I’m going with this Dell and returning my Lenovo Slim 7 Pro. In my previous thread saying I switched to Windows I read that Dells offer great compatibility. I ordered this Dell XPS 13 and plan on going with Pop OS. Thoughts on this? Good choice?
Edit: Apparently it’s certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I assume I should go with This particular Ubuntu version then?
What was your issue with the webcam? It may depend on the distro but mine works well even though I almost always use an external camera instead because most webcam quality sucks on any laptop and OS anyway.
Supporting Linux/open-source companies is certainly a plus. Not that there machines will work better but it makes more sense if you really want to adhere to the global philosophy of open-source. For the record I still didn’t go that route because either I couldn’t find the right machine or the price was significantly higher for similar products and I didn’t take the “risk” to spend more without enough certainty on the build quality. Experience varies and I’m sad to say that I convinced a friend to switch to Linux and he immediately jump on a Tuxedo machine but unfortunately it had a lot of issues out of the box. One remains but I will not blame the company for this one (compatibility with a hiDPI external monitor).
The webcam straight up doesn’t work on ubuntu and debian, which are supposed to be supported. I’ve tried multiple things from around the web (“add this apt repo”, “enable/disable this kernel module”, “use this git repo with
dkms”, …) and consistently ran into issues. Now I just use an external camera.Other people around me with the same or similar models had the exact same problem and there are many posts online about Dell’s weird camera choice. It sours the experience quite a bit, IMO.
Tuxedo Computers has been a painless experience for me. Even got a relative one and after updating, everything works without issues and has been for a while now. Haven’t heard any complaints.
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Thanks for sharing your experience. Always interesting to hear how things are (not) working for others. The only negative side of Linux - which is at the same time a good thing in other aspects - is the behavior difference across distros. Arch is working smoothly on the XPS 13 and the Razer Book 13 which is a very similar machine.
I have no doubt Tuxedo is great. My friend was just not lucky with his laptop. Like any brands there’re various positive and negative stories about their machines. Just here we have different experiences with Dell and Tuxedo. That’s just frustrating when you’re trying to collect info to help you decide on a buy. Ending up with issues while you did your best to prevent them is really a killer to the excitement you should have with your new laptop.
Yeah, that’s true. I do think it’ll take a while before there’s a truly good linux laptop brand that people will recognize and that’ll show up in general ads. The brands closest to that atm are slimbook, purism, and tuxedocomputers, I think. But time will tell.
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