Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review

I&#x27;ve been using one of these with the HD screen since the spring, here are some thoughts:<p>Nice: - Good battery life. With screen on full, wifi on I can get between 3-5 hours depending on CPU utilization. With screen brightness turned down, wifi off, low utilization, ~6 hours<p>- Keyboard and mouse pad are great<p>- No issues with unsupported bits and pieces from ubuntu, with exception of video output via usb<p>- the battery strength indicator on the side is handy for quickly checking if i need to grab my power cable without having to turn the machine on as well<p>- Display quality (minus the glossy finish) is great, wide viewing angle, vivid colours<p>Naughty: - Glossy screen is a pain in the ass. Forget about using in sunlight, I also need to adjust mine to avoid getting the overheads in our office.<p>- Temperature management is pretty poor - the air vents on the bottom don&#x27;t have much clearance even on a flat surface, and don&#x27;t seem to move enough air. I worry about the long term lifespan of this machine because it regularly operates &gt; 70c. When I can, I sit the machine on a laptop platform with a fan.<p>- (minor) the function keybind for adjusting the volume requires 2 hands - the fn key is on the lower left, while the volume up&#x2F;down are on f11&#x2F;f12.<p>- only 2 usb ports and no SD card reader.<p>Overall I&#x27;ve been happy with it.

A laptop targeted to developers should have a TrackPoint to move the cursor without taking the hands off the keyboard, a non-shortscreen monitor to see more lines of code, a matte screen to read the code better, and a numpad to, well, type numbers. OK, I guess I&#x27;m asking too much for today&#x27;s standards, even if all these things were common ten years ago (sigh...), but when I saw &quot;developer edition&quot; I thought I would see at least two of these four features, and I see none.<p>This is just a standard high-end laptop. Disappointing.

I have one of these and think it&#x27;s pretty good. I am really happy to have been able to give my money to someone selling me something with Linux on it.

6 hours isn&#x27;t great, it&#x27;s shitty for a 13&quot; laptop with Haswell.

Great laptop. I got mine over Christmas and I have no complaints. I hope Dell continues to support Linux.

The real issue here is battery life. Only 6 hours? The new X1 carbon from Lenovo can get 9, the T440s can get up to 17 (with extended battery), and the MBA can get 12 right out of the box.

The first thing I noticed from the picture is that the keyboard looks <i>exactly</i> like the keyboard on my MacBook Pro. I haven&#x27;t really looked at Windows laptops in a long time, so maybe this is a common layout now. It just seemed notable to me.

I had one of these for some months and I&#x27;d say the only culprit is that there are only 1 mini DP and 2 USB ports and nothing else: no SD card slot, no Thunderbold or Firewire. Even a third USB port would have been nice. There isn&#x27;t any kensington lock port, either.<p>The screen is glossy but for some reason, it&#x27;s not actually catching too many random reflections (so it&#x27;s much better than my MacBook which can hardly be used when sitting back to the window).<p>The touchpad feel isn&#x27;t as good as a MacBook but it&#x27;s large and much better than those from most other PCs I&#x27;ve tried. Overall a nice machine.

I have one of the first-gen (non Sputnik) systems. I simultaneously love it and hate it so much that after one year I had to put my (mixed) feelings in writing here: <a href="http://lorenzo.villani.me/2013/08/19/dell-xps-13-l321x-the-review-one-year-in-the-making/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lorenzo.villani.me&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;dell-xps-13-l321x-the-r...</a> (this is little more than a pondered rant, unlike OP&#x27;s thorough review).<p>However, I think this year I&#x27;m probably going to bite the bullet and buy a 13&quot; Retina MacBook Pro.

I&#x27;m conflicted about the price being in the range of MBPs and Dell competing with Apple, supposedly, based on quality and design. I think they would be much more competitive if they were to price this laptop significantly cheaper than MBPs without sacrificing too much quality. I think Dell has the resources to do this. It&#x27;s difficult for me to ignore brand image and I guess this makes me a fan boy. Although, I really do want a decent Linux laptop. I will keep an eye on the XPS13 in case I make the switch.

I owned one of the early 2013 1080p versions for about a month, but had serious issues with backlight bleed. After having it replaced twice it became clear that the issue was inherent to the hardware.<p>Aside from this, it seemed like a fantastic machine, but beware of the potential backlight issues if you spend a significant amount of time with dark or black windows &#x2F; backgrounds. For me, this was 90% of the time between terminal windows and Sublime Text.

&gt; If the laptop is turned off (or sleeping) and the battery is charging, there&#x27;s no way for you to tell whether the batter is full or not based on the color of the LED. It stays white.<p>This isn&#x27;t entirely true. While the color of the charger LED doesn&#x27;t change, the LED at the middle of the bottom&#x2F;front edge (below the trackpad) goes from orange to white when charged.<p>My biggest gripe with this (very nice, portable) laptop is that the wireless card is a bit flaky with 802.11n under (x)Ubuntu 13.04 - 13.10. I find that in some rooms of my (relatively small) flat I can&#x27;t connect without disabling 11n (sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1). I get a very high &quot;Tx excessive retries&quot; value in iwconfig otherwise and the network connection is unusable.<p>It&#x27;s not a failing of the laptop, but rather the bundled Intel wireless card and the drivers that ship with Linux 3.11.0-15. My Lenovo T430s has the same issue (it has a Centrino Advanced-N 6205).<p>I&#x27;ve seen numerous bug reports and kernel patches but haven&#x27;t had much success in resolving the issue.

