Dell Now Preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS On New XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dell Now Preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS On New XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dell-Preload-ADL-XPS-13-Ubuntu

[spykes]

This Intel camera situation is a deal breaker for me.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will think this laptop is perfectly compatible with Linux because it's sold with Ubuntu and they will get caught once installing another distro without support for the binary blob.
How can Intel (a long time Linux supporter) can release hardware without proper upstream support for the Linux Kernel in 2022 ?

[Chugworth]

Such a shame what they did to the keyboard. The older XPS models were a pretty good design. About the only good Linux laptop you can get now with a 16:10 screen is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Such a shame what they did to the keyboard. The older XPS models were a pretty good design. About the only good Linux laptop you can get now with a 16:10 screen is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9.

I can't imagine spending new laptop money for an 11th gen quad core Intel CPU. The new Lenovo AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U models are damn tempting though. And agreed on the keyboard. On their Latitude line, the Dells took a huge step back after Haswell which had great keyboards (separate home / end / page up / page down / volume up / volume down / mute keys, more logical positioning for keyboard backlight controls, etc.)

[M@GOid]

I can't imagine spending new laptop money for an 11th gen quad core Intel CPU. The new Lenovo AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U models are damn tempting though. And agreed on the keyboard. On their Latitude line, the Dells took a huge step back after Haswell which had great keyboards (separate home / end / page up / page down / volume up / volume down / mute keys, more logical positioning for keyboard backlight controls, etc.)

You can thank Jony Ivy for that. His stupid form-over-function virus spread like wild fire over the industry. To hell with functionality, laptops must look like a prop from a low budget game.

[royce]

13" stamp sized screen, which is already small for doing any code-related tasks, with resolutions of 4K. Ridiculous.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

13" stamp sized screen, which is already small for doing any code-related tasks, with resolutions of 4K. Ridiculous.

To be fair, the high resolution laptops are basically all meant to be used at some scaled resolution, 200% in this case. So you get 1920x1080 effective but it looks super crisp. Even 2560x1600 on an 13.3" Intel MacBook Pro I have is almost unusable for basic daily computing at 100% scaling.

At least for Windows / Linux x86, I'd generally prefer to just get the 1080p panel and use 100% scaling and get another several hours of battery life.

[MarkG]

... The new Lenovo AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U models are damn tempting though)...

Totally agree. I actually had a P16s with the 6850U in my cart earlier today, but the 52WH battery killed it for me. Their 86WH battery is not yet orderable, and I can wait.

[cjcox]

The Dell XPS 13 has long been heralded one of the greatest small laptops ever made.

Designer: I'd like a raise, after all, it's a winner.

Dell in 2021: I don't think so. We can get a designer from Gateway even to make these. I'm afraid we have to let you go.

Dell in 2022: Introducing the new Dell XPS 13 (it's available in the color of poop!) and XPS 13 Plus!!


Dear Dell,
The idea is to improve upon a great design or ... leave it alone. I'm thinking we skip this mess.

[arQon]

And agreed on the keyboard. On their Latitude line, the Dells took a huge step back after Haswell which had great keyboards (separate home / end / page up / page down / volume up / volume down / mute keys, more logical positioning for keyboard backlight controls, etc.)

Yeah. The problem with laptop keyboards though is that even if you don't utterly screw them up with stupidities like half-height arrow keys, you can't really win: having the nav block (or a numpad) means the keyboard is off-center from the screen, which is arguably even worse.

The only layout I can think of that doesn't suck hard in at least one of those ways is a TKL design with the F keys offset into a block on the left, but the muscle memory impact of that is probably to large for it to get any acceptance even if any of them had the balls to try it in the first place. There just isn't a good answer, so everyone plays follow the leader instead, and we end up with garbage layouts like this.