Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#1

Post by neverminder » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13
forbes.com

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#2

Post by datalist » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

Quite the opposite story of https://medium.com/@neroux/linux-why-dont-you-love-me-30cd05...

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#3

Post by chopin » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

The Linux Mint experience of the author is strange. I was able to install with no problems on three very different machines (Dell Inspiron, HP Laptop (forgot the model, it's my daughter's) and an assembled game PC featuring 4 Monitors). The only qualm I have with it: For fear of data loss I decided against full disk encryption (the installation procedure asks for it) in expectation that one can switch after installation (I think Windows is able to do this). Unfortunately, that is not possible and imposing this later seems to include a lot of low-level work.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#4

Post by GiuseppaAcciaio » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

datalist wrote: post #2

Quite the opposite story of https://medium.com/@neroux/linux-why-dont-you-love-me-30cd05...

I remember when I installed Debian on my old Toshiba laptop in 2004 (all 16x CDs of it, which a friend had to download for me coz I had no broadband), I couldn't update it because the ethernet network adapter (no wifi) on my laptop was not supported... nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists! If I remember correctly I fixed it by installing a different distro (Ubuntu or Kubuntu, which surprisingly despite being based on Debian had no issues recognizing my network adapter)

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#5

Post by kanishkdudeja » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 10:46 AM UTC

The only issue I face with Linux on my Dell XPS 13 is the sub-par touchpad experience.

If I use Ubuntu with XOrg, I don't have features like touch rejection while typing etc.

If I use Ubuntu with Wayland, my cursor is all over the place.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#6

Post by amarant » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 10:49 AM UTC

kanishkdudeja wrote: post #5

The only issue I face with Linux on my Dell XPS 13 is the sub-par touchpad experience. If I use Ubuntu with XOrg, I don't have features like touch rejection while typing etc. If I use Ubuntu with Wayland, my cursor is all over the place.

I have similar issues I've found that disabling tap-to-click is the only option. Takes some getting used to actually pressing down the touchpad instead of tapping, but at least typing is now a deterministic experience.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#7

Post by kurtisc » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

The author praises the package manager as a positive, not a negative as I usually see from people used to downloading *.exe installers. He's used other distros, plus a Mac, in the past, but I wonder if phone app stores (plus Windows' own software store) have made this become a more natural method of installing software for the average user?

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#8

Post by majewsky » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

GiuseppaAcciaio wrote: post #4

datalist wrote: post #2

Quite the opposite story of https://medium.com/@neroux/linux-why-dont-you-love-me-30cd05...

I remember when I installed Debian on my old Toshiba laptop in 2004 (all 16x CDs of it, which a friend had to download for me coz I had no broadband), I couldn't update it because the ethernet network adapter (no wifi) on my laptop was not supported... nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists! If I remember correctly I fixed it by installing a different distro (Ubuntu or Kubuntu, which surprisingly des…

> nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists /s

FTFY

Seriously, though, that's a huge outlier. I haven't touched a machine in the last 10 years where Ethernet and Wifi were not supported out-of-the-box. (Including my new Thinkpad, which I was weary about since it came with an Atheros Wifi module, but it too worked out-of-the-box without any tinkering).

These days, the biggest issues are with Nvidia GPUs from what I've heard.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#9

Post by rospaya » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 11:10 AM UTC

I'm writing this from my XPS 13 using the latest Ubuntu and once I've spent a few hours configuring everything, it works almost perfectly. There's still a few bugs, like Ubuntu not remembering the audio settings.

Re: Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

#10

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 11:14 AM UTC

rospaya wrote: post #9

I'm writing this from my XPS 13 using the latest Ubuntu and once I've spent a few hours configuring everything, it works almost perfectly. There's still a few bugs, like Ubuntu not remembering the audio settings.

XPS 15 9560 here. The audio thing seems to be very recent. I've noticed that my (usually muted) audio is always re-enabled on boot now, but only in the past week or so. I've been running Cosmic since the early alpha days. A minor annoyance as everything else works perfectly on this machine - hopefully it'll get fixed soon in an update.