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by ippa 3183 days ago
I have had the Kaby Lake XPS 13" for about a year. Linux is nice in many ways and it's a decent laptop. The small formfactor/screen might be the best thing about it hardwarewise. Here's my rant:

- I had to research and create a bashscript with these cmds to get better defaults / fix stuff:

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# Longer timeout for backlit keyboard

echo 5m > /sys/class/leds/dell::kbd_backlight/stop_timeout

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/dell::kbd_backlight/brightness

# This is to stop touchpad from beeing to sensitive while typing

syndaemon -t -k -i 1.0 -d

# Fix headphone hissing

amixer -c PCH cset 'name=Headphone Mic Boost Volume' 1

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- Wireless networking performs way worse then on my macbook pro 2015.

- Bad palm rejection on the touchpad bites me all the time, even though I tweaked it with above script.

- Power supply stopped working after ~6 months. Dell sent me a new one though.

- Feels more sluggish then the older MacBook Pro 2015 even though the specs are better.

- Battery-life already feels ... bad.

- When I close screen and opens it back up it's very slow to re-connect to the WLAN. Again, my older MacBook Pro is so much faster.

- Ubuntu have some bad defaults for how certain things work. For example, when I connect to a bluetooth-speaker the default isn't that the volume-buttons on the keyboard controls the bluetooths-speakers volume.

I really wanted to like this laptop, but I'll most likely go latest MacBook Prop for my next. Even though I enjoy the power of pure linux.. and the keyboardlayout better then on a Mac.