Regarding 13h vs 22h battery life - I wonder if c't did any test with manually enabled SATA power management? This is a big deal on recent Intel hardware and unfortunately is still not enabled automatically by linux kernel, as described here:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/42156.html

Easiest way to enable this is to run "powertop", switch to "Tunables" tab, then toggle all lines that look like this:

  >> Bad Enable SATA link power management for host0
  >> Bad Enable SATA link power management for host1

Some people know how to tune and others just want to work on the laptop. As this one comes with Ubuntu pre install, in my opinion, Canonical should provide a patch or script to Dell which tunes this on par with Windows out of the box instead of having the user do it. Seems MS arranges aggressive powermanagement out of the box for Windows so Ubuntu should have the same. This is an example of the wrong way around anyway; you should not have to install and run powertop etc ; you should have to deinstall it if you do not want it... IMHO that it. I use powertop and some of my own scripts on my X220's (my go-to laptops for years now and hopefully years to come) and I get the same battery life as Windows on it.

That is a very good point. I would go even further and say that Canonical, too, shouldn't have to apply patches. That's upstream kernel's job.

But here's the rub - on some hardware enabling SATA PM can sometimes lead to various weird bugs - from failure to boot to crash with blank screen after few hours of working perfectly. And Intel would't release any sort of documentation that sheds any light on why that is the case, and what should be done to avoid it. Intel does know what to do, since (sic) Intel's storage drivers do the right thing on Windows.

Which brings us to even stranger point: Intel apparently doesn't share this documentation with Microsoft either. Hence new laptops with pre-installed Windows ship with Intel's storage drivers, while installing vanilla Windows 10 with Microsoft's storage drivers will give you as bad a battery life, as you get under Linux. This is an issue important enough that some laptop vendors employ hardware tricks to make storage hardware "invisible" for normal Microsoft's drivers for no good purpose other than to enable Intel's driver take over this hardware smoothly. See for example recent "Lenovo fake RAID" debacle:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/44694.html

There is a patch to make the nvme drive last a bit longer mentioned on the arch wiki (I've not tried it yet, tbh):

https://github.com/damige/linux-nvme

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(9360)

That is not quite the same thing. Andy's NVMe patches allow drive itself to go into deeper power-saving states, while discussion above was about power-management of SATA controller which is part of PCH (earlier known as northbridge), which in turn, on last 3 generations of Intel CPUs is integrated into the same die as CPU itself.

Unpleasant side-effect of SATA (or NVMe) controller being integrated onto the CPU die is that it now shares a power domain with the rest of the chip (i.e. PM being present or absent on SATA controller affects allowed set of C-states for the whole package). In other words, as long as SATA controller don't go into deep sleep (i.e. never - without power management enabled), whole CPU+PCH package would not go to deeper C-state. Thus, lack of PM in storage controller has disproportionately high effect on the total system power consumption.

Thanks that is very informative (as is your followup comment). And also it is kind of depressing; are there vendors more open or does that just not happen?

Or if you want to be a little heavy handed, you can run:

  powertop --auto-tune

That should add a nice boost to battery life.

Also, just enabling laptop_mode using laptop-mode-tools also improves the battery life a lot.

You can go and tweak stuff individually if you want, but these two are easy wins.

Honestly though in 2016 why can't whatever is done during auto tune be done without intervention based on a power profile?

"If laptop -> powertop --autotune"

I should submit a patch.

They do not explicitly mention link power management, but I'd be surprised if they were not aware of this, since I remember this issue being mentioned in c't several times. They did ask Dell about the discrepancies in power consumption, and Dell says that it's mostly due to the new Kaby-Lake Intel GPU, which is not yet properly supported by Linux, and that probably the combination of Xorg and Unity draws more power than Windows. They were able to reduce power consumption by 0,7W by setting i915.enable_psr, but that settings lead to temporary freezes of the screen.

