I'm currently on my first and last XPS, a 9570. I really wanted to love it, but there's just too much about it that is a complete disaster, particularly around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals.

I know I haven't exactly babied it, what with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic, but the battery is shot at this point— getting barely an hour of life. Often it'll be supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason. Then it'll wake up and immediately go into a power-panic shutdown, only to assert that the battery is full after all when it reboots connected to juice. And now the HDMI port is also toast (verified under multiple OSes to be a hardware issue).

Maybe I just got a bad year, but this is supposed to be Dell's premium machine and I don't think I can justify giving them another chance after this. It's just nowhere near reliable enough to be used on the road, and not performant enough to be a true desktop replacement. So I don't know who is using this machine and for what.

Same issue with power here on my 9570! In fact I just checked after one month of plugged-in non-use, turning it on resulted in dead battery in < 3 minutes. What's crazy is that if I let it charge now, I will get 3 solid hours of battery life. The battery health indicates 2/4, it's definitely not a fully spent battery.

The other thing that has driven me crazy is the wide-gamut 4K screen. The text is nice and crisp, but good luck with sRGB content. Basically all content for non Adobe professionals is fubar'd. I eventually made the situation tolerable by finding an old version of Dell PremierColor and using its sRGB profile (newer versions of the software on Microsoft Store quit working on the 9570 and the color profiles do nothing - imagine that). Still get terrible color banding and crushed blacks, and I'm not even sure investing in a colorimeter would fix it.

Overall I've come to the same conclusion as you. In 2018 this was a $2000 machine (Costco price below retail), and I also can't justify giving Dell another chance.

My XPS 15 was horrible under Windows, but it was fantastic running Linux. It would somehow get 2x the battery, and ran a lot faster... and once Proton hit, it wasn't half bad on gaming.

I had a 9520 for about 5 years. I had two issues, which was a broken left hinge (4k touch screen was two heavy for that part, I believe in the XPS 15 actually didn't suffer from the same issue), and swelling batteries, which caused various knock on issues. I also experienced the same issue with batteries from the dell latitude I got from work. Seemed to be a dell thing for laptops left plugged in constantly. I never had to deal with overheating issues despite having a Xeon (although it did get quite hot).

Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.

That's so funny, because I'm in the same boat with my XPS 9570. I bought it for personal use because I had an amazing experience with a 9370 developer edition at my last job. I figured it would be the same, but that was extremely naive. I got the i5-8300H SKU with an empty 2.5" SSD bay, 53Wh battery, and a 1TB drive for $800 and change with the intention of plugging it into my GTX 1070 eGPU at home. I figured that this would be like, a power-sipping config.

NOPE! It wakes itself from lid-shut sleep and cooks itself whenever I put it in a bag, it will crash and reboot if the Thunderbolt cable gets jostled, and I get maybe 90 minutes on battery life after weeks of optimization script fiddling. I wanted to like it so badly because at the time, the processor was a steal. Matching the old 7820-HQ's performance with a bottom-tier i5 8300H felt like magic, but nothing else lived up to the hype.

> around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals.

Can't speak for wake behaviour cause I have never encountered issues on my 15" 9570 but you can actually make it much, much better with a bit of work.

You need to work around plundervolt flags and enable undervolting(there's a tutorial in some reddit threat on how to do this), then undervolt CPU a bit, this way it almost never throttles. As for thermals, just changing paste to Kryonaut and adding few stacked thermal pads so they connect to the chassis in few places according to some tutorials I found made insane improvements. I play Valorant on mine and I went from almost constant throttling, to no issues at all, even during longer sessions. It's also almost never running fans on higher speeds during normal work.

But I agree, my next machine will be a MBP with Mx chip, I don't want to put in so much work into something that costs a small fortune just so it works properly.

I've had the same experience with my XPS 9560. Past few years I've had "TPM device is not detected"[1] issues. Tried all the different solutions and nothings fixed it. Dell have never addressed it with a BIOS update.

I don't want to go back to OS X, but its hard to find good build quality and a high res screen.

Also, my battery was terrible after a couple of years. I had it plugged in as well. I bought a replacement this year and it was easy enough to switch out. Hopefully I can just keep this going and use it as an RDP machine.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_d...

I had the same issue, for me updating the TPM firmware solved the issue (but it is convoluted)

https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-...

My guess is that Dell didn't update the TPM firware, my guess is this breaks some keys so can't be done automatically and a BIOS update at some point then screws up the handshake with the older TPM firmware unless the laptop is fully powered off.

But I'm not a huge fan of dell hardware.

I think the real garbage part of buying an XPS from Dell for professional developer work on Linux is that they will not provide any support for the device. Particularly when you report driver, sleep, or other software level issues that they ostensibly provide with OEM installed Linux.

