[1] http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/xps-13-9350-laptop-ubuntu/...

Ubuntu has been terrible. I switched to Fedora 24 on the XPS 13 and it has been brilliant. No other laptop (not even macbooks) come with that weight/power ratio.

Everything works - including skype, etc. suspend resume has worked absolutely perfectly.

I really, really recommend using Fedora. Ubuntu has not been delivering the experience that the hype expects.

Works way better than expected and I use it ten hours a day. At some point, Wayland solves this natively, but in the meantime this is an acceptable workaround.

It is 80% there, and if I didn't just get a MBP from work, I'd probably spend some more time with Fedora outside the VM.

Either way, if MS doesn't clean up their act, I'm done with Windows after a long time of daily use.

Long version: It seems there are two kinds of people here:

Some like me never think about any font that finds its way into any mainstream distro.

Others seems to care deeply about them.

I find it useful to keep this in mind as I honestly find one of the highly praised Mac a usability disaster (tried honestly to work with it or around it for almost three years).

I personally would love to see a proper graphics application. I would use linux as my main PC in a heartbeat if a Sketch equivalent was available. I expect a lot of people have similar feelings or have one thing keeping them from completely making the jump.

I recently got a MBP and the fonts are great. In 2016, Linux needs this fixed.

That's like saying some art dealers don't care what paintings look like. They just sell the stuff.

I know three types that I use: serif, sans-serif and monospaced programming fonts.

I do however care a lot about keyboard layouts, keyboard shortcuts and general snappiness of the OS so I am definitely a programmer ;-)

Edit: and I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not an "art dealer" anyway, more like someone in logistics. :-)

Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.

Switching to Linux is not like switching brands of cars. It's more like switching from a car to a motorcycle. The rules are different, the ride is different, the functioning knowledge you need is different. Don't expect your car-seat to work anymore, you'll need a different product entirely to achieve the same function.

Especially if you are switching for philosophical reasons, I'd say just bite the bullet and learn to adjust. There are a lot of huge benefits, but also a lot of things you're used to just won't work anymore.

I haven't touched Windows in 3 years. You definitely don't need it.

Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.

This is quite an irrelevant point. macOS is also very different from Windows, from the POSIX API (which makes it very similar to Linux) to Cocoa. And yet Skype works fine.

The real reason is more likely to be that Microsoft just doesn't want to support Linux properly. Of course, the reasons are more clouded, possible reasons are: virtually no marketshare on the desktop, large fragmentation, or they simply see Linux as a competitor that they don't want to give momentum. Given that they do support Android, iOS, and macOS, my guess would be the former two.

rm -rf /opt/skype

But there's a new official client coming based on WebRTC :

https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-Alpha-a...

No video yet though

Jitsi Meet is a self-hosted, enterprise-grade alternative which works just as well. It even supports larger video conferences than Skype.

Easier said than done when colleagues, friends, and family use Skype for video calling.

Public instance there: https://meet.jit.si/

Company I work for migrated from Skype to Jitsi for meetings.

This is all with Debian Linux btw.

The desktop experience of Linux in general is still a bit off, but if you are like me and spend 99% of your time in the terminal or a web browser it certainly gets the job done. You can always supplement with a VM if you have to run "that program".

I don't understand why the XPS is so popular compared to similar priced business grade Thinkpad and Latitudes.

Only nit is that the standby battery life is only a few days. I upgraded from the 3-cell (which was pretty old and lasted about two hours) to a 6-cell. I'm still testing it but it lasts at least 5 hours under moderate usage. I think with the brightness on low it could last 10.

> If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

Dell xps dev edition is the closest thing to that right now. but i definitely agree, it would be awesome to have a linux equivalent of the surface pro made by either redhat or canonical.

I'm on Mac for now. I really, truly want to be on Linux because I would like to use docker-compose for development sandboxing (and Docker Mac performance is unacceptable). But until I can get solid battery life, it's just not in the cards.

Also, since 4.2, I can't change the screen brightness. I can change it during the BIOS splash, but once the kernel takes over, the key stops doing anything. The brightness slider moves around, but doesnt actually do anything.

It's a shame too, gaming is the one thing keeping my dad (who has the same laptop) from switching over to linux.

Not only that, the W520, T420, and L420 [0][1] and W530 have BIOS/chipset bugs that mean you need to disable x2apic. Avoid unless you love tinkering with Linux.