I got a Developer Edition XPS 13 9360 two weeks ago. My compatibility experience:

- DisplayPort over USB-C alternate mode did not work at all in Ubuntu 16.04 (unplugging the USB-C cable froze the computer). So I upgraded to 16.10, and DisplayPort over USB-C now works, probably because 16.10 has a newer Linux kernel with better support for USB-C. I do encounter this bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1634449) where the external monitor will sometimes flash black when the mouse moves between monitors.

- The headphones are very noisy. When playing audio the hiss can be eliminated by running "alsamixer" and increasing the "Headphone Mic Boost" to 10 db gain. Depending on the monitor, there is 0 to very very little hiss when routing the audio through DisplayPort or HDMI and using my monitor's headphone jack. Annoyingly, when first playing audio, it takes about 2 seconds for the audio to start playing though the headphone jack on my DisplayPort monitor.

- Sometimes the touchscreen does not register touches after waking from suspend. A workaround is to close and open the lid.

- Occasionally (this has not happened in a few days), the wifi will disappear. Running "sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service" gets it working again. Also, iwconfig always reports "Bit Rate=1 Mb/s" even though the actual speed is much faster than that.

- Dell disables the super key out of the box. You have to uninstall the "dell-super-key" package, and add the super key keyboard shortcut with ccsm. (see http://askubuntu.com/questions/751661/dell-developer-edition...). Dell says that disabling the super key is not their choice (http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/46...)

Otherwise, everything seems to be working well. I have not tested it, but as far as I know Thunderbolt 3 does not work with Linux yet, so Thunderbolt 3 docks probably won't work.

Re: audio noisiness, it was a kernel bug with the older (9343) version, did it happen again? https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/11

It took a couple of months to get it fixed...

"Otherwise, everything seems to be working well"

Sigh, back to Apple who don't seem to want to serve pro customers anymore, but apparently still do it better than anyone else (in nix land)...

Honestly, try Ubuntu on a ThinkPad. You'll have to install the OS yourself, but that's generally it.

How are their touchpads and screens nowadays? HiDPI support in Ubuntu?

Stick to a TSeries and the touchpads/screens are pretty darn good nowadays, just feel nice. I haven't put linux on one since my T42 though (still probably my favorite ever..)

Hmm. /r/thinkpad doesn't seem to agree with you [1]. Did something change in the last 9 months? Whenever I look into thinkpad reviews it's always the same - crappy screen, more expensive than macbook when specced similarly, but expandable. And when it comes to touchpads I've yet to come past something that can compete with Apple's, even though they're now actively making them worse as well.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/46jjdw/which_thin...

I have one of these laptops (since Friday):

* ) Batt -- Still tweaking things, I dropped the ubuntu install pretty quick for arch, but I recon 9-10 hours is where I'm sitting atm.

) Headphones sound fine here...

) Wifi Perf? I get ~250mbit on fast.com from my house

The bigger issue is the graphics card whine under high load....

A few more details:

Regarding battery: They mention they could tweak the power consumption from 4,7W to 4W by setting

i915.enable_psr=1

but that this setting lead to temporary freezes of the picture on the screen for several seconds, so they don't recommend it.

Regarding the headphones they mention that it is worse when running on battery and when using the trackpad (they say it's a mosquito-like noise). They also say that there already is a fix for the audio driver but that it does not work.

As for WiFi: it's OK for for receiving (they measured 300MBit/s) but with sending they only got 29MBit/s.

In conclusion, they also say that except for the HDMI issues with the docking station, all those problems are driver issues which will eventually be fixed, but at the moment it is what it is.

Hmm; I've not tweaked that one -- I'm using:

options i915 semaphores=1 i915_enable_rc6=7 i915_enable_fbc=1 lvds_downclock=1

And things are fine graphics wise -- I'm going to give it a proper run in tomorrow @work and we'll see how it goes.. Played a 1080p film on it earlier with mpv and it ate about 20% -- had brightness at about medium.. Not sure if that's good or not..

4W seems a bit optimistic though doesn't it? I've tweaked things quite a bit, but maybe I'm missing some extra magic or I just don't know the machine enough to know what the baseline is...

