[Freak_NL]

After two System76 laptops I have now switched to Dell. System76 is good, but it's just too much of a hassle when buying from the EU; particularly when dealing with hardware defects under warranty. After all those years I had hoped System76 would have partnered up with a representative in the EU internal market, but alas.

Dell is also acting corporately weird by the way. The XPS 13 (9310) is available with Ubuntu 20.04 installed, but it's not possible to pick it in their Dutch online store like you can in the US one. You can buy it in the Netherlands (and presumably all of the EU) by calling them though. The Dutch Dell salesperson did find a way to configure it that way (with a proper 32GB of RAM too), but that took a bit of prompting and they were genuinely baffled that this option existed and that the configuration tool accepted it (they were cooperative; the knowledge just wasn't available).

[maximum_stress]

>Dell is also acting corporately weird by the way.

My employer offers a modest Dell discount via an Employee Purchase Program. (EPP). You can order the 9310 with 16 or 32 gigs of memory through the EPP with Windows, but if want one with 32 gigs of memory and Linux, you have to engage their small business group and ask for a quote. Exact same machine in every way, just more memory. As I understand the memory is now soldered on the 9310 it's worth paying up front to get maximum, but I've read the storage is still upgradeable.

So Dell still thinks only businesses use 32GB of memory with Linux and for that matter Linux developers only want 13" screens. Both assumptions are (IMHO) obviously false, but there's that corporate weirdness for you.

If anyone from Dell is reading this please expand your Linux offerings to your larger laptops, preferably ones with bigger batteries and discrete GPU options. Not every developer on the planet wants an Intel-based macbook air clone, particularly when a) Iris XE GPUs benchmark slower than the current M1 GPU (which is about to get refreshed), and b) the i7-11{6,8}5G7 CPUs support 64 GB of memory. Stop crippling laptop features to fluff up your battery life numbers.

[Freak_NL]

Dell isn't visibly offering Linux on their laptops in their Dutch digital store front at all. Despite being able to configure them. Which is weird, because the developers who want to buy it certainly exist.

[usr1106]

I was forced to use Dell by my previous employer for many years. After a couple of kernel upgrades in the beginning everything was smooth and rock-solid. I bought several unused ones for a symbolic price from that employer and they still serve well as family machines (running Linux), despite being over 10 years old now.

Because I don't fiddle with my machine a lot I liked the way you just enter the service tag into their support site and even years later you got all relevent information about the machine including the full configuration when it was built.

Recently I had to do support for a new a Dell, some XPS 15 really high end machine. I was disappointed to see that they seem to have closed their Finnish internet store altogether, the links to the resellers are broken, the support page only tells me that the machine has run out of warranty 3 months ago (lasted obviously only 1 year). So no more Dell for me in the future.

[neverminder]

Calling them may be a drag, but when I did so last year, the rep pulled the specs that I've chosen on their webshop and gave me a 5% discount, which is quite a bit considering a £4500 laptop.