[radicalbyte]

For the love of everything that is good, if you buy this laptop, go for the 4k screen. It's beautiful.

It's a big laptop, you'll use it on a desk, so the battery life is fine.

I use my XPS 9550 for work and carry around a MBP13 for email / reading / surfing.

The biggest problem with the 9550 by far is the keyboard. The MBP keyboard is amazing in comparison. However it is a laptop keyboard, I have yet to encounter a good one (old Thinkpads come the closest). Just buy a decent mechanical keyboard and plug it in.

[jylam]

Not all laptop keyboards suck. My (old model) Thinkpad keyboard is really good. I even use it on my desktops (home and work) https://sc02.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1vYX2KXXXXXarXVXXq6xXFXXXp/Gen...

[radicalbyte]

True, the old Core 2 Duo era Thinkpad keyboards were not bad. Still not a patch on a good quality full sized keyboard, mind. Updated my comment for clarity

[TheRealDunkirk]

The Dell XPS laptops have a reputation for being good to use with Linux, but I read somewhere else that Linux doesn't handle 4K very well yet. Apparently, the UI elements look tiny because they don't scale. Any chance you've tried it, and can comment?

[ytjohn]

I can confirm. Linux on HiDPI still has a lot of scaling issues that OSX and Windows does not - OSX is far superior here when it comes to handling their "retina" display.

On my 1440p 23" desktop, things seem to render just fine. On my 11" lenovo helix and on my 15" macbook pro (while running linux), it's definitely noticeable.

I mainly use either Gnome or MATE desktop on Ubuntu. MATE seems to handle scaling the desktop elements better than straight Gnome. But it's still a bit off.

The worst part is browsing the web. Firefox has relatively decent HiDPI support these days, but Chrome on Linux is just terrible. A site like Facebook on Chrome shows the newsfeed as this 3" wide centered column, and you have massive white space on the left and right of it. But reboot into Windows and they make that column much wider and easier to read. On imgur on chrome/linux, I find most of the images are "too tall". If I'm watching an animated gif, I find that one edge is vertically outside of my viewport.

Your only fixes is to change the scaling. As you do this, you start to lose the advantages of the higher resolution:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911509/how-to-make-linuxs-de...

Ultimately, things are still usable, video playback is fantastic, but most of the applications really need to improve their Ux on high resolution screens under Linux.

[amouat]

No problem with scaling (just set it from the display menu), but I gave up trying to get it to work consistently with a second monitor at a different scale. In the end it was much easier just to turn the laptop screen off when using a second monitor.

Battery life with Linux isn't great and there were flicker problems, especially with Chrome. Updating the kernel and setting various Chrome flags helped considerably.

EDIT: I should mention I'm using Unity on Ubuntu 16.04

[aoloe]

i'm quite happy with the xps 13 developer edition and debian testing.

hidpi is not handled well in some (or many) applications, but the window manager (or linux as a kernel) has no problem with it. (and i still have very good eyes)

the usb-c dell adapter works perfectly (hdmi, vga, ethernet), i get up to 8 hours of battery, it's light, solid, quite and fast...

just a bit hot when charging.

the only big issue that i have still to solve is, getting a second monitor to work (mirroring somehow works)... but this is what you get when you don't use a destkop environment and have just a minimal install... (the ubuntu that comes pre-installed has no problems with the external monitor)

[funkyy]

Not all laptop keyboards suck. I have Asus laptop and the keyboard is great, much better than mechanical for me. Light on the fingers with proper mechanics behind tapping keys. And I am developer, so I type a lot...

[gonzo41]

Thinkpad t460 - great keyboard, not as good as the past but switching over from a macbook. wow so much travel and such comfortable keys.

[radicalbyte]

I've used a lot of laptops and have still to find one which either types as nicely as a good mechanical keyboard or is as comfortable as the Microsoft Ergonomic (which sadly has rubbish typing action).

Of course this kind of thing is very personal, it depends on a lot of factors.

The 9550 keyboard just feels cheap and wobbly. The action is otherwise actually pretty pleasing. It wants to be the MBP keyboard but just isn't quite there.

[eveningcoffee]

I wish they also included trackpoint. Would be instant buy for me. Unfortunately Dell has not been very consistent in that regard.