I've got skype, spotify, maybe 20 firefox tabs, dozen terms or so, dwm, wpa_sup wifi, and some other stuff, and i'm currently at:

System baseline power is estimated at 11.8 W

Freq Throttling (this isn't controlable, seemingly, and handled by the intel_pstate driver) currently has me on: current CPU frequency: 526 MHz (asserted by call to hardware)

Don't really have a baseline yet -- I can drop a reply in here tomorrow if you're interested in how it holds up with some real use?

I'm disappointed, I own the 9330 model and at the beginning in a quiet room, the coil whine was very distracting.

I don't know if my ears are less sensible or the noise level is diminished but now it doesn't disturb me so much.

This is probably their 4th/5th HW iteration for the XPS model and still they didn't bothered to check for the noise emissions. In their support forum I was baited to wait for a HW solution from a Dell employee that never materialized for what I consider a macroscopic defect... T__T

Note: Unless I'm missing something, these have a max of 16GB RAM. Disappointing.

> The battery lasts for 13h under Linux, which is not too shabby. However, it lasts a whooping 22,5h with Windows 10.

This makes me wonder how it would fare when booting into Windows and running Linux inside a VM.

I'm pretty sure that's going to be my next laptop setup now that Apple's notebooks seem to have finally diverged too far from my needs.

I'm not in love with Windows, but as long as you don't go out of your way to screw it up it makes a pretty decent bootloader & hardware abstraction layer that also plays games. =)

>* I'm not in love with Windows, but as long as you don't go out of your way to screw it up it makes a pretty decent bootloader*

So, I've been running win10 on my games machine for about ten months now, and there's been two 'reboot now or in 15 minutes, no other choices' updates that I've seen, and a sizable number of times I've come back to it having autorebooted to a login prompt. Usually I'm just gaming, but I've had it reboot with open documents.

I could probably turn this off somewhere, but as it's not a mission-critical computer, it's still amusing to me.

Nope, the only reliable way to block it (that i know of) is to break reboot service by taking away permissions to run or edit it from your own OS

Possibly it will get overturned by autoupdate after a while anyway

Oh for Christ sake, just disable the Windows Update service and stop complaining. Done. No updates until you turn it back on.

It's two clicks.

Hahaha wow. Well, that's good to know. That would be a possible non-starter for a machine actually intended for "real work."

"I'm pretty sure that's going to be my next laptop setup now that Apple's notebooks seem to have finally diverged too far from my needs."

I'd be quite curious to know which specific "need" has been diverged from, given that these models have either the same limitations (max 16GB LPDDR3 RAM) or more-limiting ones (max 512GB SSD, no discrete graphics)...

I'm still on the fence if my next laptop will be an Apple. I have been squeamish about changes to the Macbook Pro over the years. I've had terrible luck with batteries. In every laptop I've had to buy a new battery after 2 years because it failed sooner than advertised (but outside of the warranty). I was skeptical when they got rid of the user replacement battery, but I was wrong. Battery reliability got better and it wasn't that difficult to actually replace the battery.

On every laptop I've owned I've also had to replace the hard drive and have upgraded the ram both because of failures and in order to upgrade. I still like having a DVD rom, but replaced my wife's DVD rom with an SSD without giving it much thought 6 months ago. She was in the hospital and her friends brought over a DVD box set and she had forgotten I had removed her DVD rom. I just paid for the series again on iTunes.

I'm also not yet ready to give up all of my ports for this next purchase. Thunderbolt had the same promise of being the uber-connector. There were eventually 1 or 2 hubs to be found, but they never came down in price or became ubiquitous even though Apple went all-in on them. I'm confident USB-C will eventually have wider adoption...I'm willing to wait.

Part of the problem is that everyone in my shoes have been waiting over a year for the next big upgrade so it makes it harder to deal with the compromises. I think I'm going to upgrade to a used Macbook Pro so I can get retina but still have the few last things I want. Maybe by the time I need to replace that I'll be ready for whatever Apple is currently selling (or another vendor fills the vacuum).

