I'm sure it is possible to start fiddling around and configure stuff if you need/want to, but so far the XPS 13 (well, Precison 5510 in my case but it is the same line of product) with Ubuntu works as I expect it to
Setting up CUDA along with Bumblebee is real pain though. In the beginning sometimes the lightdm just crash on start, but it has been stable after the first week.
Strangely, this is exactly my experience of running Linux on my Thinkpad. It just works: Every time. No fuss, no messing about with drivers, no dorking about with DEs. Open it up, get down to work.
Admittedly, when I worked full time with a Mac Pro as my desktop, OSX was perfectly OK. I honestly can’t say that I felt it was any better than my Linux experience on a day to day basis though.
I just don’t spend any time fiddling with Gnome; sure, it’s a bit opinionated about how it wants you to work with it, but so was macOS. I don’t spend any mental cycles worrying about the DE on either macOS or Gnome & that’s exactly the way it should be.
I’ll freely admit that the possibility of going down the rabbit hole of fiddling with your DE until you’ve got it just so is always there under Linux, whilst you have to to be a lot more committed to customisation on macOS if you want to mess around with that kind of stuff. But I decided long ago that so long as the DE got out of my way & let me get on with doing stuff then I wasn’t going to care about it.
It’s possible that I’m missing out on some amazing experience that would transform my computing life, but having tried both I’m really just not seeing it personally.
That's hyperbole if I've ever seen it. You can look at how many problems plagued Fedora on the XPS13 as recently as a year ago:
https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...
The tl;dr version is that the guy spent so long trying to get it working properly that he ditched the laptop for a Thinkpad. And FWIW, Fedora usually has better support for recent hardware than other distros due to the up-to-date kernel.
From what I gather, Thinkpads are the crown jewel of Linux-supported laptops. This is more of a dogfooding thing than anything else: kernel developers, Redhat employees, and other Linux users tend to use Thinkpads, which means they then spend more time getting support for Thinkpads into the kernel.
The community sorted out most of the issues, so about 6 months later the experience was actually quite good.
Dell released the Linux version of the laptop too early, I guess they wanted to get some traction but it backfired.
I find GNOME 3.22 to be at least as, if not more usable than macOS.
Would you like to describe your experience? My use of the DE is mostly for staring browsers/terminals and jumping workspaces (not as smooth as a Mac w/ trackpad).
> It's a great OS, by far the most stable OS I have ever used.
Windows 10 is reasonable, but I wouldn't say it's the most stable OS I've ever used and updates are usually a pain, specially compared to Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora.
It's a bigger challenge on Windows than OSX. On OSX devs only have to target a small number of High DPI resolutions.