Yeah, the worst Linux laptop I had in years:

1) the touchpad never worked; 2) the keyboard still has problems; 3) some of the more important programs look just horrible on Linux, as the resolution is just too high; 4) sometimes WiFi just does not work;

...so much for the Sputnik project.

Is that with the 'Infinity' screen or whatever they called it? I just got the 1080p one and don't use scaling. I had a Yoga with a hidpi screen and agree that a bunch of programs just don't work at all with scaling in Linux.

I should have just bought a Thinkpad :-) It's the Infinity display + preinstalled Linux that caught my attention.

It's sad to see you had trouble. With the latest version of it (9350), I had trouble at the beginning but upgrading the kernel to 4.4 solved all of them.

Also, regarding #3, I've heard Linux Mint as great HiDPI support in their last version.

I've had similar experience with my ASUS N76V: it worked fine for a number of recent releases, but only with the upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 did the touchpad start working decently (I couldn't turn on two-finger scroll before, because that resulted in phantom multi-finger gestures).

The current situation with XPS 15 seems much worse: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071

For decent experience, one should wait until April until 16.04 comes out. And some issues will probably remain for a release or two after that.

Support was terrible last May when I bought the laptop. Now everything works except the hidpi issues. But that's not laptop problem.

Overall the only problems I face is with - GTK2 apps, they look awkward. Eg. very small icons - Spotify, Steam, Skype will look very small

However the biggest turnoff is that whenever I connect to external display (1080p), I have to apply a weird command with scaling and panning options. This results in blurred look, a bit lag and fan spinning hard. I wish there was some option to do selective font scaling based the screen.

That's a good data point. I've been running 15.10 since I got it with minimal issues. This is another good resource: https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues

Agreed, putting any distro on there other than what shipped def helped me.

Also take out the broadcom wifi and burn it with fire! Replaced with Intel wifi card and have zero wifi issues.

I had same issue but now that's it's smoothed out it's a nice laptop I don't thing about it it just works great.