I own this laptop, had it for almost a year. I love it except after a while I noticed random hard freezes, basically the display freezes in place and the system doesn&#x27;t respond. I would have to hold down the power button to force an unexpected reboot (in the words of Moss). It would happen after a day, or a week of use.<p>Turns out it&#x27;s a problem with the kernel in 12.04 and the Intel 4400 chipset. The only solid fix is to simply update to a non-LTS release. Since updating to 13.04 I&#x27;ve been okay. I shouldn&#x27;t have to wait much longer for 14.04 so I should have an LTS release soon with the updated kernel.<p>The only other problem I&#x27;ve had is some updates deleting my firmware for the wireless, I&#x27;ve had to re-download it. But I did not have this problem when upgrading Ubuntu.<p>Despite these issues, otherwise it&#x27;s been a very solid laptop.

I think it should be cheaper compared to a MBA with Linux.. anyway the competition is good

Warning: Ubuntu on this laptop does not support video output on USB 3.0 docking stations.

Notebookcheck has a test of this laptop:<p><a href="http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-XPS-13-Ultrabook-Late-2012.87006.0.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Review-Dell-XPS-13-Ultrabook-La...</a><p>I love their review because they go into very much detail and some of the information is hard to found elsewhere, like real measurements of screen contrast and brightness, the one parameter that already eliminates 95% of laptops every time I look for one, and of loudness.

How is the multi-monitor support on the XPS 13 running Ubuntu? I googled, but could not find much useful information.<p>How many external monitors can be connected?<p>I found some information here: <a href="http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-031040.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.intel.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;sb&#x2F;CS-031040.htm</a> , but it looks as if most of the info applies to Windows.

Sort of funny, but it looks like their Linux developer laptop keyboard has a Windows key. Licensing issue, or just an unfinished project?

I bought a refurbished ASUS Vivobook X202E and put Linux Mint on it. I was pleasantly surprised that everything worked out of the box (touchscreen, multitouch trackpad, wifi, etc). It&#x27;s still important to have manufacturers standing behind Linux on their PCs, but hardware support on Linux is always getting better.

Nice, I&#x27;d consider getting one. Wish it was a bit bigger though... I have an XPS 16 which isn&#x27;t very heavy and don&#x27;t want a smaller screen.<p>When I use the wife&#x27;s Mac I&#x27;m always fumbling around the keyboard shortcuts. However, the screen is amazing. If this Dell had a bit more DPI I&#x27;d be sold.

About the low battery time I am pretty sure it is a linux problem and not so much a hardware. Battery is really one of linux weaker spots. However I read that the optimization ubuntu is doing for phones will help the overall battery situation. I guess we can just cross our fingers that its true.

I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga a month ago and installed the alpha of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. The only thing that didn&#x27;t work out of the box was the lock button and scrolling in Firefox using the touch screen (install the Grab and Drag Addon). Features: matte screen, TrackPoint, Pen Input.

I was debating getting this laptop or a Thinkpad T440s and a Chromebook Pixel. For me the Pixel just doesn&#x27;t have the storage capacity I want, and the T440s isn&#x27;t quite as portable.<p>I&#x27;ve made a deal with myself to get this once I&#x27;ve paid my loans off. C&#x27;mon, baby, just two months..

Not sure why anyone would get one of these. The new MacbookPro 13 inch is the sweetest laptop deal out there right now (if you can do with 13 inch and only 2 cores).

Right now I have Lenovo w520 and I approached 3 times to configure ubuntu with external screen, no luck.<p>Does Dell XPS 3 DE work fine with external monitor on ubuntu ?

does Ubuntu use some kind of DPI scaling on this or is it just native FHD ? That could be pretty small for some people. How does it handle setting to lower resolutions ?<p>Also 6hours of battery life seem a bit on the short side, though he had quite a few programs running. Id like to know how it would do in Windows8 though.<p>Id also be interested in how well it handles sleep&#x2F;awake scenarios with an external display attached etc.

could use a 15&quot; brother with a bigger screen -&gt; lets you see more lines of code and run side-by-side editors more efficiently.

Does the WIFI LED flash a different colour when it uploads directly to the NSA?<p>What am I going to do with 8GB of RAM? My mom has 8GB of RAM.

&gt; First boot: Ubuntu animation, <i></i>Dell User Agreement<i></i>, then the standard Ubuntu installer.<p>Seriously?

I&#x27;m not sure I trust anything from Dell anymore after the DER SPIEGEL releases.

Two wishes. They supported 16GB RAM. Dell Australia would sell them.

No matte screen though :(

how does it compare to a macbook air with linux installed?

Good might me next laptop series... Hm.