[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile/... [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/18/1

(If you need a secondary monitor, the situation isn't so good, though. Linux is missing support for some i915 USB-C feature that can cause issues with some adapters.)

Well, a year or two ago, at least T440s ThinkPads came by default with a Realtek wifi card, for which there were no good Linux drivers [1]. Lenovo had an option for intel wifi card at no extra cost, but you had to be clever enough to choose that option when ordering the laptop.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578

There are various issues such as the laptop freezing when plugging in an external monitor (this can be fixed through a kernel update), crashes when waking from suspend / lock, Trackpad issues, problems with Bluetooth, problems with supporting 4k monitors through MiniDP, ...

So I'd say the stability of Linux on the new Skylake Thinkpads is far from optimal, although most of the hardware seems to be supported and runs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4nu355/finally_fix...

When my workplace gives a developer a new desktop (one of Dell's Ubuntu offerings, seems to always use AMD GPUs), that person's first day is normally setting up dual head.

I wanted to buy a laptop with a GPU for CUDA experiments.

I was looking at Lenovo Yoga 710 (14 inch with nvidia gpu). Am I going to have a bad time dual booting a linux distribution?

It's a mess.

Someone else in the thread said what I completely agree with if possible just get the latest Intel HD series it works pretty much flawlessly.

In modern laptops, you usually have the complication of 'optimus' which allows you to switch between the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia GPU. This can be a bit awkward to get working, but it's improved recently. I've had plenty of issues getting it working right on Windows too.

All three work great in Windows of course. For Linux, integrated-only is best, followed by discrete-only, and I've never had success with optimus.

It's my understanding that newer Thinkpads don't have the BIOS option to switch and that this is much more of a PITA to get working.

[0]: http://bumblebee-project.org

You shouldn't have issues with Nvidia hardware though.

You also want to avoid AMD Radeon, which is even more problematic than nVidia. I think the best advice is "as long as you go for Intel graphics".

The X260 will likely work as an exact replica, but I haven't updated to Skylake yet so it's hard to say (ISTR there being some GPU buginess with Skylake at first). Otherwise everything should work almost perfectly out of the box, in my experience, though you'll probably want to tweak your power settings. The X260 will have a far superior screen, which if you're coming from a Macbook or anything will probably be important.

One of these days I'll upgrade and take my X220 down to the local hackerspace and get Coreboot put on it probably...

I'm a huge fan of the X1 series, which has about the same weight as the X260 but a bigger and higher-resolution screen. The X260 has the advantage of a hot-swappable, externally chargeable battery, and a better docking station; if you don't need either of those, go with the X1 and its awesome screen.

That's where System76 comes in for me.

Moreover, the XPS 13 is the first laptop that can charge using a battery pack (Dell Companion ) and runs brilliantly on Fedora 24.

Ubuntu has consistently performed badly on the xps 13. There is no thinkpad that comes at the price vs performance vs size ratio as the thinkpad. Obviously, there is no comparison for the thinkpad keyboard :(

I think Korona[1] is a spin of Fedora that has this stuff included by default, so if you want Linux that works out of the box, Korona + any Thinkpad is probably your best bet.

[0] http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/index.html [1] https://kororaproject.org/

See Dell: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-co....

Red Hat isn't a company that makes money by taking open source projects as a base and adding proprietary features on top, everything they make is under an open source license and anyone (regardless of whether the paid for it or not) can grab the source packages off their FTP server and build it themselves. Contrast this to Canonical who sells proprietary tools for Ubuntu (Landscape, a big sore spot for me), kept Launchpad proprietary for the longest time, Ubuntu One (though this is now dead).

And then we have the other big name in "Enterprise" Linux, SUSE, and we've got loads of proprietary software their sister companies sell (Novell, NetIQ) from eDirectory to GroupWise, the list here goes on.

Red Hat is an engineering organization dedicated to one thing. Sure, they have a sales channel and a large partner ecosystem, but at the core of their business is making fully open source products that people want to use (and hopefully buy support for).

Ideologically, I like this. I'll be sure to evaluate Red Hat when the opportunity arises.

From what i understand they are hardly the same.

That they are employed by the same company, yes.

One has faster development cycle, the other is regularly branched off and has longer support.

Why?

Watch out though. Some of the Baytrail netbooks are unfun for a variety of reasons with Linux. (Also with Windows). One of the longest threads on the Ubuntu forums is people trying to get Linux to run on an Asus X205TA.