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.
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.
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...
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.
https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/tree/master/QCA6390
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".
It's possible that Arch ships with the workaround/fix by default.
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.
http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...
Unless you plan to put them into a bag or backpack suspended:
With regards to transporting your laptop in a bag or backpack, safety should be your primary concern. You should always turn the laptop OFF [...] Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-Standby/td-p/7...
https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k0fm7z/system76_l...
Great points, though. Especially brightness -- even if you don't need all those nits for day-to-day use, they're great to have as an option when you do! Don't skimp on the screen specs that matter to you.
As much as I appreciate the privacy and freedom enhancing aspects of some of these devices, ultimately a device that’s more practical for me in day to day usage wins out.
That generally leaves me with a more established manufacturer. Lenovo Thinkpad and Ideapad have options in this area and run Linux just fine. Dell XPSes are good too, though I wish they’d offer an AMD option. HP Envy/Spectre devices are rather decent too, though getting the touchscreen and sensors to work on these can be fiddly because HP compensates for their broken BIOS through the Windows drivers instead of just fixing shit.