| Dell XPS series looks fantastic from the outside, but there are a few things that stop me from wanting one, that I've mostly observed from other owners of XPS laptops, having not owned one myself. 1. The keyboard. It's apparently not so bad once you get used to it, but compared to typing on my Thinkpad I find myself unhappy with it; it feels spongier in comparison, and the key travel is pretty short (though not nearly as bad as the Apple butterfly switches.) 2. The docking situation. Thunderbolt 3 docks are not really that appealing to me because it becomes difficult to drive many displays at 60 FPS with them. In all fairness, the Thinkpad workstation dock can also only drive 2 displays 60hz 1080p OR 30hz 4k, but at least it's reliable, and my Thunderbolt port is still free if I want more displays at the cost of convenience. 3. Linux support is actually really awful. The XPS 13 developer edition is supposedly an exception, but I have heard that it's really only well supported with the exact version of Ubuntu it ships with, and that updates have occasionally broke the system. Admittedly, the same can be said for some Lenovo laptops. My P51 is pretty bad under Linux (though it's gotten to the point of being usable, thankfully.) 4. Reliability. A coworker has replaced his XPS like 2 or 3 times now, and one of the chargers also died. I hope that's the exception. Obviously even Thinkpads are not as rock solid as they used to be, but even though I found this level of failure to be pretty extreme, it lines up with what I've witnessed with other Dell laptops and is one of the primary reasons I've never owned one. Honestly, the choice of laptop comes down a lot to priority, but I feel like XPS exceeds mostly in the categories of portability and style, two things that I do not value nearly as much as robustness and performance. More than anything, the most important thing you can do is research the crap out of any option you're considering buying. I've found that Arch Linux wiki pages about laptops are quite useful, with the caveat that you have to be careful to not assume two similar models will perform similarly since that is often not the case. |
Having worked on an original IBM Model M keyboard in the 90s and as touch typist, I'm as much as a keyboard snob as could be, and I think the keyboard on the XPS 13 is excellent for what it is. I had the opportunity to compare an X1 Carbon keyboard (or was it another high end Lenovo?) against the XPS 13 in a shop where they had both on display, and preferred the XPS 13 subjectively. The Lenovo, certainly a high end part, had more key travel, and was also quite a bit wider; both facts combined made the outer left and outer right keys "block"/"skew" because they weren't hit straight from the top. Also, the keys were a bit too loose/clacky and felt more like a cheap desktop keyboard. I can't imagine typing on that thing as fast as I can on the Dell. The Lenovo also was quite a bit more expensive than the Dell, but had an atrocious 14" TN display (manufactured to 10+ year old standards) next to the Dell's.
> Linux support is actually really awful ... [XPS] only well supported with the exact version of Ubuntu it ships with
That's not been my experience at all. I'm running the XPS 13 for over two years now and everything works out of the box on my non-Developer Edition model (with the occasional glitch, like once every other month, of WLAN reconnect failure and power management switching into a really slow mode when waking up/opening the lid).
Fully agree with Arch Linux wiki pages; used them as resource to get Ubuntu running on the Dell XPS when this wasn't yet possible out of the box.