Be very careful. They are very good laptops, and Dell's customer support for businesses is stellar, but the XPS machines play VERY bad with Linux. There are some XPS machines that are shipped with linux, so they should be fine. But most of them have wifi/bluetooth chips that have no support at all, or very bad support.
Having used 2 XPS13 (9343 and 9370) as my daily driver for years, this is simply not true in my experience.
On my 9343 bluetooth did not work initially, and on the 9370 the fingerprint reader is not available (no driver available), but apart from that linux is just working - and I'm not particular fond of spending time on setting things up.
Much more of an issue is that the xps, as every non apple computer does not support s3 sleep anymore. So just closing the lid and putting it in a bag can lead to overheating and battery drain.
Honestly I don't get, why we can't have decent power management unless you buy a mac.
> Having used 2 XPS13 (9343 and 9370) as my daily driver for years, this is simply not true in my experience.
That's good to hear for you, but I'm not just making this up. I have the XPS 13 9310 which mostly comes with the AX500 chip for wifi and bluetooth.
- For about half a year it had NO support in Ubuntu (non-existent drivers)
- Then it finally got drivers, but it was extremely unstable. After an automatic update from ubuntu, the wifi no longer worked and it took several weeks for it to be fixed.
- The bluetooth VERY often won't turn on after a reboot, requiring me to reboot about 5 times before it finally works.
- Same for wifi, even on the latest drivers it often can't find any networks.
- Some networks can't be found by the linux drivers. No problems at all under windows, with the same laptop.
- Crashes or freezes of the whole OS as a result of these drivers.
There's probably a ton more issues that I'm forgetting...
I have a 9310 32gb model with the ax500. With a 5.17 kernel and the WLAN.HST.1.0.1-05266-QCAHSTSWPLZ_V2_TO_X86-1 ath11k firmware, the machine has been flawless. Well maybe not the fingerprint reader.. i installed some updates and that broke but I never really used it so I haven't bothered trying to fix it.
Oh and make sure you configure the nvme to AHCI in the bios. The intel raid stuff is trash and causes major battery / suspend issues in my experience.
I mean that sounds like problems with one wifi card which can be swapped out for about $30. Swap it out for something like the ax200 and I bet those problems go away
Dell XPS has a Linux-specific line, called "Developer edition", which is intended to be Linux-compatible (it can be indeed be configured with Ubuntu on purchase).
Their compatibility is not as good as they say (it needs a couple of tweaks, one of which is crucial, otherwise the machine eats batteries while on standby), but it's still decent. Definitely not "VERY bad".
I have an XPS 13 9310. What's this crucial tweak? I've been running it on a vanilla Arch install for about a year and haven't noticed much battery drain on standby (maybe a few % per day left sleeping?)
I’ve owned two generations of them and exclusively run Linux on them (I think the 2016 and 2018 releases). One of them was a Developer Edition from work, but the other one was a generic store bought. Never had any issues with WiFi or Bluetooth.
I’ve always run distributions with kernel releases that aren’t months or years behind upstream, which might have helped as far as hardware support goes.
Be very careful. They are very good laptops, and Dell's customer support for businesses is stellar, but the XPS machines play VERY bad with Linux. There are some XPS machines that are shipped with linux, so they should be fine. But most of them have wifi/bluetooth chips that have no support at all, or very bad support.