Right. I would not move to these Dell XPS models specifically, because of the reasons you said. My wording there was a bit vague. I meant that I was considering a move to a Windows+LinuxVM setup in general.

With Windows as your host OS though you are only as secure as Windows...

I don't think the difference between linux and windows in terms of security is as big as you're implying.

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/32238/Microsoft-Windows-1...

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/20550/Canonical-Ubuntu-Li...

Windows is closed-source and edited by an American company, so I think there are security implications beyond the number of vulnerabilities that have historically been found.

You are comparing Windows 10 (just desktop OS) with Ubuntu for all versions, with all packages, including the server ones.

Windows Server, each version, has its own product for CVEs, as does Internet Explorer.

Wow are we still in 2003 with the security fud still?

My point was more that you can't treat Windows as "just a bootloader" as the parent to my post was implying. You also need to worry about security. I'm sure that a stock Windows install has more remote security vulnerabilities than lilo or grub.

No matter how much you lock down the guest VM, the host OS is still a weak point.

You need to get Pro version of Windows 10 to get full disk encryption...

To be fair, "battery life is fantastically good on Linux, and stupendously good on Windows" doesn't exactly sound like a downside to me.

50% worse is pretty bad no matter how you spin it.

13 hours is still 'good enough'. You could go a full day at work without charging it.

You're completely missing the point. You're paying for double of that battery usage and not getting it.

Imagine if Linux was so unoptimized that it needed twice the CPU cores and RAM; your argument would be that "but it comes with twice as much as the other guys" and ends up being twice as expensive and twice as big.

>>You're completely missing the point. You're paying for double of that battery usage and not getting it.

The point is that the marginal value of that extra time is absolutely negligible for most people.

I'm not sure I really believe any os can actually drive NVMe, 3somethingx1080 touchscreen, 16GB of ram and a quad core 17 for 22 hours with this hw setup while doing anything remotely resembling normal use.....

This machine will be my work luggable, I'm pretty sure it'll hold up all day.

First real run is tomorrow (dev+infra stuphz), I'll drop back in and let you know how it lasted if you're interested?

edit: anyone/any-os

I'm not sure that's true. Do you have data to back that up?

I love Linux as much as the best person but we really gotta get on that power thing.

I don't know, 10 hours of extra battery use on a laptop doesn't seem "absolutely negligible" to me.

10 more hours on 1 hour would be amazing. 10 more hours on 5 hours would be great. 10 more hours on 10 hours would be a fine thing, but most people's working day isn't that long. 10 more hours on 20 hours wouldn't be very useful.

This is the concept of diminishing marginal returns. You cannot look at "10 hours" in isolation; its value is lower when the baseline is higher.

You are impacting battery longevity though.

I'm not sure that someone spending over $1000 for a Developer Edition laptop falls into the "most people" category.

It seems strange to argue that someone buying a workstation device should be okay with half the battery as a Windows user because it's Good Enough.

I've bought these machines for years, at home and at work. I'm definitely not a "most people" in that I've happily used Linux as my desktop environment for the past 20 years. OTOH, I'm very ordinary in my battery requirements. To be honest, at work anything that covers a long meeting is probably 'enough'.

Also, real numbers on Windows are nowhere near 22h: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/dell-xps-13-battery-life

And then there's the price difference to the US. For instance, the cheapest model:

    -  $949.99 in the U.S.
    - $1323.07 in Germany (1249 Euro)

A tad over 1100 USD when you account for the VAT. Still quite the difference.

Add sales tax, some forex risk buffer, and import VAT. Normally the difference is rather negligible...

Do not forget warranty! In Europe you must provide 1 or 2 year warranty vs 90 days in the US. We are also paying for this insurance.

Pick sales tax OR VAT. They are mutually exclusive. Import duties for computers are 0% in EU.

I'm curious, did they install and configure laptop-mode-tools, tlp and/or intel powertop on linux?

But that's the state of the art using Linux with bleeding edge hardware.

"Developer Edition" doesn't mean "built for developers", it means "fix your drivers yourself".