Yeah my 15” xps was pretty bad too. Coworker and I both had this issue where one key press would result in the same letter being typed twice. Coworker sent his machine back several times but never got that fixed. I just used an external keyboard most of the time. Besides that, my machine’s battery ultimately puffed up and made the trackpad impossible to click.

> supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason

Same. It fires up full fans and all in the middle of the night.

It’s a nice form factor, but much like me growing tired of stuff like “android slowdown syndrome” and me getting an iPhone last fall … I feel like I’m being pushed to try a Mac laptop for a cycle….

I just don’t want to deal with this stuff anymore.

> with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic

Yeah, my second seems to have succumbed to that as well. There's a setting in the BIOS that says "I plan on keeping this plugged in all the time" and it'll do better battery management that way.

My mbp automatically enables that after being plugged in for awhile, by setting the max threshold to 80% or something. The mbp warned me in the battery monitor I think. Nice, because I wasn't even thinking of such things.

That's the kind of thing that Linux tends to miss out on. But I don't feel that selling my computing experience to Cupertino is worth such things either.

I’m thinking, that since your battery has passed its cycle limit, maybe the increased internal resistance of what odd causing all the heat issues. Maybe, change the battery?

> But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware

Please, it’s not that weird of an opinion.

> (the trackpad […] are all inferior IMO)

Oh.

But I think I agree when it comes to anything like drag-and-drop.

My XPS 13 9360 randomly turns on when the lid is closed and burns through the battery. There was an official document at some point saying that if you put it in your backpack in sleep mode, it voids the warranty.

I really like the laptop otherwise, but battery/power management is utter crap on it, both on Windows and on Linux.

I've noticed this too, but it seems Bluetooth related. There's a report with the Linux kernel, but no progress as yet.

See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521995

What are you after in a trackpad? I think this is the best feature of the laptops.

I am rough with mine (my first uses were on some IBM tank from the late 80s/early 90s when I was young and a Lenovo T61 in college). Spurious clicks and taps happen all the time when I end up using the things. I have spent minutes trying to get an Apple trackpad to perform to drag and drop and instead having it do every other thing from extra clicks on the way to zooming to running out of space when I get to the edge trying to get where I'm going. The fact that you can SSH in and use a more exacting interface is the best feature of the things IMO, but sometimes the UI is just the only way to get something done.

I also liked the matte texture of the ThinkPad, but I think that era is over (the XPS isn't glassy like Apple's at least, but still lacks texture).

But all of that crap is optional. The first thing a macOS user should do on a new machine is go to system preferences > Trackpad and turn that stuff and "Force Touch" off.

That doesn't help when I'm using someone else's Macbook.

Have you tried 3 finger drag? So much nicer than needing to apply pressure.

Doesn't that swipe between desktops/workspaces/whatever? On that note, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to discover these gestures. I had the same problem when I had an iPhone for a few months (long story): I became afraid to swipe anything because I never knew what anything would do and the lag on the thing meant that some widget could show up under my finger without knowing (something I really dislike about reflowing and progressively loaded websites too). The floating dot thing was also way more invasive than a button too.

FWIW, I have animation time set to 0 on my Android phone to avoid these kinds of behaviors but given that the primary interaction was through them on Apple, it was unavoidable.

By default yeah, you need to disable that gesture (or set it to 4 fingers) and then enable 3 finger drag in accessibility settings under trackpad. Aside from 3 finger drag though these are all in the normal trackpad settings, it's pretty clear about what does what and all of it can be disabled.

This used to be a regular (non-accessibility) setting, not sure why they hid it away a few versions ago.

In system preferences there are videos demonstrating all trackpad gestures in the trackpad settings.

I think most issues people have with using the trackpad are due to the fact that the default is that you have to click the trackpad like a mouse button in order to perform a "click." Most people coming from Windows want to use tap to click and I think that is what leads to confusing results.

Fwiw, I have a nearly-maxed-out brand new mbpro m1 and can't stand OSx so it's collecting dust as my similar specs 1 year old XPS i9 with PopOS sees 12h of daily use.

Of course an m1's battery life is better. Everything else sucks in comparison imo but I admit this is very subjective.

Not weird, or at least if you are I'm with you. OS; eh, ok, I'm used to it. Hardware, nope. I run my work Mac in clamshell and use none of it. Screen is fine I guess, but I'm old and most of it's lost on my shitty eyesight anyway.

I was eyeing an XPS like of notebooks for many years, but comments like the ones in sibling threads are holding me back from acting upon it.

Just got an XPS 15 with i9-12900HK with Ubuntu 22.04 (5.18 kernel installed after the fact). Still working the kinks out, but the machine won’t reliably wake when the lid is opened. It’s about 10% faster than my M1 Pro, but with much worse battery life. If I didn’t still need an AMD64 machine for somethings, there’s no reason to put up with the quirks of a Linux laptop IMO.