe this time Dell will customize that key for the developer edition? One can hope.

Sitting here using an XPS 13 Ivy Bridge (didn't buy as developer edition, but running Ubuntu) and definitely considering jumping for one of these for the battery life alone.

It would be great, but I must admit I'm on a MBP now.

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