If Dell did their homework and ensured a silk smooth experience with Linux, the laptop would be priced higher and people would be upset that the Linux version is more expensive arguing that "Linux is free".

So bad performance is a short-term compromise. If you don't want to join the effort to fix the drivers, or you can't wait some months until the community fixes the drivers, you should get an older model.

I'm using Arch Linux on one of these and absolutely everything (including the touchscreen, suspend/resume, etc) has worked out of the box; the only things I had to mess around with were UEFI (since I've been on macs for years and just came back) -- "libvaapi" so that mpv uses hardware accel, and to install the intel-microcode initrd, and hacking dwm's config.h for ages...

Is this the article? https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2016-25-XPS-13-Developer-Edi...

With respect to the HDMI port on the separately sold docking station, define "does not work correctly" :)

Usually if people are having issues they post them to Barton's blog so that the issues get visibility and to discover whether other people are having similar issues. The problems that you refer to will probably be mentioned there in soon-ish.

Yes, that's the one. The problem with the HDMI on the DA200 docking station is that they tested several monitors and and they either did not work at all or only with low resolutions. They asked Dell about it and Dell itself says that they do not recommend using the DA200 and similar docking stations with Linux.

Gah, that's not good. Thanks!

As an owner of a previous generation XPS 13 I have a couple of comments.

> The battery lasts for 13h under Linux, which is not too shabby. However, it lasts a whooping 22,5h with Windows 10.

Not likely Dell's fault. User "aexaey" commented about this.

> WiFi performance is dismal in Linux. No problem with Windows.

There were some driver issues in my generation for WiFi but this was eventually sorted out. I would prefer Intel wireless cards over Killer since Intel typically has better Linux drivers but this is usually not up to Barton and/or the Sputnik team.

> The HDMI port on the separately sold docking station does not work correctly with Linux.

If this is talking about the USB 3.0 dock from Dell (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l...), this is because the underlying USB to display driver is from DisplayLink (http://www.displaylink.com/) and (last I checked) they have repeatedly refused to support Linux due to lack of perceived market demand. No USB dock is going to work with linked displays over Linux (that I know of/use DisplayLink under the covers).

However, TB3 docks do not typically suffer from this same problem. So now with the Sputniks coming with Thunderbolt, look at TB docks (you should be anyway) and this won't be a problem.

> The headphone port is very noisy with Linux. No noise whatsoever with Windows.

Had a similar problem with mine. Can't remember how I fixed it.

If you want to buy a laptop that has a team dedicated to supporting Linux on the hardware, you can't complain to much about Dell Sputnik. Dell has been doing good work and overall I think has made a positive impact on the Linux laptop/hardware support market. You are also more or less paying for support. It's a pretty neat thing to be able to file a support ticket with someone like Dell regarding a hardware issue on your laptop running Linux.

But this is still Linux we are talking about...and it is still very much a second-class citizen at Dell. So as long as you know this, I have to say I rather enjoy mine still.

If it is a driver issue, it should improve other time, shouldn't it?

I had the first XPS13 developer edition and it had so many driver issues. After one year things were better.

Here is the link to the test. Only in German and behind a payment barrier: https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2016-25-XPS-13-Developer-Edi...

I had a noisy headphone port on a slightly older XPS 15. There was a simple `echo 1 > ???` fix, but I have no recollection of the specifics. I could probably look for it if someone else has the problem and needs it, though there's no guarantee that the new XPS 13 would be fixed the same way.

This is only from little experience with Ubuntu and the like, but it seems that mainstream Linux distros, by their very nature, contain many separate components installed by default that could be doing something with the CPU despite not really being necessary, with no one group responsible for overall power management/resource use (unlike Windows or MacOS).

It may be open-source and free, but if the user doesn't want or need it and it's installed and actively consuming resources, it's bloatware nonetheless. I'd be interested in knowing the battery life with a far more minimalist distro.

Did a fairly standard install of Lubuntu 16.04 + full disk encryption, and I seem to get about 10 hours (i5, 8GB, 128GB). I'll have to try powertop and see if that changes anything.