The Dell XPS 13 is the best-known developer-focused, high-end Linux laptop. Here's how it got there.

Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”

So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
        15·
        1 year ago

        Sure, but the performance and battery life will be terrible. I don’t think that buying old laptops solves the problems we have with most new ones. Buying something like a Framework Laptop instead of some Dell or Apple garbage actively supports a pro-right-to-repair company and you also get a really nice laptop with good performance, battery life, upgradability, reparability and customizability.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      11·
      1 year ago

      Bought an old second hand p50 recently, and it still far outperforms most modern laptops by a mile, battery lasts 4 or 5 hours on integrated graphics (probably quite a bit less on discrete but haven’t really tested that yet)

      Plus I can buy a second battery and just swap them out when one runs out

        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          My old Lenovo yoga cost more than the p50 and couldn’t hold a candle

          Came with 32gb memory, 4k display, discrete gpu and an nvme which all help considerably, the CPU generally sits around 1-8% during normal usage (on Linux that is)

          Can quite happily code on this thing, my previous laptop could barely run an ide

          Obviously there are more powerful laptops but considering I got it for ~£500 and even second hand modern laptops go for ~1000 with less memory and no GPU I think it competes very nicely

          • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
            31·
            1 year ago

            The Lenovo Yoga line is essentially the PC version of 2017-2020 MacBooks, thin, light, loud and hot with terrible performance. Even my toaster would outperform one of those. These are “Ultrabooks”, not real laptops. It’s a shame that they are calling some of these pieces of shit ThinkPads, but most other modern ThinkPads also suck. Quite sad how the ThinkPad brand has been ruined by Lenovo. Nowadays, I’d even take an ARM MacBook over a ThinkPad. The P50 was probably one of the last good ones, but it’s kinda outdated now. I’ve been really happy with my 13" Framework with the Ryzen 7 7840U, 32GB of RAM and a nice NVMe SSD running Gentoo. And I know that I can repair or upgrade almost everything on this laptop.