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by mmanulis 3096 days ago
I switched to Dell Precision Develop Edition 15" at the start of the year. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04.

I have really enjoyed this machine and don't miss my MacBook Pro at all.

The machine worked great out of the box, I made a few minor changes to how I like to work.

The two major changes I made were:

* Install a libinput and get rid of synaptics driver * Install the latest kernel

I run with a bunch of proprietary drivers (nvidia, intel, etc.) and don't have any problems

The only thing that I miss having is Sketch. But I just run a small Windows VM and use PS when I need it.

Majority of my time is spent in Chrome/Firefox, Terminal, gVim and Slack, so I don't miss anything Mac-specific.

If you're looking for help on how to get yours configured, there are plenty of guides if you search for: Dell XPS 15 Ubuntu or variants of that.

1 comments

How well does the precision work out of the box? I would prefer to run standard Ubuntu with no modifications or proprietary drivers of possible.
It works fine except for the touchpad, hence the switch to libinput.

Keep in mind, it comes with a bunch of stuff enabled by Dell and using their own repos.

I upgraded the kernel as I'm using the WD15 dock and the thunderbolt firmware/drivers are flaky on older kernels and will lock up the system.

If you've never ran Linux as your primary machine, be prepared for occasional snags, especially around suspend.

Overall, it's an easy system to fiddle with with lots and lots of online resources and how-to's.